LiveSide - News blog : Bing

Windows Phones, My Phone And A Sneak Preview Of Bing For Mobile

Sunshine — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:04:00 GMT

Yesterday we told you about Windows Mobile Marketplace going live. Today we can tell you more about which Windows Phones will use Windows Mobile 6.5 and some more about My Phone.

First the phones. Microsoft and its partners now deliver a variety of Windows phones for people to choose from in several regions...

...(read more)

Bing flavored #koolaid at the company meeting

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 06:57:00 GMT

Microsoft held its annual company meeting earlier today (Wed Sept 10) at SafeCo Field (where the Mariners play major league baseball), and from the tweets and various snippets of posts that filtered out of the stadium seemed to cast Bing and Windows Live in a positive note.

Mary Jo Foley noted several hints at an upcoming Bing 2.0, possibly as early as next week. Dr. Qi Lu continues to impress the ‘Softies, even Mini-Microsoft:

Dr. Qi Lu might be my favorite techie right now. I was impressed with what he's brought together for Bing and what's coming and how he has focused the team and adopted some of the new technology that Satya was showing. Who the hell thought we'd be feeling so good about our search decision engine? Ever?

Bing and Windows Live even got a passing grade from a Mini commenter, which is unusual considering the comments on Mini-Microsoft usually run strongly against Windows Live:

Bing, Windows Live, Natal, and Windows 7 are notable exceptions. They rock.

Amazingly, a couple of company meeting tweeters even took my advice to use #koolaid as a hashtag. Now if I could just get them to post some video using Windows Live Movie Maker (even with the audio sync issues!). Oh and speaking of that, they did show the new Windows 7 ad, featuring our old friend Kylie (now 5):

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Windows 7 - Good News

Playing with Bing APIs: Long Zheng’s latest project (cool and fun!)

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:40:00 GMT

Our good friend Long Zheng is at it again, after collecting the Bing home pages and taking on Microsoft over changes in the UAC in Windows 7. This time he’s taken the Bing APIs, worked some JSON and JQuery magic, and come up with a very cool search page he’s calling “The Real Live Search”

Long explains:

Inspired by the realtime-ness of Google Wave, I wanted to build a prototype search engine that did away with a search button and page loads. Instead, search queries are sent character-by-character to the lightning fast Bing AJAX APIs which returned JSON results easily processed and formatted by Javascript on the page. The UI experience is driven solely by the browser

The screenshot above doesn’t do justice to how cool this is – every letter you type returns almost-instant results. Of course this may be quite distracting if you’re doing serious searches, with the page changing at every letter typed, but the cool factor is way high on Long’s little experiment, it’s just very fun!

www.istartedsomething.com – Long’s website
www.istartedsomething.com/bingimages/ Bing Home Page image archive
Long’s post introducing The Real Live Search
www.istartedsomething.com/livesearch The Real Live Search
http://www.bing.com/developers Bing Developer Center

More Bing on iPhones, and more clicks for Bing

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:47:56 GMT

At the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose CA yesterday, Bing senior program manager Alessandro Catorcini revealed that Microsoft is testing an Objective C wrapper that will allow iPhone application developers to add Bing search results to their applications.

An InfoWorld report quotes Catorcini:

"Right now, there is an unneeded step to climb to integrate Bing results in your iPhone app but we want to make that smooth," he said. "We want to make it as easy as link [a] library, create an object -- bam -- you're done."

Bing continues to make progress in the marketplace, with Nielsen Online reporting more positive numbers for Bing in July. Perhaps more importantly, at least one search marketing firm working with large advertisers, Efficient Frontier, is reporting that paid click share for Bing is up 44%.

Silicon Alley Insider cautions against reading too much into the numbers:

Be careful reading too much into this data. It's just from one source, and besides, Efficient Frontier does most of its business with very large advertisers. Bing could have more or less paid click market share from Mom and Pop advertisers, which make up most of rival Google's business.

We agree that almost any data coming from parties with somewhat vested interests should be treated with caution, however the Efficient Frontiers report, and SAI’s disclaimer, point out an important feature of Bing. It may not be necessary, or even particularly desirable, for Bing to win across the board market share against Google, at least early on. By going for the jugular, that is paid click share from large advertisers, Bing could make significant inroads into Google’s share of revenue, leaving those “Mom and Pop” advertisers, and search share for searches that don’t pay, to Google. Bing’s focus on key (lucrative) verticals such as shopping and travel seem to be having an effect, and search marketers and advertisers are certainly taking notice.

