Microsoft announced today that it has added a new Pinterest pinning feature to Bing Image Search. The self-explanatory feature lets users pin images directly from the search results page.
You don’t have to install the “Pin It” bookmarklet on your browser, though if you’re the type to pin stuff you find from image search results to Pinterest, I’d say there’s a good chance you already have it installed anyway.
Bing links to and gives proper attribution to the original content, it says, so image owners should be happy that Pinterest users will be sent to their images rather than just to Bing.
“Last fall, we hosted a group of lifestyle and design bloggers at the Bing headquarters to better understand their search and social media habits,” writes Bing program manager Chen Fang. “What we discovered is a community that does more than its fair share of image searches, with much of it tied to Pinterest. They shared some of the hassles they face, and that finding efficient ways to hunt down original, high-resolution images and filtering image results were some of their pain points.”
That’s why Bing has launched the “Pin to Pinterest” feature, Fang says.
Those who follow the search industry know that Bing prides itself on its social features that are lacking from Google, so this is really just the latest extension of that.
That didn’t take long. Just when we thought Microsoft was wrapping up the whole “Scroogled” thing, they’re back with a big new campaign, this time taking on Android.
Obviously, now that we’re well into April, the word “Scroogled” has a non-holiday themed connotation.
“You can interpret it however you would like,” Microsoft senior director of Online Services, Stefan Weitz, recently told us.
My interpretation is that Microsoft is spending a lot of money to make consumers think that Google is screwing them.
And that continues today with the new campaign against Android, which just happens to coincide with a complaint Fairsearch.org filed with the EU regarding Android, saying that Google uses it as a “deceptive” and competitive advantage. Microsoft, is of course, a major force behind the seventeen-Google-competitor FairSearch coalition.
The Scoogled campaign isn’t quite about that, however. It’s about Google sharing personal info with app makers. The campaign goes like this:
When you buy an Android app from the Google app store, they give the app maker your full name, email address and the neighborhood where you live. This occurs without clear warning every single time you buy an app.
If you can’t trust Google’s app store, how can you trust them for anything?
Obviously, this is a plea to get you to try WIndows Phone. Here are the new ads:
“Unlike Google, Windows Phone Store doesn’t share your personal information with app makers,” Microsoft says. “Google hands over details about you to app makers without any clear warning, placing your personal information in the hands of unknown third parties. The privacy breach could potentially lead to spam and online harassment.”
“It’s not necessary for an app maker to have your full name, email address and neighborhood, so Windows Phone Store refrains from passing on this sensitive information,” the company adds.
As reported in February, the issue at hand had caught the attention of lawmakers.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Microsoft was facing some privacy criticism of its own. Here’s an excerpt from a UPI article from October, sharing comments from Consumer Watchdog, a privacy advocacy group that often criticizes Google in a fashion that in some ways really isn’t all that different than the Scroogled strategy (remember Eric Schmidt the evil ice cream man?):
John M. Simpson, who monitors privacy policies for Consumer Watchdog, said although Microsoft has stated in emails and blog posts it won’t use the information in targeted advertising, the Services Agreement does not.
“What Microsoft is doing is no different from what Google did,” Simpson said. “It allows the combination of data across services in ways a user wouldn’t reasonably expect. Microsoft wants to be able to compile massive digital dossiers about users of its services and monetize them.”
The SEO tags aren’t the only April Fools’ joke from Bing this year. You didn’t think they’d get through the day without taking a shot at Google, did you?
They introduced Bing Basic. There’s no mention of Google in the announcement, but it’s not hard to guess what the “telltale query” referred to is.
“Every day on the Bing homepage, we strive to bring you a picture of the world that you’ve never seen before,” says Bing principal UX manager Michael Kroll. “Just a single image a day, but always something memorable and beautiful. But for all the variety we’ve explored through the thousands of images we’ve showcased on our homepage since 2009, there are still internet searchers for whom full motion videos of South Pacific beaches, images of exploding geysers or 3-D underwater scenes are just too engaging. Indeed we’ve been told many people come to Bing to find the name of the movie with tom cruise and a unicorn only to get lost for days clicking around the homepage image.”
“So we ran some numbers on this unique online behavior, did some ethnographic research to study habits and tastes; and then took a shot at redesigning Bing’s homepage to discourage this behavior of exploration and discovery,” continues Kroll. “So today we’re running a special test, where if you visit bing.com and enter a certain telltale query, you’ll get something a little more bland. We decided to go back to basics, to the dawn of the Internet, to reimagine Bing with more of a 1997, dial-up sensibility in mind. We may see some uptick in our numbers based on this test, but the main goal here is just to learn more about how our world would look if we hadn’t evolved.”
So if you go to Bing.com, and search for “google,” you’ll be presented with Bing Basic:
It’s a pretty good shot at Google who continues to think, for some reason, that you might just want to search for something rather than look at pretty pictures when you go to a search engine. In fact, they recently got rid of the ability to set your homepage image.
On Bing Basic, there are little hidden squares in the image that you can mouseover for links, much like the typical Bing homepage. On of them says, “Having trouble seeing this image of an arctic fox eating marshmallows in a snowstorm? Click here to zoom out.” That takes you to images of arctic foxes. It’s a dig at all the white space. Get it?
One of the boxes says, “When there’s nothing else to look at…you may take drastic measures.” That links you to a video of “Watch Paint Dry…In HD!!!”.
One says, “If blank space is your thing…you could go low-tech.” That takes you to an image search for “plain white paper”.
Finally, the last box says, “With so many delicious flavors available, most people still choose vanilla. What’s your favorite?” Naturally, that links to the “Bing it On” challenge.
Strictly speaking about ice cream, I have to say, vanilla is a great flavor. It goes great with just about any topping.
With its numerous April Fools’ jokes (one is currently trending on Bing’s real homepage), Google appears to be continuing to pretend that Bing doesn’t exist.
Attention SEOs: Bing is finally rewarding you for all your hard work. Starting today, new Bing SEO tags let you tell Bing exactly where your page should rank. Easy as that.
The new SEO tags cut out the middleman and let you insert a couple of tags into your page code that direct Bing as to where to place you on results pages. There are two new tags, “set to position” and “must be before.”
Now you can make sure that your page always ranks on spot ahead of your competitor’s page. It’s so easy!
Along the way, some SEOs abused the systems to try to game the results. Back and forth for years, the engines and so-called “black hat” SEOs have waged a behind-the-scenes battle to position content on the Search Results pages. It’s pretty easy for the engine to win this battle in the long run, though, as we own the pages.
As time has progressed, we’ve been able to tackle spamming issues at many levels. In most cases today, most websites follow the known best practices and simply do the right thing. They’re too busy running a business to try trickery to rank better, trusting we will sort the rankings properly. And now it’s time to reward that trust and your hard work.
For a year, you’ll only be able to use one “must_be_before” tag, so choose wisely. Bing says that next April 1st, they’ll give you 50!
“To ensure compliance with this request, should you insert more than one “must_be_before” tag this year, we’ll simply contact your host and arrange for the server hosting your site to be put into a low-earth orbit for the following 365 days.”
Klout has just announced that its adding another element into your influence score: Instagram.
“Instagram generates some of social media’s most beautiful and engaging content, and is one of the most highly-requested networks by Klout users. Starting this week, all your Instagram activities will be part of your Klout Score, and your most popular photos will appear in your Klout Moments. We are rolling out this integration by phases so some of our users might have seen their score increase due to Instagram before this post,” says the company on its blog.
Klout is also announcing more fruit from its partnership with Bing. Starting today, you can connect your Klout account to Bing. And in the future, search results will being to factor into your Klout score.
“Bing is now displaying Klout Scores for high-profile professionals and socially active influencers right in Bing search results. At a glance, it is easy to see an influencer’s Klout Score and expertise without having to click any further.”
Bing has added a new way for users to sort their search results by time period. You can sort by “Past 24 hours” to see the top links that have surfaced during the last day, for example. You can also search by “Past week” and “Past Month”.
“At Bing, our goal is to give you the most comprehensive and trustworthy set of search results so you can get more done,” says Bing Principal Development Manager, Dr. Walter Sun. “Behind the scenes, we spend a lot of time and computational horsepower to ensure that you are getting fresh and topical search results as they happen.”
“Now whenever you search, you will see a filter at the top of the results page which lets you narrow down your search based on time period,” he says.
Google has a similar feature, and gives you more options: Any time, past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past month, past year, and custom range.
The feature, however, is hidden under “more search tools,” and probably isn’t used incredibly often. I do like Bing’s approach to putting it right in the forefront. Search engines, especially Google often place a little too much emphasis on freshness in search results for my taste, so it’s nice to be able to give a time period.
Last year, Bing launched its “Snapshots” feature, which shows direct answers for searches on the results page. The feature was updated in December for people and places, and it looks a great deal like Google’s Knowledge Graph. Today, Bing announced that it has expanded the offering to include more.
“For Bing, search is about more than blue links,” a spokesperson for Bing tells WebProNews. “It’s also about understanding the entities – people, places, things – around us and the relationship between them. With people and places being two of the most common searches on Bing, we want to ensure that whether you’re looking for the details on your new coworker, the official Facebook page of your favorite celeb, or who won best actress in 2010, Bing gives you the answers you’re looking for quickly and in one place.”
Bing’s Richard Qian discusses the changes on the Bing blog. “The underlying technology for Snapshot is designed to develop deep understanding of the world around us not only as a collection of entities (people, places and things) but also the relationships between those entities,” he writes. “Inside the Bing engineering team, we call this technology Satori, which means understanding in Japanese. Over time, Satori will continue growing to encompass billions of entities and relationships, providing searchers with a more useful model of the digital and physical world.”
“Today, we are inviting people to check out Snapshot to experience our expansion of Satori,” he continues. “Since its introduction in June, we have expanded Satori to include a significantly larger number of entities from more domains with a deeper level of understanding about them. They include people, places, and things which are among the most common searches on Bing. So, whether you’re searching for answers about a celebrity, co-worker, animal, geographic location, or man-made structure, Bing helps you understand the world around you by providing at-a-glance answers about the people, places and things you care about.”
Bing’s offering sprinkles in social information from Twitter, Facebook, Klout, and LinkedIn for people. Qian shows examples for “leopard, Abraham Lincoln, Lawrence Ripsher, John Kerry, and Mount Everest.
It appears that Bing is experimenting with showing pictures of people in search results similar to how Google does with its authorship feature, but for when results are about a person, rather than written by them.
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land points to some examples where Bing is doing this for results for journalists Kara Swisher and Nick Bilton.
According to Sullivan, Bing’s Duane Forrester said Bing is considering something like authorship at the SMX conference last week. It’s unclear whether he was referring to this or something separate. As in the Bilton example Sullivan shares, Bing is not always showing images of the person when it is showing these images. In one case from that example, Bing was simply showing an image from the article.
Here are a couple of the images Bing is showing for Sullivan himself:
Blind FIve Year Old’s AJ Kohn did some additional on what Bing is up to, and found a bunch of sources for results where Bing is showing these kinds of results including: CrunchBase, Myspace, NBA.com, Quora, TED, ESPN, The Canadian Encyclopedia, Amazon, MTV, Last.fm, Forbes, NNDB, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Movies, Hollywood.com, AskMen, FriendFeed, TV Guide, and Comedy Central, to name a few.
According to Kohn, the images show up more often for about pages, which he says, “supports the idea that Bing is looking for high confidence entity pages and not assigning real authorship.”
Google has been pretty clear that authorship is going to be an increasingly important factor moving forward. It’s no surprise that Forrester hinted that Bing will be working on this too. Perhaps what we’re seeing now will provide a sufficient supplement to whatever they come up with for real authorship.
Microsoft says that Bing Desktop users now have three new customization options for Bing Desktop:
The first option allows you to minimize to Windows Taskbar as a toolbar.
The second option allows you to set a keyboard shortcut so you can launch the search box with a few simple keystrokes.
The third option lets you minimize the search bar to your systems tray.
Bing Desktop is also finally getting Facebook integration after its Web-based brother integrated with the social network last year. The application now serves as a notification hub of sorts:
Now you can connect Bing Desktop to Facebook and enjoy updates without having to open your browser. In a few simple clicks, you can get friends’ latest updates including posts, comments and posts directly to your desktop.
Finally, Bing Desktop is getting a number of new personalization features:
We are also introducing new settings that allow you to choose which recent homepage image you would like displayed as your desktop wallpaper, control of your search history, the choice of whether Bing Desktop loads when Windows starts and more.
This latest update to Bing Desktop is available across all versions in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, France, Germany, India, China and Japan.
If you find yourself wanting to experience Bing Desktop, you can grab it here. You can also find it sitting at the bottom of the optional updates in Windows Update.
Bing’s “Scroogled” campaign, the one that not-so-subtly claims that you’re getting screwed by Google on a everyday basis (Bing says that it’s not Screw-gled, but Scrooge-led, like Ebenezer). is on the way out.
