Bing’s Senior UX Design Lead Manuel Lima gave a lecture towards the end of last year at the the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts about our need to reconsider the process of network visualization. In this age of information we live in, it’s imperative to understand that the trajectory of information and knowledge doesn’t move in a linear motion but is much, much more dynamic, wrapped and woven together in complex ways that require a new approach to organization and indexing. In the talk, Lima talks about how our traditional habit of using the model of a tree to visualize how a network of information branches out and is connected is no longer capable of supporting the “complexities of our modern world.”
This complexity is exemplified in no better way than with the massive, nearly infinite amount of information that is currently ever-expanding on the internet. It’s easy to forget sometimes that the internet is not some organic, macro-synaptic network growing from out of the digital ether but, rather, a group of people out there are tasked with finding ways to organize all of that information. Given Lima’s hand in that those types of affairs, he has a particularly qualified insight into information networks.
As if that wasn’t fascinating on its own, the talk is accompanied with one of RSA Animate’s illustrations that literally visualize the comments and concepts from Lima as he is talking.
While that was only about ten minutes of Lima’s talk, below is an extended version. Although no offense is intended towards Lima or whomever put together the graphics he used in this speech, they’re not nearly as endearing as RSA Animate’s illustration.
According to his website, Lima is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, nominated by Creativity magazine as “one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009,” founder of VisualComplexity.com – A visual exploration on mapping complex networks.
Before you go off clicking on any of the blue links listed in a page of search results, Bing really wants you to have a chance to know a little something about your topic of search before you go diving off into the depths of the internets. Bing already incorporates small snippets of information about a topic among search results, courtesy of Encyclopedia Britannica, and it also will display recent scores and stats of Major League Baseball games and players. Now, Bing wants to give internet users a warm, welcome handshake to topics and that handshake is called Qwiki.
Bing announced today that users will begin seeing Qwikis, those surprisingly appealing interactive presentations of pictures and videos that are narrated by a calm female voice from the future, among the links of Bing’s search results. The link to open the Qwiki appears just below the Wikipedia link in the search results (see below).
As you’ve likely predicted, users will click the “Watch the Qwiki” link and the presentation will open up directly on the page.
The pictures used in the slideshow are actually links to other pages that will open up upon clicking, sometimes to other Wikipedia pages, to pictures uploaded onto Fotopedia, or maybe even to a page of related Bing searches (like when I watched the Qwiki for basil and then clicked on a picture labeled “lamiacae” that then opened up a new browser tab of Bing search results for the plant family, lamiacae). The Qwikis are only integrated with Wikipedia content, which explains why the narration you hear in the presentation will be the first couple of paragraphs from the adjoining Wikipedia article, but Bing says that eventually it hopes to include content from other search results.
Qwiki and Bing may be on the verge of changing search into an interactive experience that has until now not really be tested. It’s ambitious, likely looking to produce active browsing instead of having a person sit there passively scanning over a bunch of similar-sounding links.
“Search can be so much more than text and blue links,” said Doug Imbruce, the Founder and CEO of Qwiki. “For example, with today’s release, searches for ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ on Bing produce beautiful, interactive playable presentations that have demonstrated increased information retention.” Imbruce added that it’s time to start reshaping the way people think about internet search. “Looking ahead, Qwiki and Bing can help any content creator or web site owner help people do more through increased engagement.”
Bing Search Director Stefan Weitz offered up this short demonstration of how Qwikis will appear in the results as well as what users can get from watching the presentations.
The Qwikis embedded in the Bing search results are a pretty savvy counter to Google’s Knowledge Graph, which is essentially the same thing – the first bit of a Wikipedia entry, some pictures, a couple of links – but a lot less dynamic than what Bing’s introduced today.
As far as the category of flair goes, Bing wins this round, but we’ll have to wait and see if this new feature is enough to inspire internet users to migrate from Google.
Last week, Bing announced its Phoenix update that includes an armada of new and updated utilities for Bing Webmaster Tools that should give webmasters whole new dimensions of search data to tinker around with and evaluate. While the Bing Team promised to elaborate on each of the tools in the near future, Bing Webmaster Tool’s guru Duane Forrester stopped by SEOmoz to discuss and demo some of the new tools on Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Friday.
The pair talk through several of the features with Bing Webmaster Tools as Forrester explains what the different aspects of traffic reports mean, how keywords are evaluated from an advertising perspective, etc. It’s the most comprehensive explanation and tutorial you’re likely to get on Bing Webmaster Tools to date; even if you’re a novice with SEO and traffic analysis, you should still be able to follow along with the discussion.
Even though you should watch the video if you’re looking to get a better grasp of Bing Webmaster Tools, SEOmoz also provided the transcript if you want to skip around. More, Forrester has been hanging around in the page’s comments section the past couple of days to answer some users’ questions which, if you’ve got some lingering confusion or lack of clarity, you should check out to see if your answer is awaiting you somewhere in the thread.
Webmasters could really go delightfully tumbling down an SEO-hole with all of the rich data that Bing’s new Webmaster Tools inventory has to offer, and it certainly makes a formidable challenge to Google Analytics. If you’ve taken both of those services for a test drive or two, which do you find works best for your site? Did Bing just put Google on notice with this Phoenix update? Let us know below in the comments.
On the heels of last week’s announcement that it would begin including answers from Encyclopedia Britannica among search results, Bing announced today that it’s got another timely offering of answers for this summer season. Now, when you search for a Major League Baseball team or individual player you can instantly see the answer associated to your search inserted among the blue links.
For instance, I did a search of the Los Angeles Dodgers, mainly because that was my favorite team when I was a kid and when I still followed baseball. As you an see in the example below, Bing displays the next three upcoming games of the Dodgers as well as their record and league rank. By hovering over the different boxes that say “Schedule,” “Scores,” and “2012 Leaders,” you can see the team’s associated statistics and figures without having to leave the page of search results.
A minor note: weirdly, searching “los angeles dodgers” doesn’t conjure the same answer box as “l.a. dodgers” does.
If you missed last night’s game(s), can search the generic term “MLB score” and see the latest scores of games around the league.
Finally, if you’re looking to brush up on the individual qualities of baseball players, you can search the name of any current player and find their current stats for the year. I searched the first player whose name I could find, Mariano Rivera, and his 2012 regular season stats were at the very top of my page.
Judging only from the example searches I did to test out the MLB answers on Bing, it appears that a lot of the information for this feature is culled from Fox Sports. More, if you click on any of the “See more” links included in the answers, I always seemed to be directed to Fox Sports’ page.
As of now, this feature is said to only be available for Bing users in the United States.
The Encyclopedia “Bingtannica” (by the way, Bing, you can send me the royalty check any time now for coining that clever name for you) partnership aims to provide brief answers to search queries within the Bing search results page by inserting a snip of pertinent information, a historical fact or two, and a thumbnail image among the list of the standard 10 blue links.
Based on my highly scientific empirical research, it appears that the Bingtannica insert tends to show up somewhere between the fourth and sixth search results. Below are a couple of different examples I found of the placement.
After giving the new feature a test drive with several search terms, the consistency with which I was seeing the Bingtannica answers was hit-or-miss. The answers seemed to appear more frequently when I searched for people as opposed to places or inanimate objects. For example, my searches for “brazen bull,” “red mercury,” “Vatican,” “Pepsi,” “corvette,” and “Salome” didn’t produce the Bingtannica answers on my first page of results.
A spokesperson from Microsoft explained that the placement of the Bingtannica links are decided with the same algorithms Bing uses for everything else. “We use our standard machine learning rankers that, by definition, adjust for things like user intent, and page placement over time,” he said.
This is likely less of an oversight and more of a sign that providing answers within Bing search results is a work in progress. After all, the amount of information in the world is scratching the barriers of infinity so it’d be a bit of a reach to expect that Bing will immediately start providing short info blurbs to your search queries regardless of how vague or specific you make your search. To be fair, I don’t expect Bing (or anybody, really) to indulge my tendencies to search for strange or uncommon topics.
The bulk of the answers provided in Bing search results will rely on information provided by Encyclopedia Britannica although some content may also be included from other reliable sources.
The insertion of the Bingtannica answers are more obscure than what Google’s been doing with its Knowledge Graph although the general information is comparable between both search engines. However, Bing’s related search suggestions tend to be more closely related to your original search term than what Google’s Knowledge Graph provides. Re-using my Giacometti search example, you can see below how Bing’s suggestions are a bit better at predicting my additional related queries than Knowledge Graph (Bing’s on the left, Google’s on the right).
It irks me that Google’s suggestions are trying to pull me away from what I originally searched for, but I guess the difference comes down to a matter of preference. At least in this specific example, I’m not interested in obtaining a consummate history on surrealism – I’m looking for Alberto Giacometti information. That’s why I entered his name in the search bar. If I wanted to learn about Giacometti’s contemporaries, I’d search for them. Nonetheless, if you prefer the former routine, I suppose Knowledge Graph is doing just fine for you but I favor Bing’s actually on-topic suggestions. There’s no accounting for taste, though, so whuddya gonna do?
The new arsenal of analytical tools comes on the heels of Friday’s announcement that the new Bing design has become the standard Bing for users in the United States. Some of these tools are brand new while others are merely getting an update or moving out of beta.
The Bing Team says that you should consider this announcement of the tools as an webmaster aperitif because they’ll be providing a more detailed explanation of each tool in the upcoming few weeks. Since Bing has promised to elaborate on each of these tools in the near future, I’m not going to try to out-Bing them so I’ll just include a brief description of each of the updates below. We’ll bring you further information about each new feature or tool as Bing makes the information available.
Probably the most immediate change you’ll see is that Bing has redesigned the Webmaster Tools dashboard. As seen below in the example taken from the Bing blog post, the new look complements the cleaner look to Bing’s search results page.
And now, on to the catwalk.
New Tools:
Link Explorer (beta) – Go spelunking through the internet to discover links associated with any domain.
SEO Reports (beta) – Generate SEO analysis reports directly from Bing. The report uses roughly 15 SEO best practices to generate the analysis and runs once every two weeks for all of the domains you have verified with Webmaster Tools account.
SEO Analyzer (beta) – Similar to the SEO Reports tool, Analyzer will use the same best practices criteria to scan an URL in order to tell you whether or not you’re in compliance with each best practice.
Fetch as Bingbot (beta) – Every curious how the Bing’s web-crawler, Bingbot, sees your site? Now you can find out with this new tool, which will allow a webmaster to send Bingbot crawling across a specific page and display it as the bot sees it.
Canonical Alerts – A new tool to help keep webmasters from erroneously using the rel=canonical tags so your website doesn’t get mistaken as one single page.
The following tools have existed for a bit but received updates with Phoenix.
URL Removal Tool – Simple enough: a tool to allow webmasters to easily block a page from appearing in Bing’s search results.
Keyword Research Tool (beta) – Previously, users were only able to enter one single keyword or phrase per keyword request, but now now webmasters will be able to add multiple entries within the same request.
URL Normalization – Updated the interface to clarify how it works.
Whew. That should be enough to keep you Bing Webmaster Tools users busy for a while, at least until Bing begins to share more information about the hows and whys of each of these tools. To start playing with the tools, users will need a Bing Webmaster Tools account, so happy webmastering and enjoy.
Vice President of Bing Program Management Derrick Connell visited SMX Advanced 2012 today to talk about some of Bing’s recent changes as well as a sit-down Danny Sullivan and Michelle Robbins of Search Engine Land for a Q&A session about more Bingness.
He began by talking about some of the upgrades that the Microsoft-owned search engine has received lately, most notably the new three-column format of search results that feature a middle column of quick facts, called Snapshot, and a third column of results culled from online social networks like Twitter and Facebook. He mentioned that since the Bing Team overhauled the search engine’s design, the results load about 20% faster due to some fixes they made on the script.
During the Q&A with Sullivan and Robbins, Connell indicated that it might be possible in the future to add a fourth and maybe even fifth column to the search results given the space allocation in the new design, possibly even developing a horizontal column to fit somewhere on the page.
In what may have been a slight dig at Google Search Plus Your World, Connell explained that the social results in Bing are sequestered to the right-hand column because “putting people into the algorithm results is just unnatural.” He brings up a good point asking how you rank a person as opposed to a page, adding that the social content is off to the side merely as an auxiliary feature in case Bing users want to browse it. The primary value of the social content, Connell said, was that it adds some freshness to search results that might have, for example, a review for a restaurant that was created a year ago whereas a recent Facebook update or Tweet might have more immediate information for a search.
The SEL duo then asked Connell about Bing’s relevancy scoring and how it tested pretty very well against other search engines. Connell went on to explain that one goal of Bing is to improve its marketing strategy in order to convince more people that Bing is at least on par with Google, if not better in some respects. Here’s what he said concerning a comparison of relevancy in the results of the two search engines:
In our more recent studies, we’re just ahead, but it’s statistical. We did a test where we went out and showed consumers up against Google’s. The surprising thing was in branded results, we did really well. But when we switched the brand, our results were far better than Google’s. So it shows there’s a perception gap. There’s a consumer perception that Google’s results are better than they actually are. We’ll do some perception marketing over the summer. And I think there’s a need to have an independent, third-party group for that.
He goes on to welcome the challenge to eventually build a brand that could rival Google, comparing the competition to a Coke versus Pepsi choice (he did not, however, care to talk about the Faygo of the soda-search engine market, Facebook). In essence, Connell at this point reiterated that goal isn’t so much to build a search engine that can keep up with Google, but convince people that Bing can and does keep up with Google. Connell pointed out how Bing has slowly gnawed into Google’s dominance of the search market, passing up Yahoo recently and capturing around 17% of the market. “I’ll be happy on the journey when we get to 20%,” he said. “I think that’s a tipping point.”
Finally, Connell announced a new version of Bing Webmaster Tools, the Phoenix update, that will give webmasters an array of new tools and features to play with so as to get a deeper analysis of SEO and link data.
The full transcript is available over at Outspoken Media per Michelle Lowery.
This tends to occur at various conferences when search is discussed, and of course it’s no surprise that it would occur at a search-specific conference like SMX Advanced.
Google’s Matt Cutts spoke with Danny Sullivan in a keynote discussion at the event. Cutts famously does these 30 day challenges, in which he will commit 30 days of his time to doing specific things. Sullivan asked Cutts if he’d do something like “I’m gonna use Bing for 30 days.”
At E3, Microsoft announced, among other things, that Internet Explorer is coming to the Xbox 360 this fall. That means that tons of Xbox users will have easy access to browsing the entire web right from their favorite gaming console. It also means that Microsoft will have an opportunity to significantly increase searches on Bing.
Granted, there is a paywall element at play. Microsoft will require users to have an Xbox Live Gold account to use IE. Still, it’s a chance for the company to push its browser, and perhaps its search engine in front of a hard core (as well as casual) gaming base more than ever.
Last year, Bing came to the console in very limited fashion. Microsoft launched Bing Voice Search, enabling users to find content across Netflix, Hulu Plus, Comcast Xfinity on Demand ,HBO Go, Zune, and other programs on Xbox Live. This was part of the company’s “future of TV” announcement. Is Bing the future of TV?
And no, we’re not talking about product placement in television shows, of which there is plenty.
I’ve long held the belief that Xbox would be Microsoft’s greatest weapon for increasing its share of the search market. Xbox is huge, and Microsoft could reach people in a place where Google has so far struggled: the living room. While Google tries to figure out Google TV, Microsoft already has a hugely successful set-top box, if you will.
Speaking of Bing Voice Search on Xbox, Microsoft announced it’s expanding this feature into 12 additional markets (that’s added brand exposure for Bing if nothing else): Australia, Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain and Switzerland.
“Soon users in 15 countries speaking 7 languages will be able to get full voice search support,” Bing said in a blog post. “In addition, in some countries and languages, you will be able to search for content genres such as comedy, drama and action, and also will be able to use your voice to search user generated content on YouTube.”
Microsoft isn’t playing Bing up too much in the IE news, but as you can see in the image above, it appeared in the demo. You can watch the whole event here, courtesy of Gamespot:
How much do people want to search the web on a gaming console though? Well, perhaps more than before. As previously reported, IE on Xbox will support Kinect and SmartGlass, so users don’t have to use a game controller to operate it.
Some might consider Microsoft to have the competitive edge when it comes to social search, for that matter, given that Bing is now tightly integrated with Facebook. The new, more social Bing is available to everyone in the U.S. as of last week. If people find value in their social connections for search, they’re most likely going to get more out of Bing than Google in that regard, as Google doesn’t have the kind of Facebook (or Twitter) data Bing does, relying more on Google+ and other public data.
“With sidebar, Bing brings together the best of the web, with what experts and your friends know, giving you the confidence to act,” said Bing VP Derrick Connell, when unveiling the new Bing. “This new way to search lets you share, discover, and interact with friends like you do in real life. If you’re on the go, you’ll notice we’ve optimized the layout and placement of the social results on the mobile device for smaller screen sizes and for touch input, so the user experience will be different than what people see on a PC.”
The big screen will add a new element to the equation. As Microsoft continues to experiment with the cross-section of search and social media , using its So.cl social network as a testing ground, perhaps they’ll be able to find better ways to tap into that in the living room. So.cl already has a video chat Hangout-like feature.
“You may not always see friends you expect to show up for a number of reasons,” Connell notes of Bing’s social features. “Bing uses public Facebook information and content you’ve given Bing permission to use, such as friends’ photos on Facebook. We won’t match friends based on other Facebook content such as status updates or check-ins. Bing also respects you and your friends’ privacy settings so you won’t see friends who have opted out of Facebook instant personalization or blocked the Bing app.”
Assuming that Microsoft has learned its lesson from its own antitrust regulation of the past, we can probably expect an option for users to switch their default search engine when IE hits Xbox. The question is, how many will bother to do so. It at least gives Microsoft the opportunity to get users to try Bing (and ultimately serve them ads).
Do you have an Xbox 360? Will you be searching with Bing? Let us know.
Science fiction is full of worlds that have artificially intelligent devices that serve as sidekicks to heroes (and villains!) for performing the tasks they need to check off by the end of the day. These characters and their electronic counterparts always seem to live in the future or have traveled from the future to our pedestrian time period where they proceed to dazzle us with their über-smart computer devices that seem to know more than the users do.
Meanwhile, those futuristic devices make our iPhones and Android smartphones look like telegraphy instruments. Don’t give into disappointment and throw your smartphones on the ground just yet, though, because our humble Year 2012 devices might be getting an intelligence boost in the near future.
Bing announced today the beginning of on{X} (pronounced “on-ex” and, sadly, not like the mineral or 90s rap group), a new developer initiative that aims to push your Android smartphone into the future by becoming more of a predictive secretary for your life. And yes, I did only mention Android because, as of the launch of on{X}, that is the only platform on which the project is available – sorry, iPhone developers and users.
on{X} is an ambitious project that wants to make your smartphone “smart” enough to take care of some tasks automatically that, as of today, you have to manually tell it to do. For instance, some of the possibilities expected from on{X} would have your smartphone automatically text your spouse that you’re on your way home from work without you having to do it yourself (although adulterers may want to stay away from this feature) or automatically show you your work calendar whenever you arrive to work. See the video below from Bing to hear more about the ambitions of on{X}.
Given all of the environmental acuity that smartphones have these days, everything from retrieving weather information to geolocation to speakers and cameras, there’s really no reason why smartphones shouldn’t be more pre-emptive with taking care of some of the menial tasks that, thus far, we’re doomed to repeat nearly every day. on{X} hopes to push smartphones into that direction by making them capable of detecting and reacting to environmental changes.
For each such triggering event, we can easily create reactions. Instead of limiting the reaction to a simple list of actions, we are offering the full power of JavaScript. That’s right, you can push any arbitrary JavaScript code, remotely, down to your mobile device and hook it up to a continuous signals sensing framework that you only need to download and install once. The possibilities are wide open because you no longer need to worry about the target platform. Even better, Project on{x} is optimized to not drain your battery.
Working on on{X} will require some developer know-how, so it will naturally not be accessible for just anybody to participate. However, Bing has tried to make the project as easily accessible as possible for anybody enthusiastic enough to give it the old college try:
The code we write is an action that we hook up to a sensor-based event. For example: “AC power disconnected” or “WiFi network detected”. Do you want some more sophisticated examples? How about “User mode-of-transport just changed from walking to driving” or “user left home”?
Ultimately, on{X} inverts the way smartphones traditionally operate. Instead of sending the data up to the cloud from the device, Bing wants to push the code down to the smartphone. Eran Yariv, Bing Principal Development Manager, emphasizes how the different direction of data transfer with on{X} will ultimately result in better privacy as no data is actually leaving the Android device. The lack of mandatory access to the cloud helps make sure that all the computation is happening on the device. More, in initial tests, the on{X}-enabled device never even needed to communicate with the cloud even though the JavaScript has the capacity to do so.
Anybody curious to dig their claws into on{X} can find the app in Google Play. Thus far, in the 27 reviews that have been posted since the app was made available, users seem to think overall that the idea driving the app is amazing except for one caveat: you must sign into on{X} with your Facebook account. A vast majority of the users who gave on{X} 1-star reviews state that they were excited to start using the app until it was learned that this app is tied up with Facebook. The discovery seems to have sent every eager developer running for the hills, which is unfortunate. This app is superbly promising yet as long as on{X} is shacked up with Facebook, the project looks to lose many creative minds who would rather not have Facebook leeching even more information from them than that site already does. Hopefully, Microsoft and Bing will take heed to this initial revulsion by potential on{X} users and offer an alternative in the near future, maybe with a Google log-in (since these developers presumably are already using said account on their Android devices) or even an email log-in option.
Then again, Bing and Facebook have been cozy for some time now, and if on{X} ends up DOA solely because of its Facebook association, that failure could really tax that relationship.
Facebook, you’ve got the nega-Midas touch these days. Hope you’re happy with yourself.
Bing has officially staked out its online search territory in the Chinese market by striking an agreement with Hudong, which is regarded as the Wikipedia of China. The new partnership looks to give Bing, which is owned by Microsoft, a greater reach throughout China by generating search results that are more local and relevant to Chinese Bingers since those results will be pulling information from Hudong.
You know how when you search for something in English on either Bing or Google, you almost always have a Wikipedia link at the top of your results or at least among the top few results? Chinese internet searchers could expect to start having likewise results with Hudong links appearing pretty high in their search, except much more extensively than Wikipedia’s prominence in English search. The Wikipedia English site has nearly 4 million articles, a lot by any standard yet far behind the 6.4 million articles available on Hudong. More, Hudong has on average nearly twice the amount of words per article than Wikipedia, 1097 words to 590 words, respectively.
Hudong, which aside from being the world’s largest Chinese encyclopedia is also a for-profit site, expects that its new collaboration with Bing will accelerate the efficiency of both sites. Hudong CEO Pan Haidong said that the online encyclopedia still focuses on spreading knowledge and creating a college without walls with its wiki technology in the increasingly complex Internet information environment.
The new buddy cop movie of internet search between Bing and Hudong is a timely development for Bing as it continues to amp up its all-out effort of pushing Google off its well-worn throne of online search. Aside from an impressive new design that emphasizes social-sourced search results, Microsoft also announced that its basically going to turn XBox 360s into online search devices by equipping the Bing search engine with all XBox Live Gold accounts.
Bing’s team-up with Hudong should lend the search engine’s new second-column Snapshot feature some hefty momentum to go against Google’s Knowledge Graph in the Chinese market.
It’s the first day of June today, summer is officially huffing above us, and there’s no going back to that brief flowering moment of May. Another thing you can’t go back to: the old, non-social Bing.
Prior to today, Bingers still had the option of using the previous incarnation of Bing or taking a great leap forward into the social era of the internets and embracing the new Bing, which features a three-column format to show you snapshots (center) of search results and the social sidebar (right) of what your Facebook and Twitter familiars are talking about in addition to the traditional “10 blue links” (left). As of June 1 – today – though, Bing has decided that the stragglers and traditionalists in the United States needed that final nudge to embrace the new format.
The Bing Team has been feeling a little overwhelmed by today’s events.
The aim of new Bing is to virtually replicate the social structure that most of us rely on when we need some answers or advice by integrating our personal online networks with search results. It’s a pretty heft counter to Google’s Search Plus Your World, especially since Bing has access to that rich Facebook pool of user information that Google has been thus far prevented from tapping into.
To commence with the new era of Bing, the Bing Team also unveiled a new marketing campaign for the product that emphasizes the social aspect of the redesign. If you’re a TV watcher, you’ll likely see these short spots if you tune in to the MTV Movie Awards or the season finale of Mad Men (which I hear a couple of you like to watch).
The new ads are a part of a season-long effort by the Bing Team that they’ve declared the Bing Summer of Doing that will include an extended social media campaign featuring “daily searches designed to inspire doing while rewarding searchers with cool prizes” (most likely with Bing Rewards). Bing wants so badly that you get up offa that thang and dance till you feel better that it’s partnered up with DoSomething.org in order to encourage people to give a little back to their communities. Bing is also emceeing a national daily challenge called “The Hunt, 11 Days of Doing” that looks to motivate teens to take part in 11 days of challenges that, in some fashion, improve their communities. The 11 Days of Doing kicks off on July 10, so if you’re a teen or you know one that needs to get a little more active, tell them they’ve got a little over a month to get in shape before the challenge commences.
Due to some concerns regarding how Bing Maps deals with requests to blur images on its Streetside feature in Germany, the company has decided to disable the street-level image feature in order to assess some of the complaints. Blurring out faces is common fare with ground-level photographs in Streetside and Google Maps rival service, Street View. However, that doesn’t appear to be quite far enough to satisfy everybody in Germany as some have requested that the companies blur out the facades of buildings, as well.
A spokesperson with Microsoft told WebProNews, “There are a limited number of customers in Germany who raised concerns about the way we are pursuing their respective blurring requests.” He added, “As we take privacy and data protection of our customers very seriously, we decided to take down the StreetSide Beta service in Germany, while evaluating these single cases and working on a solution.”
Bing has canvased quite a bit of Germany since it started photographing the country last May for the Streetside feature and was still diligently at work on the project as recently as this month. However, according to a source that spoke with PCWorld, Bing plans to continue on with the photography schedule.
As of this point, it’s unclear if Streetside will ever be reinstated in Germany. Google Maps endured complaints of a similar nature when it embarked on collecting images for Street View. Since those complaints filled Google’s inbox, the company complied with requests to blur out faces and buildings,has seemingly stopped updating any of the Street View imagery for German cities, leaving much of the country’s Street View imagery out of date.
Bing could follow suit and abandon all hope of providing reliable, up-to-date Streetside imagery or, given that these are a “limited number of customers” who have submitted complaints, maybe Bing thinks they can appease the Germans where Google could not. Cross your fingers for the former but don’t hold your breath.
In the meantime, the only way you’re going to be able to stroll down the streets of Germany is to put some boots on the sidewalks and shake a leg because you may not get another chance for a virtual tour of Deutschland anytime soon.
Google and Bing do things differently. I think we all understand that by now. Their differences apparently extend to how they teach. Google teaches people through their weekly Office Hours Hangouts which gives developers to talk to the people behind the product they use to get real answers. Bing just, well, they put slides on the Internet. Are you feeling up to revisiting the feeling of college lectures? Bing sure is.
The Bing Maps team has released two separate slide shows, unfortunately powered by Silverlight, that detail how a developer can leverage Bing maps to their advantage. The first is just more or less a normal introductory course in Bing Maps development. The second gets a little more advanced by showing developers how to use SQL server spatial data in their Bing Maps applications.
The introductory course explains the benefits of using Bing Maps while showing you how to get started on development. The rest of the slides are dedicated to the AJAX7 Control method in Bing Maps alongside the REST interfaces that you will be using. It even has a test at the end to make sure you were paying attention.
Bing Maps Learning Snack by Snack Owner
The second explains how SQL server spacial data works together with Bing Maps to create advanced data applications. It then spends some time on explaining the finer points of working with data in SQL Server 2012. Finally, it will show you how to combine the two to create great Bing Maps applications.
Bing Maps and SQL Server Spatial Data by Snack Owner
Earlier, we looked at So.cl, Microsoft’s new(ish) social network, which seems to be something of a testing ground for interactions between search and social media.
While some of So.cl may look familiar to Bing users (or those who have read about the recent Bing redesign), and some of the features may one day make their way to Bing, So.cl currently has no impact on Bing’s current social features.
Duane Forrester answered a user question on Twitter:
On that note, its interesting that Pinterest isn’t mentioned on Forrester’s list of Bing’s social focal points. Perhaps he was hinting at the future. A Pinterest-based image search integration could be cool.
In addition to being one of the faces of Bing, he’s also “The Online Marketing Guy” according to the domain name of his personal blog.
There is a section in his Penguin/Panda advice post called “Exercises in the Obvious,” and the first thing mentioned is Pinterest.
“Pinterest,” Forrester writes. “It didn’t take long for the Pin It button to start popping up on websites. And it didn’t take a passing grade on the MENSA quiz to see it coming, did it? Rapid growth, huge adoption, media buzz, your friends recommending it, and so it goes. An exercise in obviousness that you’d better pay attention to this little gem.”
This is only one of his “obvious” points, but it’s interesting that he would call out this social network as the first point of obviousness.
There’s been a lot of buzz around the service, for sure. Last week, reports emerged that the company raised $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. Its monthly active user base is still trending upwards, though it looks like it might be losing some steam with the Facebook-connected user base. Perhaps that’s worse news for Facebook than it is for Pinterest.
Duane Forrester (often thought of as Bing’s Matt Cutts) has offered some tips for recovering from Google’s Penguin and Panda updates, or at least avoiding getting hit by them. While he never mentions “Google” in the post, the post is titled “Penguins & Pandas Poetry,” and is largely about diversifying your traffic sources.
“Seriously folks, if you want to lay a smack down on the animal kingdom that’s taken over your life, you can do it,” he writes. “Get the basics covered, leverage your unique strengths (or create new ones) and focus, like a laser, on the single thing that matters most: your visitors. Get religion on this point and never let go. The engines are very focused on those visitors: what they like, what they dislike, what they click on and what they avoid. We’re watching them closely so we can learn what they want and bring exactly that to them every time. You should be, too.”
Forrester talks about anticipating change, because algorithms and rankings change all the time.
“If your plan was to make sure your content ranked well across all the major engines, then your plan of action would already be in effect, protecting you from the loss in one area,” he writes. “True, its not an offset that matches what could potentially be lost at the same level, but the option is losing everything and having nothing suddenly.”
He talks about “preventative work,” or taking care “all those projects you know should be done,” as well as doing “the obvious,” which apparently includes using Pinterest. He also lists the following as “other obvious stuff”:
Do you have a webmaster account activated at the engines?
How’s your robots.txt file doing? Blocking the right stuff?
Got clean sitemaps?
Still have duplicate content issues?
Have you integrated social sharing features across your site?
Got the best practices of SEO covered (remember, we like SEO…)
I’m going to suggest that you also take a long, hard look at Google’s quality guidelines, if you were hit by Penguin. If you were hit by Panda, you should analyze this list of questions Google put out last year.
At the time, Microsoft said, “So.cl has been designed for students studying social media to extend their educational experience and rethink how they learn and communicate. They can build posts with many elements—photos, video, text, and more—and share them with colleagues. They also can find students with similar interests and build communities around specific educational goals. So.cl might even give students the ability to create their own social tool, customized for their own community.”
To use the service, you can either sign in with Facebook or your Windows Live ID. When you go to sign in using Facebook, it says:
So.cl is an experiment in open search. That means your searches on So.cl are viewable by other So.cl users and will also be available to third parties.
So.cl does not automatically post your searches, comments, or likes to your Facebook stream unless you choose this option. Also, we don’t contact your Facebook friends unless you invite them.
Then, you’re asked to choose interests (not unlike StumbleUpon) and follow the most popular users on So.cl:
Then, you’re taken to your home page, where you can “explore the best of So.cl”. The top bar and notification counter looks somewhat like Google’s:
If you click on one of the categories, you get a newsfeed for the category. This is comprised of searches that people have performed and posts that people have made to that category. For the ones based on searches, it tells you what they searched for, and then gives you a specific link (I’m not sure if this is the top result for the search, the one that person clicked on, or what). It’s a different experience. That’s for sure.
If you search for something, you’re presented with a set of results from both Bing, and feed results from So.cl. You can add results to your posts, not unlike Bing’s social features. When you’re ready, click “done” and it will post your update, with results.
They may still have some bugs to work out. When I tried to post the one from the screen cap above, it didn’t really give me any indication that it was actually posted. When I went to “My Posts” it was nowhere to be found. It’s also telling me that I have 0 interests. Then why did I accept all the suggestions it gave me at the beginning? It also says I am following 0, even though I also elected to follow the popular people it suggested.
Another feature of the service is called “Video Parties,” which appear to be Microsoft’s version of Google’s Hangouts. Here’s what the site says about them:
Watch videos with your So.cl friends in real time by creating a party in So.cl. Note: Video Party allows other users to see the videos that you have posted or viewed
It appears that users get 10 invitations to start with.
So, it seems this is about more than a tool for students now. It’s unclear whether Microsoft is really trying to build its own social network like Google has done with Google+, or if this is really just a testing ground for social Bing features. It seems like the latter.
For one, they’re letting you sign in with Facebook from the get go. This could make the whole thing more useful, since everyone is already on Facebook. Think about how much more complete Google+ would be if it had all of your Facebook friends. Of course, if it has all of your Facebook friends, what’s the point in using both? That’s where things get a little hazy with Socl too. It seems to be largely about search, and BIng is obviously Microsoft’s baby in that department (complete with a fresh, socially-focused redesign, no less).
Lili Cheng, one of Socl’s creators, reportedly said that they’re using Socl as “an experiment with the search + social networking experience from Microsoft Research,” and that we’ll see “other experiments in Socl over time.”
Have you tried Socl yet? What is your impression? Let us know in the comments.
Microsoft turned some heads last month when they announced that the Bing Search API would be heading exclusively to the Windows Azure Marketplace. A lot of non-profit groups like libraries were understandably upset because Microsoft wanted $40 a month just to use the new API. After hearing the criticism from non-profit groups, Microsoft has adjusted the pricing to include a free option.
The Bing Search API is now available on the Windows Azure Marketplace. From there, you can download the API and begin using it in Azure Web apps to provide Bing-powered search results alongside images, video and all kinds of other great search-related queries. The new Bing Search API can also be configured to your liking to return only the most relevant data to your applications.
Microsoft, in a move that will make non-profits love them, are keeping the Bing Search API free up to 5,000 queries. That’s a little better than Google’s Custom Search which only allows up to 100 queries per day which equals out to about 3,000 free queries a month.
For applications that use more than 5,000 queries a month, Microsoft has an easy to understand tiered-pricing system. It goes from 10,000 queries for $20 a month to 2.5 million queries for $5,000 a month. For 2.5 million queries using Google’s Custom Search, their pricing comes out to be $12,500. Either way, Bing Search is obviously the more cost effective option. It’s worth pointing out that Google at least only charges you per 1,000 queries, up to 10,000 a day, where as Bing charges you upfront for all the queries in a month. So you can get away with paying less with Google if you have slow search days.
If you are using the Bing Search API 2.0, Microsoft encourages you to switch over to the new Windows Azure Marketplace version. You can still use the old 2.0 API for free until August 1 which is when Microsoft will switch over to only handling requests for those who are using the Windows Azure version.
To encourage people to make the switch sooner than later, Microsoft is offering a free trial for any subscription tier. You can start processing 2.5 million queries for free as soon as you sign up. If you find yourself needing even more than 2.5 million queries a month, Microsoft can hook you up for a small fee.
If all of this sounds better than you ever could have imagined, check out the migration guide (docx) for moving old Bing Search API apps to the new Bing Search API. In doing so, you’ll be signed up for the free trial. Just be sure to change back over to the free tier before the trail ends unless you can afford $5,000 a month.
As an aside, Microsoft is removing two services from the Bing Search API since they aren’t used all that much. Starting August 1, the PhoneBook SourceType and the RSS endpoint will no longer be available through the API. Microsoft’s translation service will be available only through Microsoft Translator (for a separate fee) instead of the Bing Search API as well.
Wajam recently released a new and improved version of its browser add-on that brings a more social experience to Google. The company has now released the counterpart for Bing and Yahoo.
Since Wajam released the Google version, of course, Bing has unveiled its own major social overhaul. Wajam thinks it can do it better though. The company put together the following video and chart showing the differences:
It’s interesting to see Wajam get the edge on product recommendations, given that Bing has always touted shopping as one of its highlights. Of course, if you use Bing’s regular search and search for products, Bing will still show the social bar, with Facebook likes, and Twitter results if applicable.
The new Wajam is currently rolling out for Yahoo and Bing.
When Google rose to popularity, ever so long ago, it was considered to be revolutionizing search. Think about what search was like back then. AltaVista, Yahoo, and a bunch of others were competing for your queries, but Google brought a different approach. PageRank was a huge part of that, and is often credited as the big differentiator, but another key element to what made Google stand out was its simplistic design.
Do you miss the days when Google’s design was simpler? Do you think Bing is outdoing Google in design and usability? Let us know in the comments.
Google still largely maintains its simplicity on its homepage (though it has a less simplistic homepage option in iGoogle), but in the search results it’s another story. Search engines in the pre-Google days were essentially portals. Google, in its early days, was just fresh, clean search. These days, Google is much more portal-esque, with all of the company’s various products that are not only available from links across the broader Google experience (the top navigation and whatnot), but also injected into the search results in various capacities.
Much of what Google has on its search results pages these days has been added at different times. It wasn’t all overnight, but Bing’s redesign really shines a spotlight on just how much more complex Google results are these days.
When Bing launched, we saw Google start doing various things that looked more like what Bing was doing. That’s why it’s interesting to see today that Bing has implemented some Bing changes that are more reminiscent of Google, or at least a past version of Google.
Here’s what Bing’s results look like now:
Here are Google’s for the same query:
One of the big differentiators of Bing when it was first launched was the left panel of search options, which Google also adopted. Now, the two search engines have essentially reversed in design.
Of course some Google results are even more cluttered. Look at this one for “hotels”:
“Over the past few months, we’ve run dozens of experiments to determine how you read our pages to deliver the link you’re looking for,” says Bing Principal Group Program Manager Sally Salas. “Based on that feedback, we’ve tuned the site to make the entire page easier to scan, removing unnecessary distractions, and making the overall experience more predictable and useful. This refreshed design helps you do more with search—and gives us a canvas for bringing future innovation to you.”
“The new experience is more than skin-deep,” says Salas. “You will also notice faster page-load times and improved relevance under the hood. After all, our goal is to help people spend less time searching and more time doing. And changing how we look is the next big step in doing just that.”
Bing’s new design also highlights its use of Facebook (as opposed to Google’s +1s) in a more restrained and appealing way by showing thumbs up next to results that your Facebook friends have liked:
Bing’s integration with Facebook is nothing new, but it’s likely that Bing will continue to look for ways to make it more useful, and this may appeal to users who have been on Facebook for years, establishing and cultivating relationships, who just aren’t getting the same kind of engagement on Google+ (if they’re using it at all).
The whole design element is kind of funny, considering that Google has historically taken a simplistic approach to design, which is still evident on its home page. It really illustrates how Google has evolved away from this approach on the results pages though, for better or worse.
Google is packing a lot of features into search results these days, however. Do you think this makes the pages more usable, or too cluttered? Let us know what you think. What do you think about Bing’s changes?
Bing says it is also testing out new ideas for its homepage, including a larger version of its daily image.