Bing in the news: Jingles, NoFollow, Pharm ads, cashback (hey all pr is good pr, right?)

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 06:07:00 GMT

If Bing’s intent is to generate buzz and keep their name in the news, it seems to be working. Of course some news is better than others, but at least people are talking, which wasn’t the case a few months ago.

First, while we tried to ignore the Bing Jingle commotion in hopes that it would just go away, Bing announced a winner of the “submit a jingle to Bing” contest today, which Mashable instantly labeled “the creepiest jingle ever”. Now it’s being tweeted and retweeted all over the place. In case you were lucky enough to have missed it up until now, here’s the video:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9DBynJUCS4

Another story that got quite a bit of attention on Twitter this morning, from Search Engine Land, was a report that “90% of Bing’s Internet Pharmacies search ads lead to rogue sites”. From SEL:

By “rogue” they mean Internet pharmacies that fall into the categories of:

Those that facilitate the sale of prescription drugs, including controlled substances, without requiring a valid prescription.

Those that sell drugs from sources that are not licensed as a pharmacy in any US jurisdiction.

Those that illegally source unregulated, unapproved prescription drugs from outside of the United States.

Those that are otherwise deceptive or misleading.

Emil Protalinski at Ars Technica dug a little deeper into the story, noting that while Bing was singled out in the report, rogue sites were found on Google and Yahoo! searches as well:

While the study singled out Microsoft, searches on Yahoo and Google turned up paid advertisements leading to questionable drug websites as well. Search companies require pharmacy sites that pay for advertising to be verified by a company called PharmacyChecker, which unsurprisingly is a competitor of LegitScript. The company has 41,982 pharmacy sites in its database, of which only 224 are considered legitimate, 897 are awaiting a decision, and 40,861 do not meet standards.

Then on WebProNews, Chris Crum notes some problems with Bing’s indexer and nofollow rules, which Brett Young from Microsoft admits is a problem on Bing’s end. The report stems from a couple of posts on the Bing Community Webmaster forum, and Young, a Program Manager for the Bing Webmaster Center, admits “(t)his is a known issue we are working quickly to resolve.”

And one last thing, to end this post on a positive note: an email sent out to Bing cashback users today is promising big cashback savings coming soon:

The email promises “unbelievable cashback savings” to start August 10th, just in time for back to school shopping. Bing cashback is currently only available in the United States.

Bing Maps Imagery & Map Data Release, July 2009

Sunshine — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:59:41 GMT

41TB of new satellite imagery, aerial photography and vector data covering 189,000+ square kilometers of Earth including 12,000+ square kilometers of Bird’s Eye photography has just been added to Bing Maps.

So go on to the Bing Maps World Tour, there’s lots of new stuff to see!

Just want to know if your town is added? Head on down to the Bing Maps Blog for a full list.

Bing gains 1% US share in July, Google loses: StatCounter

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:00:00 GMT

In a press release issued today, web statistics firm StatCounter showed an increase in US search market share from 8.23% in June to 9.41% in July. Google was down in the US from 78.48% in June to 77.54% in July. Global figures show Google still dominating, with 89.23% share in July (down from 89.80% in June).

It must be noted that Bing tracking is an inexact science, and each of the major web tracking services has their own methodologies, all somewhat different. The numbers from StatCounter come from websites that have installed the StatCounter “invisible web tracker”, so while the sample size is big, it may be skewed towards the type of people more likely to install the tracker, whoever they may be. According to the site:

Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites. Stats are updated and made available every 4 hours, however are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 7 days from publication.

Still, Bing seems to be gaining some momentum, which couldn’t have been hurt by the Yahoo! announcement, even though that won’t take place for a year or more. We’ll be interested to see what the other major web stats trackers say about Bing.

Bing home page featured I-35W Bridge on 2nd anniversary of collapse

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 22:47:00 GMT

Most of the time, the images on the Bing home page are pretty pictures, sometimes with topical connections, but rarely controversial. Today’s US image was a little different, before it was apparently pulled and replaced by an image of a bridge in France. Perhaps today’s picture in the US was coincidental, perhaps it was meant in homage, or perhaps it may have been somewhat an error in judgment. In any case, the image showed a view of Minneapolis’s 3rd Street Bridge and behind it an intact I-35W Bridge, which collapsed 2 years ago this weekend, killing 13 and injuring 145.

A number of Twitter messages mentioned the image and the inclusion of the ill-fated bridge, which is the subject of a new lawsuit filed by the State of Minnesota against a company it had contracted to inspect the bridge and suggest repairs.

We’re not sure why the image was pulled (or why it was chosen in the first place). We’ve asked, and will update this post with any statement from Microsoft. In deference to anyone who may have feelings about the image, we won’t post it here, although Long Zheng does have it in his archive.

Update: A Microsoft spokesperson offered this statement:

"The Bing homepage image was updated shortly after 1:00pm PDT, after it was brought to our attention that the previous image of Minneapolis included the I-35 bridge which collapsed on Aug. 1, 2007. We apologize to anyone who may have been offended."

Yahoo! powered by Bing, but not much more?

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:29:26 GMT

As widely expected, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal (very early) this morning, a 10 year agreement to have Bing power Yahoo! searches, with Yahoo! controlling ad sales. Last night we asked a few questions, and by digging down a bit we found some answers this morning. Like most of the tech writers, Wall Street is favoring Microsoft in this deal (at this writing nearly halfway into today’s stock market session, MSFT is up a bit but YHOO is down around 10% – you can click on the ticker symbols in our Sane Bull stock market widget for more information). However, while the deal will increase market share in terms of what the advertiser sees, at first look this deal does little to promote “the decision engine”.

According to remarks made by Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz in an early morning conference call, and also wording in the Microsoft press release, Yahoo! search will be “powered by Bing”, and that labeling will only appear on search results pages. From the press release:

Yahoo! will innovate and “own” the user experience on Yahoo! properties, including the user experience for search, even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology.

…and then Bartz’s remarks, as reported by Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land:

Search will still be prominently Yahoo branded. Bottom of results will be “powered by Bing.”

So while Bing will power Yahoo! search, and offer one seamless set of (larger) numbers for advertisers to spend on, this deal doesn’t do much, apparently, to further the Bing brand. It won’t necessarily promote the “decision engine” (which is largely if not completely about UI), or promote Bing’s heavy focus on the four verticals: shopping, trip planning, health, and local. Of course the details about how Bing will appear on Yahoo! are (very) murky at this point. Bing has had good reaction to its UI changes and features like the Price Predictor, and it’s unclear why Yahoo! would want to replace that with something that didn’t work as well, so we may see Yahoo! search become quite a bit more Bing-like in the next months. However the wording of the announcement makes it clear that Bing will power Yahoo! search results, but not replace them per se, and that it won’t necessarily be the Bing experience within Yahoo!.

Ballmer and Bartz did talk about possibilities surrounding mobile search, which while not exclusive, is part of the deal (again, via SEL):

Bartz: We have option of using MSFT technology for the mobile experience. It’s not exclusive as on the PC. If somewhere down the road we want to switch we could.We’re very interested in doubling down on the mobile experience. Having an integrated search is important.

Ballmer: We don’t know all the scenarios involving mobile search. This gives Yahoo flexibility on the mobile side. It won’t make sense to do a whole separate crawl of the internet for mobile search.

Bartz: What we’re very interested in doubling down on the mobile experience to integrate search as part of that, to integrate our content.

In addition, some details did emerge this morning on the Yahoo! search technology. Microsoft “will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms”. So Microsoft will have access to Yahoo! search technologies, with Yahoo! holding title to them. Bartz indicated that some Yahoo! search technicians would probably move to Microsoft, some would move elsewhere in the company, and there would be “some redundancies”, although not in the immediate future.

Bing Summer Travel Photo Contest, And The Winner Is…

Sunshine — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:27:27 GMT

We told you earlier about the Bing Summer Travel Photo Contest. The contest has now ended. Out of the 10,000 submissions 9,400 photos got accepted. That’s quite a few pictures to be reviewed and rated, 13,206 unique raters helped. And the winner is…

Lightning strike over Sydney, Australia by Jeremy J Somers. This picture received 810 votes in the final round and will become the Bing homepage photo on August 3. Congratulations!