According to KQED, the TV, newspaper, and social media ad campaign is about to cease.
“That part is about finished,” said Stefan Weitz, Microsoft senior director of online services.
The Scroogled website is still up and running, and there’s no word on whether Bing will abandon the campaign entirely. But it looks like the actual advertisements are about to be phased out.
“Think Google respects your privacy? Think again. Google goes through every Gmail that’s sent or received, looking for keywords so they can target Gmail users with paid ads. And there’s no way to opt out of this invasion of your privacy,” says the Scroogled site.
That claim, which correctly points out the Google does (algorithmically) scan message content to serve ads, is a bit misleading (in-depth on that here).
UPDATE: Here’s a statement we received from Microsoft on the campaign:
The Scroogled campaign has sparked a dialogue that shows how much consumers care about their privacy, and how strongly they feel about the fact that Google goes through their personal emails to sell ads. More than 3.5 million people visited Scroogled.com, and over 114k signed a petition asking Google to stop going through their Gmail. While the ad portion of this phase of the consumer education campaign has finished its scheduled run, this important conversation about privacy continues, and so does this important consumer choice.
Check here for more coverage of Microsoft’s Scroogled campaign.
Bing announced today that it has added another company – Sonar – to its Bing Fund roster.
Bing Fund was launched last year as an “angel investor with an incubator”. In August, Bing unveiled its initial startups. Now, after remaining quiet for the rest of the year, they seem to be picking up the pace a bit.
March is full of excitement and promise. Spring is just around the corner and people are beginning to get restless. As Austin readies itself for the geek-stampede that is SXSW Interactive, it seems a fitting time for this announcement. It will be an occasion for us to once again have the pleasure of hanging out with the Sonar crew led by founder, Brett Martin.
Over the years, we have crossed paths with Sonar across the land of tech probably more than any other startup. Whether it was TC Disrupt NYC, PSFK NYC, at our own epic pop-up gallery, SMW, and most recently Xconomy NYC, wherever we went, it seemed that the cool little periscope was right there with us. We would bring each other up to speed, and talk about “hey, wouldn’t it be cool to work together?” And go our separate ways until the next serendipitous encounter.
Sonar is a social discovery app that tells users when their friends and friends’ friends are nearby, and as the company puts it, “reveals the hidden connections and small world moments you might have otherwise missed.”
The app takes advantage of social and location data from Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and LinkedIn to give users context about the people they’re near.
Last week, Microsoft launched a new “Scroogled” campaign. In case you don’t recall, the company launched a campaign under that name during the holiday season, calling out Google Shopping for its paid Google Shopping model (a move that has been controversial). This time, Microsoft is using the “Scroogled” brand again to attack a decade-old feature of Google’s Gmail – the one that Google uses to target advertising to users by algorithmically scanning emails.
Are you concerned about Gmail’s ad targeting practices? Do you consider them to be a violation of privacy? What is your opinion of the ads themselves? Share your thoughts in the comments.
We had a conversation about Microsoft’s latest attack on Google with Stefan Weitz, Microsoft’s senior director of Online Services (also one of the more well-known faces of Bing). While Microsoft recently launched a new mail product – Outlook.com – many find the timing of this attack a bit strange, given that Gmail has operated this way since its inception.
“We want to make sure people understand how much of their privacy they are giving up when they use Gmail,” Weitz tells WebProNews. “If people understand they are giving up their privacy and they wish to do so, that’s their choice. But we want to make sure they understand this is going on. What surprised us, even after a decade of this practice, is that over two-thirds of people don’t know what is happening and when they find out, nearly 90% say it should stop. People are saying it doesn’t seem right. It seems creepy. The question users have to ask is: Do you want one company to have that much information about you?”
Google did alter its privacy policies last year, essentially consolidating them into one that spans across its various products, making it easier for the company to use data from one of its services in another.
Of course, Microsoft does scan users’ emails. Just not to serve ads.
“We do not scan the contents of user emails for the purpose of showing ads,” says Weitz. “Like many email providers, Outlook.com scans the content of your email to help protect you and prevent spam, gray mail, phishing scams, viruses, malware, and other dangers and annoyances. It is just like how the postal service sorts and scans mail and packages for dangerous explosive and biohazards. Of course, Outlook.com previous article, we looked at what Google says about privacy in Gmail. Google’s PR has been sending around this comment:
“Advertising keeps Google and many of the websites and services Google offers free of charge. We work hard to make sure that ads are safe, unobtrusive and relevant. No humans read your email or Google Account information in order to show you advertisements or related information. An automated algorithm — similar to that used for features like Priority Inbox or spam filtering — determines which ads are shown.”
You can read a much lengthier set of relevant comments from the company from an old help center article in that article.
It should be noted that Google has fired employees in the past after they were caught (in separate incidents) spying on user emails and chats. You can take that two ways: 1. It has happened before. 2. Google does not tolerate such behavior. Presumably, these incidents had nothing to do with ad targeting.
Microsoft’s new Scroogled ads almost make Google’s ad targeting relevance seem like the subject of the attack in some parts. See the dead cat example in this one:
“Who wants a free pet exam coupon when the family cat has been put down?” the ad asks.
“First, it’s important to keep in mind that Google’s practice of earning money by reading personal e-mails is not exclusive to Gmail users,” says Weitz. “This also impacts those who don’t have a Gmail account. If you use another email provider but you send an email to someone else’s Gmail account, Google goes through that too. That’s why we’re also asking consumers to sign the petition on Scroogled.com and tell Google to stop going through their emails to sell ads.”
“Second, Outlook.com is committed to protecting users’ privacy and offers users the experience they’re seeking in their email provider,” he continues. “Last, I’m not sure how making their targeting even more exact is going to make the 90% of Americans who say it should stop any happier.”
In case you’re wondering if Microsoft has ever targeted ads based on email message content, Weitz says, “We have never targeted ads based on the content of email messages. Our privacy policy is very clear on this. The bottom-line is we don’t eavesdrop on private communications. We still have ads in Outlook, but the difference is we don’t scan your mail to sell those ads. We think we can still make revenue to pay for the service even if the ads are not directly targeted or related to the private communications that you have. And we give users the option to opt-out, which is a big difference from Gmail.”
Microsoft told us during the original holiday themed Scroogled campaign that the name “Scroogled” was about “Scrooge” (as opposed to “getting screwed by Google” or something along those lines). We could buy it at the time, given the holiday context. Bing even went out of its way to make A Christmas Carol references in its announcement of the campaign. Now that we’re into February, it’s starting to feel a little more like “screwed by Google”.
“You can interpret it however you would like, but Outlook.com’s ‘Don’t Get Scroogled’ campaign is purely about prioritizing privacy and making people informed,” says Weitz. “When polled, over two-thirds are unaware that Google reads their e-mails to make money from targeted ads. ‘Don’t Get Scroogled’ is simply a national consumer awareness campaign to educate Americans about Google’s practice of going through the contents of personal Gmail email messages to sell and target ads. That, and the term has entered the lexicon to generally refer to unseemly practices by Google.”
On a different note, given the rivalry between Google and Microsoft and Microsoft’s relationship with Yahoo, many are wondering what Microsoft thinks about the newly announced deal between Google and Yahoo for contextual ads.
“I’d say I wonder how Google is using the content [of] your private communications in Gmail to serve ads in other places,” says Weitz on the subject.
“We’ll have more to say about new ad products in the future but it’s important to note that they are just that – new ad types,” he says. “As we always do, we will clearly highlight when something is an ad versus organic.”
Bing announced the launch of a public beta program for the Bing Sitemap Plugin, an open source server-side offering, which generates XML Sitemaps (compliant with sitemaps.org) for sites running on IIS and Apache.
The plugin can generate both comprehensive sitemaps of all URLs seen in server traffic and sitemaps dedicated to store URLs that have changed recently.
“Having both comprehensive and delta Sitemaps provides you with significant benefits, as you will always have a full, up-to-date list of all URLs on your website that search engines can use for deep crawl, as well as a concise Sitemap of URLs that were modified recently, which search engine crawlers can prioritize,” says Bing’s Duane Forrester. “This can help in keeping bot traffic bandwidth down. In addition, the Sitemap Plugin automatically adds <lastmod> values to your Sitemap, and generates <priority> values to the Sitemap based on how popular your URLs are.”
“SEO is a complex and ever changing area but there are some key elements that are still as relevant now as they were a few years ago,” he says. “One of them is building high-quality XML Sitemaps, a comprehensive and accurate representation of your website. That way, you keep control of what you want search engines to index in order of priority and you inform them of new or updated content on your website.”
More on the plugin here. It can be downloaded here.
Bing announced that it has made a change to its Autosuggest feature, which it says makes the search experience faster by completing your query when they’re “confident” they “really know” what you’re looking for.
Bing refers to its latest development as “Autosuggest Ghosting”.
“Autosuggest algorithms are able to determine just how likely it is that you want the #1 suggestion with various degrees of confidence,” explains Dan Marantz, Senior Program Manager Lead, Bing Experiences and Query Formulation Team. “This confidence is highest in the two major patterns: Navigation and Search History. Ghosting is a way to pre-populate the query most likely to be used in the search box (blue selected-text style below) in an effort to speed up the time it takes to express your intent and get to your destination. This has seen to help users speed up by over 16%.”
“The design challenge was to focus on simplicity and intuitiveness. The interaction should feel natural and instinctive when you need it, and easy to work around when you don’t want it,” he says. “The simplest solution is to grey-in (or “ghost”) the high-confidence suggestive text and hope you notice. The problem then becomes – how do you accept the suggestion vs ignore it?”
Naturally, he takes a dig at Google.
“Google’s model complicates this by not being clear about what happens when you hit <enter> to submit the query,” he says. “Will the search be for ‘bed’ or ‘bed bath and beyond’? Turns out the query is only ‘bed’ and you need to press <tab> or <down> to select the full query.”
The Bing philosophy, he says, is not grounded in applying already-learned interaction models.
Users can press Enter to accept a suggestion, continue to type through it with something else, or press Delete/Backspace to remove the suggested text.
Butler Business Accelerator has released findings from a new study of mobile search engines and question and answer platforms. The study says ChaCha answered questions better than ten other mobile search engines and Q&A platforms including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Siri, Ask.com, Answers.com, and Quora.
“ChaCha delivered the highest quality responses consistently across the largest group of categories and question types,” said Trent Ritzenthaler, operating director of the Butler Business Accelerator.
Here’s a look at the rankings of the Butler University Q&A Intelligence Index, which measured the likelihood that “a user could expect to receive a correct answer in a timely manner to any random query using natural language.”
Here’s what the study had to say about Google:
Google’s response rate was 100%, but the first non-sponsored result on the search results page (which often times was not fully visible as an organic search result on the presented page on a mobile device) only presented an accurate answer about 50% of the time, according to the Butler University Q&A Intelligence Index. On a mobile phone, when accounting for the clutter of ads and the likelihood of extra clicks to achieve the answer, allowing for the answer to be within the first non-sponsored search result might be considered generous. Again, this study differs from the results found in the Piper Jaffray study, but differences are likely due to variations in methodology. For example Piper Jaffray found that Google scores highest in terms of navigation and information (Elmer-DeWitt, 2012).
…
In terms of handling structured data more effectively, Google is promoting direct answers using its new Knowledge Graph and Google Now technology, “which tap into the collective intelligence of the web and understand the world a bit more like people do,” (Google, 2012). The limits of Google’s algorithmic technologies are evident in the empirical results of this study and users’ actual experiences. Other Q&A platforms in this study are also incorporating similar algorithmic solutions.
Okay, the study was sponsored by ChaCha, but Search Engine Land says CEO Scott Jones told them the company had no involvement in the methodology, “nor did it seek to influence the outcome in any way.” So, take that how you will.
We did talk to Jones recently, and he was without a doubt, incredibly confident in ChaCha’s abilities. The company is on the verge of launching a new and vastly improved mobile experience (at least, according to Jones). More on its upcoming app here. Jones did admit that the current ChaCha desktop web experience is “crappy.”
Either way, ChaCha is really geared towards answering different kinds of questions than most of the other services on this list. Even Google thinks ChaCha has the best answers to some questions, despite hitting it with the Panda update:
I should note that this was totally an organic find. ChaCha did not point it out to us (and frankly, the answer ChaCha provides doesn’t really even answer the question).
As you probably know, Yahoo and Microsoft entered a “Search Alliance” back in 2009, when Yahoo was under the leadership of Carol Bartz. The agreement was to last for ten years, and would see Bing powering the back end of Yahoo’s search, and Yahoo would become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Advertising for both companies would be run through Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, which has since become Bing Ads and the Yahoo Bing Network.
For that ten-year duration, Microsoft also acquired an exclusive license to Yahoo’s core search technologies along with the ability to integrate Yahoo’s search technologies into Bing.
It’s no surprise then, that Microsoft would want to make it incredibly hard for Yahoo to leave the partnership prematurely, if the company was inclined to do so. According to a new report from All Things D’s Kara Swisher, who has a proven track record of Yahoo insider information, sources at Microsoft say the company is “unlikely to extend the agreement without major concessions, and that any efforts to end the overall deal will be difficult for Yahoo.”
She quotes one of the sources as saying, “There is what [Yahoo] wants, and what’s possible.”
And leaving the Search Alliance early could very well be what Yahoo wants. Last week at an investors conference, Yahoo CEO (and former Googler) Marissa Mayer expressed her disappointment with the deal. Reuters quoted her:
“One of the points of the alliance is that we collectively want to grow share rather than just trading share with each other…”
“We need to see monetization working better because we know that it can and we’ve seen other competitors in the space illustrate how well it can work.”
We’ve heard of industry rumors that Yahoo would seek to kill the deal early for quite some time, but Yahoo seems to be getting increasingly vocal about the state of affairs, though it has not come right out and said it wishes to kill the deal.
Yahoo has, however, slammed Microsoft in other venues in recent memory.
Either way, Yahoo is prioritizing search more than it has in years, from the sound of it. On the earnings all, Mayer said as much. Here’s Wired’s account of her words:
“Overall in search, it’s a key area of investment for us,” Mayer said. “We need to invest in a lot of interface improvements. All of the innovations in search are going to happen at the user interface level moving forward and we need to invest in those features both on the desktop and on mobile and I think both ultimately will be key plays for us.”
“We have a big investment we want to make and a big push on search. We have lost some share in recent years and we’d like to regain some of that share and we have some ideas as to how.”
That does make it sound like Yahoo is more interested in focusing on the front end than on the back end, which really makes one name spring to mind as an alternative back-end partner, should Yahoo pursue an early end to the Microsoft partnership. And that’s a name that would give Microsoft all the more reason to make it as hard as possible for Yahoo to end it. It’s also a name that Mayer has very personal ties with. It’s also a name that Yahoo just announced a new display partnership with. (Hint: it rhymes with Yoogle).
Of course, Yahoo and Google wanted to partner in the first place, but the threat of regulatory action impeded any deal, so Yahoo settled for Microsoft. It’s hard to say whether the two would be able to get something done if they tried again, even if Yahoo is able to ditch Microsoft.
A new report from Business Insider quotes some former Yahoo employees who seem quite sure that Yahoo wants Google as its search partner. One of them said this about Yahoo and Google’s display deal:
“Marissa certainly wants to move the search deal from Microsoft to Google… Maybe this is the first of a few chess moves.”
Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson himself adds, “But one thing is clear: Yahoo’s deal with Microsoft is likely forcing it to accept lower revenue per search than a comparable deal with Google would. So Mayer would be crazy if she weren’t trying to either shift to Google or use Google as leverage to extract a better deal from Microsoft.”
But Yahoo will press on with its own search initiatives regardless of partners. According to Swisher’s report, Mayer has appointed long-time Yahoo exec Laurence Mann to head Yahoo Search.
Bing announced that it has made some adjustments to the Friends’ Photos social search feature it launched last year. Updates include a new look and interface and a new “slideshow mode”.
“You may be familiar with the modern user interface design principles that serve as the foundation for Windows 8, Windows Phone and Xbox Live,” says Bing Social program manager MK Li. “We’ve introducing a new tile layout that marries design and performance, making it faster and more seamless to browse your friends’ photos.”
Here’s what that looks like:
“Now simply by clicking on a photo, you will enter slide show mode where you can see more photos from your Facebook friends that match your search. From there, you can also search for additional photos, or simply browse,” says Li.
Of course Facebook has its own new way of browsing your friends’ photos, with Graph Search, which is still slowly rolling out to users.
Bing launched a new Politics site with “Bing Pulse” ahead of the State of the Union address, and is now sharing some insights from the endeavor.
“Last night, millions of Americans tuned into President Obama’s State of the Union address – and Bing stood alone in giving people a rare opportunity to give real-time feedback and access live social data at Bing.com/Politics,” says Mark Penn, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft. “Powered by Bing search technology and its unique social search experience, Bing’s State of the Union experience featured the breakthrough Bing Pulse – what turned out to be the largest live online poll in history.”
Bing partnered with FOX News on the site, offering what Bing described as a “non-partisan online destination designed to meet” the “growing need for up-to-the-minute political information and second-screen experiences”.
The Bing Pulse receieved 12.9 million votes, according to Bing, allowing people to join the conversation by “voting” every five seconds on their reactions to President Obama’s speech. Live results from the feature were shown on FOX News.
The search engine released the following infographic looking at real-time reactions to the speech:
According to a report from Search Engine Watch, citing numbers from comScore, Yandex is now bigger than Bing in terms of worldwide monthly search queries.
Search Engine Watch’s Michael Bonfils says Microsoft sites processed 4.477 billion queries while Yandex processed 4.844 billion in November and December. That would make Microsoft (and Bing) number five. The top three are Google, Baidu and Yahoo.
Last month, Yandex seemed poised to make a mark here in the U.S. (or at least attempt it), but the company’s plans were spoiled by Facebook. Yandex launched an app called Wonder, which was a new take on social search and relied heavily on Facebook data. Facebook deemed it a competitor (particularly since it had just launched its own social search offering in Graph Search), and cut the app off. It’s against Facebook’s terms to use Facebook’s data in a competing service.
Facebook’s Graph Search could, however, actually help Bing if it gains traction. Bing provides the web results, which are the default when Facebook doesn’t have the appropriate data for a query. Graph Search is still in early beta, and is still slowly rolling out to users.
Bill Gates has just finished up his first-ever reddit AMA, answering users’ questions for just under one hour. Among the topics of discussion included Microsoft, coding, his wealth, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, vaccines, and yes, Bing.
Replying to question “Do you guys really use Bing? I mean seriously?” Gates had this to say:
Seriously Bing is the better product at this point. Try the challenge. I am biased but the work to make Bing better has been amazing.
Since becoming wealthy, what’s the cheapest thing that gives you the most pleasure?
Kids. Cheap cheeseburgers. Open Course Ware courses…
What one Microsoft program or product that was never fully developed or released do you wish had made it to market?
We had a rich database as the client/cloud store that was part of a Windows release that was before its time. This is an idea that will remerge since your cloud store will be rich with schema rather than just a bunch of files and the client will be a partial replica of it with rich schema understanding. (WinFS)
Can you still jump over chairs?
Less than I used to. It was part of exercise for snow skiing. I still ski but I am not as hard core…
How was your relationship with Steve jobs? I always hoped that y’all were really good friends and competitors.
He and I respected each other. Our biggest joint project was the Mac where Microsoft had more people on the project than Apple did as we wrote a lot of applications. I saw Steve regularly over the years including spending an afternoon with him a few months before he tragically passed away…
What emerging technology today do you think will cause another big stir for the average consumer in the same way that the home computer did years ago?
Robots, pervasive screens, speech interaction will all change the way we look at “computers”. Once seeing, hearing, and reading (including handwriting) work very well you will interact in new ways..
The search engine has released its lists of top related searches, including the overall top Grammy-related searches, the most searched winners, the most searches performers, and the most searched presenters.
“The 55th GRAMMY Awards are over and today people are talking about the winners, the losers, the snubbed and the surprised,” Bing says in a blog post. “With that in mind, we thought it would be interesting to see how the results matched with what people were searching for on Bing. Below, you will find the top GRAMMY related searches.”
Here’s how the lists have shaken out:
Overall Top GRAMMY Related Searches
1. Faith Hill
2. Carly Rae Jepsen
3. Frank Ocean
4. Katy Perry
5. LL Cool J
6. Chris Brown & Rihanna
7. Grammy Dress Code
8. Bruno Mars
9. Mumford & Sons
10. Rihanna- Bob Marley Tribute
Most Searched Winners
1. Frank Ocean
2. Mumford & Sons
3. fun
4. Carrie Underwood
5. The Black Keys
6. Adele
7. Kelly Clarkson
8. Rihanna
9. Jay z
10. Gotye
Most Searched Performers
1. Justin Timberlake
2. Taylor Swift
3. Mumford & Sons
4. Bruno Mars
5. fun
6. Carrie Underwood
7. The Black Keys
8. Jack White
9. Miranda Lambert
10. Hunter Hayes
Most Searched Presenters
1. Faith Hill
2. Carley Rae Jepsen
3. LL Cool J
4. Justin Timberlake
5. Kelly Clarkson
6. Prince
7. John Mayer
8. Jennifer Lopez
9. Pitbull
10. Johnny Depp
![Bing Zings Google With ‘Bing Basic’ [Zing]](https://dev.webpronews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/pexels-dominika-roseclay-905163-80x75.jpg)
