Baking soda works great for odors. Just sprinkle it on the floor and vacuum it up. For stains, try soda water.

That can be a problem, most carpet cleaners have been designed so that if you use anything other than the manufactories product, the seals in the unit will breack down and leak ,I would'nt try anything other than hot water if you don't want to use cleaner.

It is always a gamble to use non approved cleaners but I have my own Rug Doctor that I bought from the factory. I only use Tide laundry detergent and have never had any problems or carpet issues.

Once you drill down a little more, what's particularly interesting is Bing's growth in verticals. Between March 2009 and March 2010, according to Hitwise, the search engine saw its share of traffic for Automobile searches expand by 102 percent, Health searches by 125 percent, Shopping by 106 percent and Travel by 85 percent. By contrast, Google experienced year-over-year gains of up to 12 percent (for Shopping) in those verticals, although its total market share in all areas continues to outpace Bing by double digits. The data is based on monthly upstream traffic from Hitwise's sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users.

To me, these numbers suggest that Bing's granular strategy, in which it focuses on the verticals and leaves a lot of the traditional keyword search to Google, could be paying off. True, it only occupies some 2.84 percent market share for the Automobile vertical, 3.74 percent for Health, 2.51 for Shopping and 3.11 for Travel; but its year-over-year increases suggest that users could be relying on Bing more for specific subject searches.

Back in March, my colleague Clint Boulton interviewed Bing Director Stefan Weitz, who told him that Microsoft is primarily interested in claiming market share in nontraditional areas such as event-driven tasks and commercial queries. Describing search as "not a zero-sum game," Weitz added: "As we look at how people are using the Web itself and how the Web is changing, we think we can expand that which people do with these engines. We can grow the overall pie, the overall number of searches that are happening across the Web."

Microsoft continues to try and improve Bing with a variety of features, including one-click access to more in-depth information (such as images, news, videos and reference articles) about particular search terms. But its main competitive differentiator is the tabs on its main search page that allow users to kick off their search into subcategories such as Shopping and Travel. Bing might not be anywhere close to toppling Google, but again, the Hitwise numbers suggest that its policy of forsaking the generalized keyword-search battle for a more granular approach could be paying off.