Curious about the pictures of the other finalists? You can check them out here. Also worth taking a look at are the honorable mentions.

Nice how users can impact the way Bing looks and works isn’t it? This photo contest is one example, another is the Page Hunt Game, a Microsoft Research project. This game shows users a Web page, without the URL, and asks them what search query they would type to get to that page. If their query does return the Web page on Microsoft's search engine, they get points. Microsoft could use that data to improve Bing's search relevance, even though it is not hooked up to Bing at this time.

Our first take on MSFT-YHOO: Less than meets the eye?

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 06:03:59 GMT

A search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! hasn’t even been announced yet, and yet tidbits of information are being analyzed, scrutinized, and dissected all across the web. Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web sees bad news for search innovation of the kind Yahoo! has been pursuing, and Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider is calling the deal “awful”. Kara Swisher compares it to what Yahoo! could have got last year when Microsoft first proposed a search only deal (after Yahoo! nixed an all out acquisition by Microsoft), and we’re all anxiously awaiting more details.

In the meantime, we’ve been poring over what little “information” we could find on the deal. First, a few questions that we haven’t seen addressed:

What happens to Yahoo!’s existing search technology? In last year’s offer, Microsoft offered $1 billion for the existing search technology, which Kara Swisher categorized as a “low bid”, and “a kind of a direct insult to Yahoo techies”. So if Microsoft isn’t offering cash up front this time, what happens to the search technology that is powering 20% of US search market share? Certainly Yahoo! isn’t giving it away, after turning down an “insulting” billion dollars.
How much of Bing will make it on to Yahoo!? Will it be the full experience? Maps, mobile, health, etc? Or will Bing just replace the search bar on Yahoo! properties? Of course the search bar represents the lion’s share of traffic, but still, how far will the deal go?
How closely will Microsoft and Yahoo! work together moving forward? Henry Blodget foresees a nightmare scenario where Yahoo! salespeople yell at Microsoft technicians, forcing them to request transfers. A little far-fetched, but there will have to be some crossing of lines. How far will it go? Who will be in charge?

Blodget paints quite a bleak picture of the deal. We don’t see it quite that way, but what strikes us initially is this seems to be a “foot in the door” move rather than a blockbuster deal. Initially, ad sales will continue on as they exist now. According to the Ad Age report:

Yahoo is likely to take on exclusive representation of Bing inventory to eliminate channel conflict and complexity for advertisers, but not before both sides unwind the thousands of advertiser relationships and proprietary systems through which many large advertisers buy search ads.

In the next sentence, Michael Learmonth from Ad Age says that the two participants “have no reason to rush” a move to have Yahoo! control ad sales across all of Bing. This smacks of “let’s get the deal done and we’ll figure out the sales later”. For right now, the “incredibly complex” system of advertisers and relationships will remain just that, and perhaps become even more so.

So what we seem to have is a deal that doesn’t appear to hand over control of Yahoo!’s search technology, may not bring the full Bing experience to Yahoo! (earlier this week there was even talk that the Bing brand wouldn’t make it on to Yahoo!, with Microsoft only providing the technology), won’t unravel sales channels for quite some time to come, and will leave a large chunk of the revenue gained by getting Bing on Yahoo! with Yahoo!. A far cry from Microsoft’s attempt to acquire the whole company, that’s for sure.

Still, it is (or seems to be) a foot in the door. While Microsoft may not gain much revenue from the deal, initially, search share numbers are going to be very fun to watch again, and the perception of giving Google a run for its money may be worth it to Microsoft. Untangling the complexities of ad buys somewhere other than Google needs to be done in order to compete, even if it takes a while. And if this deal makes Yahoo! stronger, well a stronger Yahoo! powering more and more Bing eyeballs can only be good for Microsoft.

Details filter out on Microsoft-Yahoo! search deal to be announced Wednesday

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 01:11:00 GMT

Multiple reports are out from AdAge, The Wall Street Journal, and Kara Swisher at All Things Digital that Microsoft and Yahoo! are set to announce a search deal as early as tomorrow, Wednesday. From AdAge:

Through the pact, Bing will become the default search engine on Yahoo, creating a search player with close to 30% market share of search queries, compared with Google's 65%, according to ComScore data. One of the most interesting wrinkles involves who takes ownership of search sales: Yahoo is likely to take on exclusive representation of Bing inventory to eliminate channel conflict and complexity for advertisers, but not before both sides unwind the thousands of advertiser relationships and proprietary systems through which many large advertisers buy search ads. Microsoft's AdCenter is expected to be the sales-technology platform.

We've been hearing all kinds of rumors about details of the deal over the past week, but if this latest representation holds true, it seems to make the most sense of anything we've heard so far. Microsoft will not make a large (read: billion dollar) upfront payment to Yahoo!, Bing will appear as the default search engine on Yahoo!, and Microsoft adCenter will supplant Yahoo! Panama as the sales technology platform but the complexities of who will sell what, and where, will be largely left unchanged, at least for the moment.

Of course until we hear official word (and that could be coming at any time), details of the deal are still a little murky, such as when Bing will begin surfacing on Yahoo!, what the reaction of the US Justice Department will be if any (and what Google will do to counter), and what the details of the dollar transactions will be, but it sounds like, after nearly three years of rumors loud and soft, that Microsoft will finally acquire the US search share boost it's been looking for.

More soon, of course.

New Bing ads: showing off the good stuff

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:44:00 GMT

The first in a new series of Bing ads appeared last night in the US on the Conan O’Brien show. Two weeks ago, Yusuf Mehdi promised the new ads, saying:

Lastly, stay tuned for a new set of Bing ads on TV in the coming weeks, where we start providing some detail on lots of the cool features that can help you Bing & decide!

Now the first of the ads, this one featuring the Price Predictor, are beginning to show up:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP7xFODQeqI

By the way, the Bing Community is doing a great job of blogging, there’s good stuff up almost every day. For example, here’s a post from last week on the Price Predictor.

(Thanks for the tip, Alber1690!)

BingTweets

Sunshine — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:34:16 GMT

We already told you about a bit of Twitter in Bing, but the team took it a step further. They’ve partnered up with with Federated Media and Twitter to create BingTweets.

BingTweets fuses Bing search results with real time content from Twitter.

How does partnering with Twitter make Bing a more effective decision engine? Many people share their thoughts on Twitter, and search engines don’t currently do a great job of capturing that real-time content. We designed Bing to help you make faster, more informed decisions, and, since people often turn to real-time content to help them make decisions, BingTweets was a logical next step.

For example, when Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince comes out tomorrow, you may want to scan the official reviews, local theater listing, AND the latest Tweets on the movie to help you decide whether to rush to see it. With BingTweets, you can cover all that ground in one place.

BingTweets pulls in trends from Twitter and filters into categories such as “Popular Now,” “People,” “Places” and “Products” enabling easier navigation of the ever changing trends on the Web. You can also fire off a search on any topic of your choosing to see the related search results from Bing and Twitter discussion.

Check out BingTweets and let the team know what you think. Chinese readers check out Picturepan2’s article over on Livesino.net.

Bing: The First Month

Sunshine — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:33:17 GMT

We’ve been keeping an eye on Bing and reported some statistics, as many blogs and news sites did, here too. So now, over one month after launch, how did Bing do?

The Bing Search Blog reports the following:

- An 8% growth in unique users to Bing.com in June
- The amount of people “likely to recommend” Bing has doubled (based on polling)
- Bing Shopping has seen a nearly 3x increase in site visits
- There’s a 5.42% increase in transactions to Bing cashback
- Traffic to Bing Travel has increased by 90% month over month since launch

Advertisers have also seen benefits, such as higher sales and higher click volume. If you are an advertiser check this out. Developers have shown interest too, the number of developers who’ve signed up to use the Bing API has doubled since launched to over 11,000! Doubled! Amazing! And are they writing more apps? Yes, they are. The incoming requests to the API have shot up more than 50% since launch. Part to this success might also be the Bing Toolbox, which we told you about before, the one-stop for everything Bing no matter if you are a webmaster, a publisher, a developer or an advertiser!

And they have only just started! Well done. The team promises a steady progress over the years to come as, according to Yusuf Mehdi, there is so much opportunity and work to be done to improve today’s search and push beyond into new areas, such as their focus on searches that lead to decision making. Speaking about decision making, a new set of Bing ads will air (TV) in the coming weeks, which will provide some detail on lots of the cool features that can help you Bing & decide!