WebProNews

Tag: Bing

  • “King of Bing Maps” Soon To Be Determined

    Update: Microsoft announced that the "King of Bing Maps" contest is now closed. They will determine the winner soon.

    Original Article: Bing has announced that it’s searching for "someone to worship." By this, they mean lead the way in Bing Map App development. So naturally, they’ve launched a contest.

    The contest is called the "King of Bing Maps Challenge," and the winner gets a $1,000 Bing Travel gift card. 2nd prize gets a $500 card and 3rd gets a $250 card.

    Winners, selected by a panel of industry experts, will be announced August 20. 

    Bing requires applicants submit their map app by July 25th. The official rules can be found here. Bing’s Chris Pendelton cites the following steps:

    1. King of Bing Maps Contest launchedRead about the King of Bing Maps contest at www.KingOfBingMaps.com.
    2. Download the Bing Map App SDK (Live ID required). If you don’t know anything about it or if you haven’t read my blog post, read my post about the launch of the Bing Map App SDK – “Announcing the Bing Map App SDK…and 3 New Bing Map Apps”.
    3. Start with the template provided in the SDK. The template is our Hello World for Bing Map Apps. Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight 4 SDK required.
    4. Build a sick ass application. I mean disgusting.
    5. Submit your application to the Bing Maps Portal.
    6. Wait for the judges to determine your fate.

    The contest is no doubt designed to generate more interest in the creation of Bing Maps Apps, one feature that sets it apart from other search engine maps.

  • Microsoft Doesn’t Plan to Let Yahoo and Google Do Their Thing in Japan

    Microsoft is pissed that Yahoo Japan is going with Google rather than Bing. In fact, the company is reportedly moving to block the deal from going through.

    Jay Yarow at Silicon Alley Insider provides the following statement from a company rep: "We plan to present evidence to the Japanese FTC explaining why we believe that this deal is substantially more harmful to competition than Google’s deal with Yahoo in 2008 that the DOJ found to be illegal."

    According to Yarow, Microsoft estimates that Google and Yahoo joining forces in Japan would give the companies 98% of the Japanese search market.

    Earlier this week, it was revealed that Yahoo Japan is turning to Google to power search engine listings. Naturally, with the highly publicized deal between Microsoft and Yahoo, this raised more than a few eyebrows, including Microsoft’s.

    The decision was ultimately not Yahoo’s choice, however, as they actually do not control the majority of Yahoo Japan. SoftBankCorp, a Japanese ISP and cell phone provider controls 40% to Yahoo’s 35%.

    eWeek recently shared some words from both Microsoft and Google on the matter. Basically, Microsoft has called it anti-competitive, and Google has said it isn’t. Google maintains that it will only license Yahoo Japan ad technology, rather than supplying ads.

    Meanwhile, Microsoft’s "Search Alliance" with Yahoo is already starting to take effect. Last week, Yahoo announced that it has begun testing organic and paid search listings from Microsoft, with up to 25% of its U.S. search traffic seeing Bing and adCenter results.

    The company said it will be integrating Microsoft’s mobile organic and paid listings in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months, and anticipates that U.S. and Canada organic listings in both the desktop and mobile versions of its search will be fully powered by Microsoft as early as August or September.

  • Report: Google Has Twice the Malware of Bing, Yahoo, and Twitter Put Together

    According to a report released by Barracuda Labs, Google has twice as much malware than Bing, Yahoo, and Twitter put together. The study was conducted across these web properties over a two-month period.

    Barracuda says it reviewed over 25,000 trending topics and nearly 5.5 million search results, analyzing them to identify the types of topics used by malware distributors. The firm will be presenting its findings at DefCON 18 this weekend, but the report is available here (pdf). Barracuda lists the following as highlights from its findings:

    – Overall, Google takes the crown for malware distribution — turning up more than twice the amount of malware as Bing, Twitter and Yahoo! combined when searches on popular trending topics were performed. Google presents at 69 percent; Yahoo! at 18 percent; Bing at 12 percent; and Twitter at one percent.

    – The average amount of time for a trending topic to appear on one of the major search engines after appearing on Twitter varies tremendously: 1.2 days for Google, 4.3 days for Bing, and 4.8 days for Yahoo!

    – Over half of the malware found was between the hours of 4:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. GMT.

    – The top 10 terms used by malware distributors include the name of a NFL player, three actresses, a Playboy Playmate and a college student who faked his way into Harvard.

    – In general, activity is increasing on Twitter: more users are coming online; True Twitter Users are tweeting more often, and even casual users are becoming more active. As users become more active, the malicious activity also increases.

    – Only 28.87 percent of Twitter users are actual True Twitter Users.

    – Half of Twitter users tweet less than once a day, yet one in 10 users tweet five or more times a day and 30 percent of Twitter accounts have never tweeted.

    –  One in every eight Twitter users has at least 10 times more followers than they are following.

    –  Only one in 10 users is following more than 100 users, and almost half are following less than five.

    – The Twitter Crime Rate for the first half of 2010 was 1.67 percent.

    Daily Malware by Source - Barracuda

    "Our study shows that attackers have serious efforts devoted towards getting in front of the billions of eyeballs that are using search engines everyday and the millions of users that are connecting on social networks like Twitter," said Dr. Paul Judge, chief research officer and VP at Barracuda Networks. "Therefore, we continue to analyze their approaches and build new techniques to find them and protect users."

    NetworkWorld points to some market share numbers, which seem to mirror the malware percentages presented by Barracuda.

  • Apple Packs New Version of Safari with Extensions

    Apple released the latest version of its Safari web browser today, version 5.0.1. The release comes with Safari Extensions and the Safari Extensions Gallery.

    While extensions became available in Safari 5 lat month for developers, the gallery makes them available to users. A few organizations that have already created extensions for the browser include: Amazon, Bing, Major League Baseball, the New York Times, and Twitter.

    Amazon Safari Extension"Millions of our customers already use Amazon Wish Lists to store items they want to buy for themselves or receive as gifts," said Gianna Puerini, VP of Worldwide Design and Community at Amazon.com. "With Safari 5, we were able to quickly build the Add to Amazon Wish List extension that lets customers add items from any website to their Amazon Wish List with the click of a button."

    Jeff Henshaw, general manager of Bing’s User Experience says, "The Bing Extension for Safari brings Bing search intelligence to everyday browsing with Safari. When a user selects text in Safari, Bing instantly recognizes what they might need and pops up helpful, informative tips, from real time maps and driving directions to real time translations to direct web search results." 

    "Our extension for Safari is a great way for readers to get all of the latest breaking news and all the important stories, blogs and columns they want to see," says Denise Warren, general manager of NYTimes.com. "While you browse other sites in Safari, our extension checks for updates and slides in new headlines and thumbnails, so you won’t miss a thing."

    "Creating our Twitter extension in Safari couldn’t have been easier," said Jason Goldman, vice president of Product at Twitter. "By providing features like the ability to tweet about a page and view trending topics, we’ve created a simple way to deliver relevant, interesting content to people regardless of where they are on the web."

    You get the idea. Expect a lot of useful extensions. 

    Safari 5 is available for both Mac OS X and Windows as a free download here. The gallery can be viewed here.

  • Bing Introduces Seven New Casual Games

    Bing Introduces Seven New Casual Games

    Bing may have been launched as a "decision engine," but Microsoft’s now trying to make sure it’s a site where people will spend a fair amount of time.  And to that end, Microsoft added seven new games to what it called the "Bing entertainment browser" this afternoon.

    The seven games are of the casual variety.  Think checkers (or FarmVille), not chess (or Starcraft II), in other words, meaning they’ll be accessible to all sorts of individuals.

    Otherwise, one important fact is that the games are free to play.  Also, as you may have gathered from the screenshot below, it’s possible for players to sign in using their Facebook accounts, and then see real-time feeds of how their friends are doing.  Plus show off their own scores.

    That Facebook tie-in represents a clever move on Microsoft’s part, since it adds an extra dimension to these simple games.  The social/competitive nature of many people is what motivates them to play games of any sort, too.

    Anyway, the games are named Belle’s Beauty Boutique, Carniball, 8 Ball Champion, Fishdom Spooky Splash, Gardenscapes, Jigsaw, and Pyramid Solitaire, and Bing’s made sure searches will turn them up as the first result.

    Here’s hoping you find something you like if you devote your next break or lunch hour to sifting through them.

  • Yahoo Goes Google Instead of Bing in Japan

    Yahoo Japan is turning to Google to power its paid and organic search engine listings. This comes as something of a surprise as Yahoo has a huge deal in place with Bing that is just getting started, but Yahoo doesn’t actually own the majority of Yahoo Japan, so that version of Yahoo gets to do its own thing.

    According to Kara Swisher at Boomtown who broke the news, Yahoo only holds a 35% stake in Yahoo Japan, while SoftBankCorp, a Japanese ISP and cell phone provider controls 40%. Yahoo has made the following statement on the matter:

    Yahoo! Japan announced that it has chosen to implement Google as its backend algorithmic search engine and paid search infrastructure. Yahoo! Japan made this decision as an independent and separate publicly traded company, in which Yahoo! holds a 35% equity interest. We amended our agreement with Yahoo! Japan as a result of this decision, and we do not anticipate that this amendment will have a material financial impact on our revenues. We will provide support, as required by our agreement, for the search experience Yahoo! Japan has chosen for its business, and we will continue to partner closely with Yahoo! Japan in other areas including mail, messenger, mobile, our content properties and more.

    This decision by Yahoo! Japan does not impact the global rollout and implementation of the Yahoo! search alliance with Microsoft, except in the Japanese market. We remain confident in our transition plans for the search alliance, are driving innovation in the user experience around search on the Yahoo! network, and continue to be committed to our alliance with Microsoft.

    Last week, Yahoo announced that it has begun testing organic and paid search listings from Microsoft, with up to 25% of its U.S. search traffic seeing Bing and adCenter results.

    Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft’s mobile organic and paid listings in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. The company anticipates that U.S. and Canada organic listings in both the desktop and mobile versions of its search will be fully powered by Microsoft as early as August or September.

  • Google Playing Copy-Cat to Bing

    Google Playing Copy-Cat to Bing

    If you have been paying attention to what Google has been doing as of late to improve its user experience, you might be noticing something strange. It seems that almost every time that Google makes an improvement in its aesthetic appeal, it looks more and more like Bing. Remember the short-lived attempt to customize the Google home page recently which has since been removed?

    Take the latest change to hit the search engine, which is its presentation of image search results. Here is the old look for Google image search results:

    Old Google Image Search.jpg

    Here is the new look:

    New Google Search.jpg

    You also no longer have to click through pages of results as they are now all on one page, although page numbers are assigned to show page breaks.

    Now here’s Bing’s image search. A little more white space in Bing, but essentially the same look and feel:

    bing search.jpg

    In addition, Google is copying Bing’s use of a mouse-over expansion of each image to give some details about the image.

    All in all, I just find it interesting that while Google is the far superior engine in market share AND results, it is playing catch-up with Bing in how it presents itself. It’s not the end of the world, but it does seem like a hat-tip from Google to Microsoft, which is just not natural.

    What’s your take?

    Comments

  • Bing Launches Gallery of All Past Homepage Photos

    In case you’ve ever wanted to browse an archive of Bing’s homepage images, you can now do so. Microsoft has launched the Bing Homepage Visual Search Gallery.

    Whereas with the arrows on the homepage itself, you can view a week’s worth of Bing photos, you can access any of them from this gallery.

    Bing's new photo gallery for home page photos

    "Now you can go back through previous homepage images to see what you’ve missed or revisit old favorites," writes Stephanie Horstmanshof on the Bing Search Blog. "And you can sort by a variety of categories, including all the homepages featuring countries in Europe, or every homepage image from space."

    "Click on the image you like, and you’ll be taken to a details page where you can learn more about the subject in the photo and see related images," she adds. "And click ‘ZOOM IN’ for an even larger view!"

    Bing’s home page photos are one thing that sets it apart from other search engines. In fact, I know some people that go to Bing daily just to look at the photos, even though they do most of their searching with Google. Google recently added its own photo-homepage option, but it wasn’t quite as well received, and that’s more of a personalization thing.

  • Bing To Be Sole Default Windows Phone 7 Search Option

    Consumers shouldn’t expect to be overwhelmed with search options if they decide to buy Windows Phone 7 devices.  A high-ranking Microsoft employee has revealed that there will be only one default search engine: Bing.

    Bing logoMicrosoft, with its 90,000 or so employees, supposedly ran into some technical problems when it came to accommodating search rivals.  Greg Sullivan, a senior product manager at the company, explained to Stuart Miles, "The search engine has been heavily integrated into the OS, so it would be hard to offer an alternative."

    You can either blame or thank the physical search button that Windows Phone 7 devices will sport, along with Tellme voice search integration.

    Google and Yahoo fans – along with antitrust regulators – don’t need to get too worked up over this issue, however.  Miles wrote, "Sullivan . . . said that Microsoft would allow other search engines to create an app, or even, presumably, a hub . . ."

    Google.com, Yahoo.com, and lots of other sites should be pretty easy to access, too, of course.

    It’ll just be interesting to see if the lack of default search engine options bothers the average consumer, or perhaps boosts the popularity of Bing.

  • Bing’s New Webmaster Tools Are Here

    At SMX Advanced last month, Microsoft announced that Bing would redesign its Webmaster Tools this summer. The new version is now available.

    Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager Anthony M. Garcia summarizes the changes:

    The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

    WebProNews also spoke with Bing’s Eric Gilmore about the changes at SMX Advanced:

    Users of Bing Webmaster Tools will find their accounts have been automatically upgraded with the new features. The company says it intends to release many more features in the coming months.

    The new Bing Webmaster Tools comes just as Yahoo has begun testing Microsoft-powered results in its own search results. Bing’s tools stand to become more important to SEO as Microsoft takes over Yahoo, who expects to show all Microsoft-powered results in the U.S. and Canada by August or September.

  • