Tag: Bing

MSN iPad App Launched

Microsoft has launched a new MSN app for the iPad. The company says it features the same content as found on its redesigned MSN UK site (unveiled in November).

It’s split up into six main channels: News, Sports, Entertainment, Lifestyle, Cars and Video. As far as search, it comes with Bing obviously. Given the popularity of the iPad and iPad apps, this could be a new opportunity for Bing to grab a bit more market share.

“Just like its desktop counterpart, the MSN iPad app uses Bing to search the web,” says Microsoft’s Leena Shah. “The Bing search box can be found at the top of your screen. To perform a search just tap into the Bing search box located at the top of the app. Don’t worry about having to exit the app, Bing will perform a web search without leaving the app – just hit ‘search’ on the keyboard to begin. When you’re done, tap the blue ‘Done’ button to close the search window.”

As others have pointed out, the design of the app bears a striking resemblance to the popular Pulse news reader app.

The app is currently available to download (for free) from Apple’s iPad App Store and iTunes.

January 24, 2012
Bing To Users: We’re More Than Just A Pretty Picture

Been to Bing lately? If so, you may have seen a little tour of Bing’s homepage.

A bar appears at the top, which says “Bing is more than just a pretty picture. See why.” You’re then presented with buttons for “Show me” and “No thanks”.

If you click the former, you’re walked through the following path:

January 23, 2012
Bing Is For #Doing A New Ad Campaign

Earlier today, Microsoft took to Bing’s Twitter account to announce the next ad campaign for their search engine:

@bing
BingBing is for #doing. Catch @KevinPearce’s amazing story here & see why he embodies the true spirit of #doing: http://t.co/YI2kGCua ^dr 8 hours ago via Sprinklr · powered by @socialditto

As described in a blog post earlier today, Microsoft has enlisted several winter sports athletes doing amazing things in order to inspire you to use Bing. The ads will start showing up in your world this weekend when Bing presents the story of Kevin Pearce, an American snowboarder who suffered a traumatic brain injury in a snowboarding accident yet overcame the accident and eventually resumed snowboarding.

The spot will premiere this Sunday during NFC’s Championship game (that’s a professional football thing) and will appear on the air during the X Games coverage on ESPN. You can preview the video below, courtesy of Bing’s blog:

The Bing Team goes on to explain how why Bing is the search engine of choice for walkers, not talkers. “Bing has traditionally highlighted the decisions people make and now, with this new campaign, Bing will illustrate how decisions enable people to go beyond searching to doing.” And then:

Because Bing is for people who do; for people like you who are always doing more and don’t have time to sit still. So whether you’re on your PC or on your phone, Bing has features designed not just to connect you to the information you are looking for, but also to help you get things done right on Bing.com. From making dinner reservations to sharing a link with one of your Facebook friends, it can all happen within Bing. With Bing, you simply get results you can trust that will get you quickly from searching to doing. Bing is for doing.

In an unrelated aside, will people please start saying “_____ is for doing” instead of that brain-dead adage, “Git-R-Done”? Please?

January 20, 2012
Microsoft One-Ups Google With Launch Of Bing Maps Version 1

Last year, Microsoft announced that they were getting serious about their map business and launched a Beta release of Bing Maps Windows Presentation Foundation Control. Nearly four months later, and after some “stellar” feedback, Microsoft has officially released Bing Maps WPF Control, Version 1.

The control was built on top of the beta version, meaning that all of the features of Bing Maps will remain, such as various map styles to toggle through, pan and zoom keyboard controls, and Microsoft Surface (the touch-enabled facet with support for Surface v 2’s Pixel Sense technology). Honestly, I will admit, I do really prefer the look of the terrain on Bing Maps than Google Maps. Bing’s version reminds me more of the classic map I’d expect to see clutched in the hands of Indiana Jones as he escapes from a burning library.

Bing’s Plate:

Google’s Plate:

Just look at the difference. I feel like Microsoft just ate Google’s lunch money with this Bing Maps launch. Google might be more focused on, and therefore still better at, maps that are fun (and fun again), but if you have any appreciation for aesthetic quality then Bing Maps is the one posted up in the pro zone (i.e., winning).

Today’s blog post from Chris Pendleton, the Lead Program Manager for Bing Maps, continues:

Per community feedback on the Bing Maps MSDN Forums we added the following features (and fixed a few bugs):

Support for tile layers – you can now overlay your own tile layers atop the map control.

Turning off the base tile layer – this is useful for when you don’t need/want to use our base map tiles and instead would prefer to use your own without overlaying them atop of ours. The control won’t request the tiles which reduces downloads and improves rendering performance.

SSL Support – since many of you are using the WPF control in secure applications, you can now make tile and service request over SSL without issue.

Hiding the scale bar – if you don’t want a scale bar (perhaps your map is small and the scale bar clutters the map) you can turn it off. In fact, the only elements you can’t turn off are the Bing logo and the copyrights.

New copyright service – provides accurate copyright for our data vendors.

Additional inertia – inertia is now enabled for the mouse and is on by default for touch.

Miscellaneous bug fixes – thanks for the feedback on the MSDN Forums, the Bing Maps Blog, e-mail and Twitter. Good finds people.

Pendleton seems aware of the fact that he’s got a winner on hand, too:

I have to give it up for my (small) crack team of people involved in the making of the WPF Control. This was one of those 10% projects that we all really had a passion to get done because it was the right thing to do for the Microsoft Developer Community. So, we found the time, slipped the release a month (for quality) and, as the guys over in Surface said, “just got it done.” Our internal motto kept stoking the fire to push this bad boy out the door…”WPF, FTW!”

Looks like passion and dedication came up roses for Pendleton and Microsoft this time. Nicely done.

January 12, 2012
Microsoft’s Bing Now #2 Most-Used Search Engine

According to an early report from Search Engine Land via comScore, the latest data about search engine shares are coming out and, ‘lo and behold, there’s a new number two in town as Microsoft’s Bing was used more than Yahoo for the first time ever.

Covering market shares of search engine use for December 2011, Bing crept into its second-place ranking with 15.1% of all search queries, which was a small increase from November 2011 when it had 15.0% but enough to push Yahoo down in the rankings. Yahoo, which claimed 15.1% of search queries in November 2011, slipped in market shares as it only had 14.5% for December. Again, that doesn’t really look like a lot but in a competition to determine who gets to sit next to Google, every little bit goes a long way.

And speaking of Google, it continues to enjoy its status of King of the Search Engine Mountain as it had 65.9% shares of all search queries in December. This was a bit of an increase from the previous month when it had 65.4%, but the holidays will do that for a search engine.

Apparently, though, Yahoo didn’t benefit from any holiday-driven traffic. When records for online shopping were being set last month it’s not a far leap of faith to assume that more people are spending more time on the Internet and yet… they weren’t doing that Internet thing they do with Yahoo.

January 11, 2012
Bing Maps Getting Deep Into Route Planning

Bing has implemented a whole new routing engine on Bing Maps with a new route calculation algorithm.

The new algorithm changes how driving directions queries are computed.

Algorithms behind routes on search engines’ maps probably aren’t something that most of us give a whole lot of that, but Bing clearly wants us to know how proud they are of this, having devoted not only a blog post about it, but an entire research paper.

“It started when I took over as PM of backend services for Bing Maps,” says Chris Pendleton. “The Microsoft Research team presented this crazy new idea to replace our modified Dijkstra’s algorithm with the blandly named ‘Customizable Route Planning’ algo. We’ve been using our own modified Dijkstra for years, it’s done a great job and it’s flexible – so, why would we change that? Once we saw the calculation numbers it was a no brainer to begin implementation immediately. For any of our route calculations we’re now processing requests twice as fast as we ever have. Oh, snaps! Now, if only CRP could double the speed limit. Future enhancement!”

The “special sauce” of the routing engine, Pendleton says, is a feature in the API for altenate routes. Applications can request up to 3 separate routes in one request, which can be displayed on the map. Here’s what Pendleton has to say about the basic algorithm:

Our metric-independent preprocessing stage partitions the graph into connected cells with at most U (an input parameter) vertices each, with as few boundary arcs (arcs with endpoints in di erent cells) as possible. The metric customization stage builds a graph H containing all boundary vertices (those with at least one neighbor in another cell) and boundary arcs of G. It also contains a clique for each cell C: for every pair (v;w) of boundary vertices in C, we create an arc (v;w) whose cost is the same as the shortest path (restricted to C) between v and w (or in nite if w is not reachable from v). We do so by running Dijkstra from each boundary vertex. Note that H is an overlay [24]: the distance between any two vertices in H is the same as in G. Finally, to perform a query between s and t, we run a bidirectional version of Dijkstra’s algorithm on the graph consisting of the union of H, Cs, and Ct. (Here Cv denotes the subgraph of G induced by the vertices in the cell containing v.) As already mentioned, this is the basic strategy of separator-based methods. In particular, HiTi [19] uses edge-based separators and cliques to represent each cell. Unfortunately, HiTi has not been tested on large road networks; experiments were limited to small grids, and the original proof of concept does not appear to have been optimized using modern algorithm engineering techniques. Our rst improvement over HiTi and similar algorithms is to use PUNCH [5] to partition the graph. Recently developed to deal with road networks, it routinely nds solutions with half as many boundary edges (or fewer), compared to the general-purpose partitioners (such as METIS [20]) commonly used by previous algorithms. Better partitions reduce customization time and space, leading to faster queries. For our experiments, we used relatively long runs of PUNCH, taking about an hour. Our results would not change much if we used the basic version of PUNCH, which is only about 5% worse but runs in mere minutes. We use parallelism: queries run forward and reverse searches on two CPU cores, and customization uses all four (each cell is processed independently).

The research paper can be found here, in PDF form.

January 5, 2012
Rick Santorum’s Google Problem Is Not Simply A Google Problem

Former Pennsylvania Senator and current Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has become a hot topic of conversation in the last week or so. The long-time bottom dweller in the Republican Primary field has surged in the past few days, thanks to some hard campaigning in Iowa.

And it appears that his work payed off. In Tuesday’s Iowa Caucus, Santorum finished in second place, a mere 8 votes shy of off-and-on frontrunner Mitt Romney.

Santorum’s catapult onto politics’ main stage is sure to make plenty of Americans curious, and when people are curious about something these days, the next logical step is an internet search. But as many of you probably already know, Santorum has a bit of a problem when it comes to search results.

First, a little background for those unfamiliar with this issue:

Years ago, Santorum drew the ire of popular blogger Dan Savage by making some unsavory comments regarding the gay community. During an interview where he stated the position that consenting adults have no expectation of privacy, Santorum equated homosexuality to bigamy and incest. He also made some comments relating homosexuality to bestiality, although he has maintained that the were taken out of context.

Either way, Savage and some other activists were less than pleased. They launched a campaign to redefine the definition of the word “Santorum.” Through SEO tactics and link-trading, they were able to push a website called spreadingsantorum.com to the very top of the Google search results for “Rick Santorum.”

For years, whenever you search “Santorum” in Google, the first thing you see is…

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If you search Google for “Rick Santorum,” that result is still the third result.

Back in September, Santorum reportedly contacted Google about his little problem. He accused the company of purveying filth and referred to them as irresponsible. Google hit back by basically saying sorry, buddy: “Google does not remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content and violations of our webmaster guidelines.”

As Santorum seems to be surging in the polls, his Google problem is only growing. And his Google problem is actually a bigger problem because it’s not just a Google problem.

Problem?

Although Google still rules the search engine world, they aren’t the only ones who see a large volume of queries on any particular day. Millions of people use Bing, Yahoo, AOL and others. And Rick Santorum has some interesting search results in those engines as well. Check it out (logged out searches) –

A Bing search for “Santorum” puts the unsavory definition at the very top, just under the news box:

(image)

And a Bing search for “Rick Santorum” gives us the result farther down, but still well on the first page:

(image)

On Yahoo!, we find the same thing. Number one for a search of “Santorum”:

(image)

And “Rick Santorum” gives us a front page result, a little on down:

(image)

Over on AOL, more of the same:

(image)

I mean come on, the guy even has a Baidu problem:

(image)

His recent success in Iowa suggests that his search result issues failed to nuke the campaign. But if Rick Santorum maintains steam into the primary vote, and then (improbably) a national election, you would think it at least has the chance of doing some damage.

I mean, just imagine your grandmother Googling Santorum right now.

January 4, 2012
Did Bing Win The 2011 Rivalry With Google Despite Market Share?

According to recent numbers from comScore, Google sites controlled 65.4% of core search share in November in the U.S. Yahoo sites controlled 15.1%, and Microsoft sites controlled 15%. With Bing powering Yahoo search on the back-end, let’s call that about 30% for Bing. Less than half of Google’s share. That’s pretty close to how it was at the beginning of 2011.

Can Bing ever compete with Google in search market share? Tell us what you think.

ComputerWorld has an interesting article citing a couple of analysts who think Bing won the search rivalry in 2011, though acknowledging that the market share hasn’t changed much over the year.

Microsoft’s winning of the rivalry, is said to be in terms of overall growth and strategic moves. The strategic moves highlighted in the piece are mainly deals with Facebook and Twitter, which Google does not have. Google used to have a deal with Twitter but that went away earlier this year.

Google’s lack of the Twitter firehose, has resulted in its lack of realtime search, and while the company has indicated the feature would come back, more supported by Google+ (and other sources), it still seems pretty clear that Twitter is a much better indicator of what’s going on in real time than Google+ (though recent numbers suggest some pretty impressive growth for Google+).

My gut tells me that most people missing this feature from Google are more likely to turn to Twitter itself than to Bing, but I could be wrong.

Both Google and Microsoft appear to agree that social is an increasingly significant factor for ranking content. This is one main factor of Google+, let’s not forget. Google introduced the +1 button to influence search even before launching the larger Google+ product.

For all of the success Google+ has had in its early stages, it’s no Twitter in terms of readily available real-time, public updates, and it’s no Facebook in terms of size and breadth of users. Google would love for it to be both, and who knows? Maybe one day it can be, but that day is looking to be a while away at this point.

Of course Facebook, Twitter, Google+ (and others) all have the potential to show search engines how good other web content is.

“Today it’s much easier to see the accumulated results of ‘likes’ and ‘tweets’ as they pile up the numbers, indicating a kind of popularity,” says Bing’s Duane Forrester in a recent blog post discussing the importance of social to search. “Even those new to a topic can see that an article with 100,000 likes must have something going for it.”

“And while the obvious, visual signals of this popularity may come and go in the SERP results, the effect of those gains in exposure certainly can influence how an item ranks,” says Forrester. “Given no other signals for a new piece of content, a strong social signal can help your item get noticed and possibly take an early lead in rankings, allowing other signals to accumulate and either support or refute the assigned rankings. That’s right, just like a big hit of social exposure can help you rank, a lackluster result can leave us wondering if you should be ranking.”

“This doesn’t mean you need to panic if every tweet or post doesn’t suddenly go viral,” he notes. “There’s also the long term effect of interacting with your followers, the links they spread on your behalf, the consistency you show and so on. And let’s not forget that there are still a ton of other factors to weight in before you’re ranked, so don’t sweat the slow starters.”

But back to the rivaly between Google and Bing. Google just secured a major (and expensive) deal with Mozilla to remain the default search on Firefox. If Microsoft had made the deal instead of Google, it could have been a huge boost for Bing’s market share, and a big score in that rivalry, but Google was willing to plunk down, reportedly, close to a billion dollars to stay on Firefox, while also basically keeping a competitor in the browser market alive. Google’s own Chrome, by the way, is doing pretty well in that department.

Google still has to deal with regulatory scrutiny over competitive practices in search – scrutiny that Microsoft is heavily pushing for. What comes of this remains to be seen in its entirety, and the results could impact search market share in the end. Maybe.

Microsoft has its massively popular Xbox brand to help it in its Bing efforts, and I would expect the company to continue to leverage that brand power to help Bing more as time goes on. Xbox recently got a new application platform, which could be huge for all of that, while fueling the Xbox brand itself among the more casual gamers and non-gamer audiences. More potential Bing users.

Bing is also pretty heavy into marketing Bing, though interestingly Google has gotten much more into marketing its products lately as well (particularly on TV).

It’s going to be interesting to see if the market shifts in one way or another over the course of 2012. Will it or will it just be the same percentages this time next year?

Do you think Bing can grow its market share significantly in 2012? Do you use Bing? If so, what has been the main factor influencing your choice? Let us know in the comments.

December 27, 2011
According To Bing, 46% Of Men Plan To Dress Like George Clooney For New Year’s

Bing recently put out its list of top searches for 2011. Now, they’re sharing results from a survey about what people thought about 2011, as well as the year ahead.

This is a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults. See if you can spot the silly results.

– 65 percent of 18-24 year olds were positive about 2011 and are hoping for much of the same in the New Year.

– 76 percent of 45-54 year olds said that it was a hard year and they’re hoping 2012 will be better.

– Losing weight is the top New Year’s resolution for 35% of men

– Same for 47% of women

– 32% of respondents don’t plan to make a New Year’s resolution at all

– 44% plan to spend New Year’s Eve at the beach, in the mountains, or somewhere away from the crowds.

– 34% indicated that tablets are the number one piece of technology they would like to buy in 2012

– 24% said a 3-D TV.

– 35% said they’d like to spend New Year’s Eve with Sandra Bullock when asked about which celebrity they’d likd to do so with.

– 14% said Katy Perry

– 12% said Prince Harry

– 46% of men will be guiding their New Year’s Eve fashion choices baed on “George Clooney’s classic style.”

– 33% of women will be basing theirs on Pippa Middleton.

– 26% plan to mirror their New Year’s resolution diets after Jennifer Lopez.

I’m just going to stop there.

Something tells me that this survey is not incredibly indicative of society as a whole, as much as I’d like to believe that nearly half of all men plan to dress like George Clooney on New Year’s Eve.

Image Credit: http://cooltattoopictures.co.uk/ (Man dressed as George Clooney’s character from From Dusk Til Dawn)

December 20, 2011
Bing Catching Up To Yahoo

Bing may already be powering Yahoo search, but it is still behind in terms of where people are actually searching from. That may soon change, however (at least in the U.S.).

comScore has released its monthly U.S. Search Engine Rankings report, and it shows Microsoft sites gaining on Yahoo sites. In terms of explicit core searches, Microsoft is right on Yahoo’s tail.

In terms of total core search queries, it’s not quite as close, but again, the gap is narrowing.

It goes without saying that Google is still the frontrunner in both categories by a pretty wide margin.

December 16, 2011
Bing Algorithm May Have Cost Businesses and Students

If you were running promotions for Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you’d probably want to be found in search engines as people scrambled for holiday deals. You might even be offended if you weren’t ranking reasonably well when not only do you own the domain CyberMonday.com, but you are the one credited for coming up with Cyber Monday in the first place.

Well, that’s what happened to Shop.org (which is a division of the National Retail Federation), which is credited with coming up with Cyber Monday, and does own CyberMonday.com. Bing banned CyberMonday.com from its search results just at the time of the year when the site would be most useful to consumers. It’s back now, but who’s looking for Cyber Monday deals at this point?

Did Bing make a mistake? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Danny Sullivan first reported on the ordeal at the end of November, when Bing told him:

Consistent with our guidance to site owners, websites that seem to rely mostly on affiliate content or that offer only thin content often don’t deliver the value searchers are looking for and may be demoted or removed from our index. This is something we continually refine and look at closely throughout the year.

…

It’s nothing new, and follows guidance we’ve given on our webmaster site. We don’t have any specifics to share.

Thin content. As Sullivan pointed out, it sounds like Bing’s version of Panda, but at the same time, they said it was nothing new.

Now, a couple weeks later, Sullivan is sharing another statement from Bing saying:

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are notorious times for spammers, and during this time Bing’s spam classification algorithm picked up this spam pattern and heightened its criteria.

Bing took proactive action to protect our users by removing questionable domains.

In an effort to protect our users some questionable domains may have been demoted or removed that some may consider legitimate sites.

We have since revised our algorithm which has led to some previously blocked sites returning to the index.

The site was never demoted by Google, which has been on a well-documented campaign by the name of Panda to get rid of “thin content” from its top search results. When I search “cyber monday” in Google, cybermonday.com is second in the organic listings only to the Wikipedia page for Cyber Monday.

I guess the real question is: is cybermonday.com an ideal search result for the query Cyber Monday?

It seems to be good enough for both Google and Bing now. The site basically exists solely to provide users with Cyber Monday deals, and when consumers are searching for “cyber monday,” there’s a good chance that’s exactly what they’re looking for. And who better to point to these deals than the entity that created Cyber Monday in the first place?

You might say that this result would be at its most relevant right around the time when it was banned by Bing. People searching for “cyber monday” in June might be looking more for information about the day (like numbers or advice on preparation for example), but it they’re searching for it just ahead of Cyber Monday or on Cyber Monday itself, the probability that they’re looking for deals goes up.

This would have probably caused a much greater stink if this happened with Google rather than Bing, especially considering all of the antitrust talk and scrutiny that surrounds Google these days. In fact, Sullivan noted in his article that some have even accused Bing of demoting sites in favor of driving traffic to its own Bing Shopping results. But Bing doesn’t have nearly the search market share that Google does, so the impact probably wasn’t as great as it could have been otherwise.

But that’s not to say there was no impact. Bing’s market share has grown steadily since its launch, and it also powers Yahoo’s results.

This year, Cyber Monday was the biggest online spending day in history in the U.S. There were a lot of businesses competing for that money. It makes you wonder how this might have affected sales for the businesses featuring deals on CyberMonday.com. These are all third-party businesses mind you. It’s not like it’s just Shop.org getting affected here.

On top of that, a portion of the proceeds from the purchases made from the CyberMonday.com site go to support a scholarship fund for students pursuing careers in the e-commerce industry.

This algorithm adjustment may have actually affected student financial aid.

To review what Bing had to day about it: “In an effort to protect our users some questionable domains may have been demoted or removed that some may consider legitimate sites.”

Yes. Some may consider CyberMonday.com from Shop.org from the National Retail Federation a legitimate site.

Apparently Bing does too, since it’s back in the search results, with about a year to go before it’s at its most relevant.

Did Bing mess up here? Tell us what you think in the comments.

December 13, 2011
Bing Rewards: New Offerings, Revamped Redemption Center

Bing announced the launch of a new Bing Rewrds redemption center, as well as some new rewards and lower prices on some items.

Along with this, all rewards are now delivered by email in less than 24 hours. They have also made the checkout process easier by eliminating half of the steps between signing in and checking out.

“Based on member requests, we’ve also added three great new brands—Redbox, Groupon and Tango Card—and we’re adding Boys and Girls Clubs of America as a charity you can donate your credits to,” says Bing Product Marketing Manager Alex Danskin. “We’re still offering our most popular rewards and 100 Microsoft Points for Xbox 360 and $5 Amazon Gift Cards* are both being cut in price.”

The current list of rewards is as follows:

100 Microsoft Points for Xbox 360
Xbox Live 1 month gold membership
$2.50 and $5 Amazon gift cards
Hulu Plus 1 month subscriptions
Redbox free one-day DVD rentals
$5 Groupon gift cards
$5 Tango cards
$5 Chegg Textbook rental gift codes
$5 Cramster coupon codes
Bing Rewards monthly sweepstakes
$5 DonorsChoose.org gift cards
$1 to Kids in Need
$1 to Teach for America
$1 to Boys and Girls Clubs of America

“The addition of the Tango Card to our redemption center gives our members extra flexibility,” says Danskin. “Recipients can select from top brands like iTunes, Target, Home Depot, Starbucks and Nike, just to name a few. They can also donate any portion of their card to charities, or redeem any unused balance for cash. Plus, Tango Card offers free apps to manage gift cards from a mobile device. So users can check gift card balances in one place and use gift cards from their mobile devices in-store or online.”

The Tango Card app can be downloaded here.

December 6, 2011
Bing Voice Search Comes to Xbox This Week

Microsoft announced that beginning December 6, and in the months ahead, it will be rolling out Bing Voice Search on Xbox. This will enable users to find content across Netflix, Hulu Plus, Comcast Xfinity on Demand ,HBO Go, Zune, and other programs on Xbox Live.

Actually, this is just one of many new features coming to Xbox. The company made a huge “future of TV” announcement for the Xbox 360. This includes a group of new apps aimed at boosting the entertainment potential of the console. It includes a lot of television and video related content. More on that here.

“Bing on Xbox opens up living room entertainment the same way search engines opened up the web,” says Bing GM Mike Nichols. “When you think about the state of entertainment, there isn’t a lack of selection, the challenge is finding what you want in a timely manner. Now when you say “Xbox, Bing, Star Trek,” Bing will show you all the available options for the movies, music, games, on-demand TV and apps that match that title.”

“Our goal with features like Bing on Xbox is to make Bing available in convenient and intuitive ways that take advantage of the capabilities of your device,” adds Nichols. “You can see this today with features like: voice search on Bing for Mobile, implicit search such as Local Scout on Windows Phone, the ability to search using your phone’s camera with Bing Vision, and touch/contextual search through the Lasso feature on the Bing for iPad. With Bing on Xbox, we are introducing a more natural way to search on the TV. And as a result, you can spend more time enjoying your entertainment, and far less time hunting for it.”

I was just saying the other day how it was surprising that Microsoft doesn’t utilize its Xbox platform more to Bing’s advantage. Frankly, they could still go further if you ask me.

Reports have Google’s deal with Mozilla dead, with a huge window of opportunity for Bing to slip in and boost its search market share there. It remains to be seen if that will happen, but with a Mozilla deal and more of a web focus on Xbox, Bing could potentially make some pretty substantial inroads in its competition with Google.

Bing for Xbox voice search will be available in English in the U.S., Canda and the U.K. for Zune video, Xbox Live Marketplace and select content partners at first. For those who don’t have Kinect, text search will be available in Xbox Live markets.

December 5, 2011

Xbox 360 App Release Dates

It’s no surprise, but Microsoft is working hard to make Xbox the go-to device for living room entertainment. The company has a pretty good head start in this department (no question), when compared to a rival like Google or Apple.

The Xbox 360 is enormously popular, already, and consistently performs very well for the company, come earnings report day. Now, they’re set to launch a slew of TV/video entertainment-related apps that should go a long way in solidifying Xbox as the premier way to connect to online video content for many users.

And they’re doing it with Kinect and voice search as a nice bonus.

“A new era in entertainment begins where all your entertainment is together in one place — your games, movies, TV shows, music and sports,” said Don Mattrick, president of the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft. “With this update, Xbox 360 system owners will experience Kinect voice control integrated with Bing search, making your TV and entertainment experiences more social and personal than ever.”

The company put out this infographic with its announcement:

xbox entertainment

Here’s the schedule of the apps that will be rolling out:

Dec. 6:

•	EPIX. United States
•	ESPN on Xbox LIVE (ESPN). United States
•	Hulu. Japan
•	Hulu Plus. United States
•	LOVEFiLM. United Kingdom
•	Netflix. Canada, United States
•	Premium Play by (MediaSet). Italy
•	Sky Go (SkyDE). Germany
•	Telefónica España – Movistar Imagenio. Spain
•	TODAY (MSNBC). United States

Later in December:

•	4 on Demand (C4). United Kingdom
•	ABC iView (Australian Broadcasting Corp.). Australia
•	AlloCiné. France (AlloCiné), Germany (Filmstarts), Spain (Sensacine), United Kingdom (Screenrush)
•	Astral Media’s Disney XD (Astral Media). Canada
•	blinkbox (Blinkbox). United Kingdom
•	Crackle (Sony Pictures). Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, United States
•	Dailymotion. Available in 32 countries globally
•	Demand 5 (Five). United Kingdom
•	DIGI+ (CANAL+). Spain
•	GolTV (Mediapro). Spain
•	iHeartRadio (Clear Channel). United States
•	Mediathek/ZDF (ZDF). Germany
•	MSN. Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, United Kingdom
•	MSNBC.com. United States
•	MUZU.TV. Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom
•	ninemsn. Australia
•	Real Sports (Maple Leaf Sports). Canada
•	Rogers On Demand Online (Rogers Media). Canada
•	SBS ON DEMAND.Australia
•	Sky Go (SkyDE). Austria
•	TMZ (Warner Bros.). Canada, United States
•	TVE (RTVE.es). Spain
•	UFC on Xbox LIVE (UFC). Canada, United States
•	Verizon FiOS TV. United States
•	VEVO. Canada, Ireland, United Kingdom, United States
•	Vudu (Wal-Mart). United States
•	YouTube. Available in 24 countries globally

Early 2012:

•	Antena 3 (Antena 3 de Televisión). Spain
•	BBC (BBC). United Kingdom
•	CinemaNow (Best Buy). United States
•	HBO GO (HBO). United States
•	MLB.TV (MLB Advanced Media). Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, United Kingdom, United States
•	Telenovelas/Sports (Televisa). Brazil, Chile, Colombia, France, Italy, Mexico, Spain, United Kingdom
•	Xfinity On Demand (Comcast). United States

With Xbox obviously being much more than a gaming console now, this can’t hurt holiday sales either.

December 5, 2011

Report Suggests Mozilla and Google Are Done

Back in October, Mozilla introduced Firefox with Bing. This may have been a sign of things to come.

Ed Bott at ZDnet has put out an interesting report indicating that Mozilla’s deal with Google ended in November, and questions Mozilla’s future without the money it gets from that, and the increasing popularity of Google’s competing browser. He writes:

A search partnership with Google has historically been Mozilla’s greatest source of income. In its most recent financial statement, prepared in August and published recently online (see this PDF copy), the Mozilla Foundation won’t even mention Google’s name…

He points to this passage from that document:

The Corporation has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties which expires November 2011. Approximately 84% and 86% of royalty revenue for 2010 and 2009, respectively, was derived from this contract.

You know who would probably love to snag a nice chunk of search market share by being the default search option on a popular browser? Microsoft is certainly not shy about pumping money into its search business, and the fact that there is already a Firefox with Bing shows that they’re not shy about teaming up with a competitor. It could be a small price to pay. There’s a lot more money in search.

Earlier this week, we looked at a report from Statcounter indicating that Chrome has overtaken Firefox for the first time in terms of users. Microsoft is surely not blind to that upward Chrome trend either (or the downward IE trend). And now Google is even advertising Chrome on TV (not to mention pushing an operating system based on it).

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share

So far, there’s nothing out to my knowledge indicating that Microsoft is pursuing replacement of Google’s contract with Mozilla, but we’re certainly not the only ones considering this to be a distinct possibility.

MG Siegler writes, “But because Firefox has a huge user base, this is something that Microsoft would have to consider. Such a deal could potentially finally turn Bing from a multi-billion dollar suck hole into an actual business.”

Ouch.

A deal with Mozilla would help for sure. I still think they could be doing more to leverage their uber-popular Xbox to further Bing’s cause.

The Mozilla situation will be one to keep an eye on for sure. Will it be able to compete with those who have their own mobile operating systems?

December 3, 2011
Galaxy Nexus Speed Tests, Bing & Sharks

Today’s video round-up includes some Galaxy Nexus speed tests, Bing decisions that shaped 2011 (via Google’s YouTube), and an instant hit Lady Gaga video. And some great shark footage.

View more video round-ups here.

Verizon Wireless Galaxy Nexus Prime 4G LTE speed tests:

Bing’s decisions that shaped 2011:

Facebook “calls b.s.” on Google data center lockdown:

Lady Gaga’s Marry the Night – the top trending video on YouTube right now:

Great shark footage:

Assange on iPhone, Blackberry and Gmail users:

Wow, look at Tom Cruise dance and sing. It’s not good.

A fun look at Kinectimals:

School Portrait:

The problem with QR Codes:

December 2, 2011
Bing’s New Holiday Marketing Campaign, Now With More Rudolph

Recently Bing announced a new holiday marketing campaign for its Bing search engine.

The new campaign finds Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and his friends, taking center stage in four separate advertisements for Bing. Each advertisement was done in the same stop-motion puppet animation that was used in the original 1964 TV special, so it will have a nostalgic feel for most.

Check out the advertisements below. Each video is accompanied with the official video description:

“Bumble”, the more beloved name for the Abominable Snow Monster, features the lovable Bumble, who has lost his scary roar. He uses Bing to search for “scary monster” and once inspired by a few Bing Videos, perfects his roar to be appropriately scary again.

Santa and Mrs. Claus get a little crazy in the workshop with bubble wrap, search on Bing Video for bubble wrap how-to’s, and hilarious antics ensue.

Hermey, Yukon and Bumble are tired of the winter weather and are in dire need of a vacation. Bing Travel saves the day via a “fabulous island resort” search, highlighting Hermey’s friends who have “liked” specific resorts, leading to Bing Travel and the perfect destination.

Yukon Cornelius becomes exhausted from pulling Hermey and Rudolph on his sled and collapses in the snow. Luckily, Bing helps him find the closest hot yoga studio using Bing Local.

The holiday season is an opportune time for search engines, as this is when people do more searches – to find gifts, sales ads, party supplies, airfare, and literally anything else. With more people online, this means more ads that can be targeted and displayed by the search engine.

What did you think of the Bing holiday centric advertisements? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.

November 29, 2011
Top Searches of 2011 (According to Bing)

Bing has revealed its top searched terms for 2011, and believe it or not, Justin Bieber takes top prize. Then, in the number two position, it’s Kim Kardashian of course. You know, the stuff people need information about.

Bing is the “decision engine,” and clearly people had a lot of decisions to make about Bieber and Kardashian.

“From rising stars and weddings to intense trials and natural disasters, Bing has captured history through the searches that mark the year’s most important people, places and moments in time,” a spokesperson for Bing tells WebProNews.

So here’s that list of most searched people:

1. Justin Bieber
2. Kim Kardashian
3. Jennifer Aniston
4. Lindsay Loahan
5. Jennifer Lopez
6. Britney Spears
7. Katy Perry
8. Megan Fox
9. Lady Gaga
10. Miley Cyrus

The most searched consumer electronics were:

1. Xbox and Kinect
2. Kindle
3. Playstation
4. iPhone 5
5. iPad
6. Wii
7. iPad 2
8. Nook
9. Windows Phone 7
10. Macbook Pro

No Android devices. I wonder if the results were different for Google searches.

The top three news stories were:

1. Casey Anthongy Trial
2. Osama bin Laden Death
3. Hurricane Irene

Top Celebrity Events:

1. Royal Wedding
2. Final “Harry Potter”
3. Kim Kardashian Wedding

Top Finance Quotes:

1. Real estate agents
2. Cheap
3. Coupons

Bing also shared this year-end video:

Bing looks at a few more vertical trends in this blog post.

We’re looking forward to seeing how Google’s year-end list stacks up to Bing’s, given its much larger market share, as it would represent a better picture of what people are truly searching for. I’m guessing Bieber and Kardashian are still pretty high up on the list.

November 28, 2011
Bing And Yahoo Advertisers Get New Tools
Microsoft is talking about some new features it has for adCenter.

“Over the last two weeks, adCenter has released its latest round of pre-holiday features, all delivering on advertisers’ wish lists of improving campaign performance, increasing volume, and simplifying processes to help save time,” a spokesperson tells WebProNews.

Features include a redesigned web user interface, an upgrade to the adCenter Desktop, and the release of several performance reporting tools.

Microsoft outlines each of these.

The interface:

Simplified Campaign Set Up for creating campaigns and ad groups, and a sleek, new single-page view with real-time previews and keyword suggestion, enabling quicker campaign deployment.

Improvements to Navigation & Discovery to help advertisers manage across their entire account by viewing and editing keywords and ads across multiple campaigns and ad-groups at once.

Improvements to Campaign Reporting with new multi-metric trend charts, delivery status notification features and positional bid estimates.

Improvements to Editing with in-line editing, in-line bid editing, and best position estimations in the keywords grid.

The desktop:

New Welcome Screen takes advertisers on an end-to-end tour of the Desktop tool to help them get set up and started quickly.

An expanded Import Campaigns feature to allow advertisers to easily and directly import their Google AdWords campaign data into the Desktop.

Clipboard support to enable basic copy and paste functionality so that advertisers can quickly and easily copy data and move it to, from, and within Desktop.

Bulk bid suggestions to offer more than 1,000 keywords and let advertisers easily apply changes in order to increase traffic.

Simplified Targeting with a default set to the advertisers’ account location, determined by the language listed in their Desktop settings.

Tools:

New, improved Opportunities Tab that includes bid suggestions for exact/broad match and in-line editing. With this new feature advertisers can easily address underperforming bids to target more volume.

New Share of Voice feature that quantifies missed impressions in Account, Campaign, and Ad Group performance reports, and helps prioritize optimizations more effectively.

Improved historical and aggregated Quality Score data to allow advertisers to view aggregated quality score by summary or by time frame, including hour, day, week or month.

An upgrade to Change History reports so advertisers can view targeting changes and gain better insights into campaign performance related to those changes.

For those of you who aren’t advertising with adCenter, remember that these things apply to Bing and Yahoo advertisers.
November 21, 2011
Yahoo Recipe, Shopping & Entertainment Vertical Features Introduced

Yahoo has introduced some new vertical search reatures for recipes, shopping and entertainment searches.

If you search for a food item + recipes, a window will appear on top of the search results page with popular choices from “leading food sites”. You can also filter by ingredients.

The shopping vertical utilizes a similar approach, with the window and the tab.

“The new entertainment results on Yahoo! Search present you with immediate answers about your favorite movies, music artists, celebrities and news stories,” the company says. “To read latest news, watch a popular video, or even see what people are saying in the Twittersphere, find it all in one convenient place within Yahoo Search.”

When asked if Bing’s search index plays a role in the results for these verticals, Caroline Tsay, Senior Director, Search Product Management at Yahoo tells WebProNews, “Bing does not play a role in these new experiences. We use our own technology to find the content – from across the web and from our partners – users are looking for, and assemble them into these new user experiences.”

“We may introduce more vertical search tabs for specialized content, depending on what our users are looking for,” she says. “Any new vertical search tabs will automatically appear based on the user’s search term and the search results content.”

Re-emphasizing Yahoo’s independence as a search engine, despite being powered by Bing, Tsay tells us, “Yahoo has amazing content in almost every major category like sports, finance, local, celebrities, movies, television, music etc. In the past we have used this content for properties like Yahoo! Sports, but never really used it for Search. Now we have started building a parallel index called the content index, which provides every bit of information about entities. We are using this content index to build these amazing experiences. This does not come from Bing – its proprietary to Yahoo!, and our secret sauce for the Search products of tomorrow. No other Search engine can have such an amazing content index.”

November 15, 2011
Bing Editors’ Picks Bring Human Touch to Search Results

Bing launched a new feature called Editors’ Picks, which it describes as a “guide to great sites”. There is a dedicated page for all Editors’ Picks that can be used as a portal, but results from this will also become available when applicable during the regular search experience.

“Editors’ Picks are small collections of relevant sites that our online editorial experts think will be useful to you, but may not always make it to the top of the search results page,” says Kristen Kennedy, Managing Editor of Bing’s Editorial Team.

Essentially, it’s a human-edited directory with a very limited number of listings. At the same time, however, the “Editors’ Picks” results become available via a tab for relevant queries. For example, if you search “tech conferences,” you will get the tab as an option, and then be able to view the listings.

“The job of Bing editors is to enhance your experience on Bing,” she adds. “For example, when we know you’re looking for something really specific — like ‘How to use a semicolon’ or ‘Free clip art’— we’ll provide a list of editorially selected sites on that specific topic (in addition to our algorithmic results) to help you find what you’re looking for faster.”

There are currently 140 topics Bing is featuring editors’ picks for. They are open to suggestions for more topics.

November 14, 2011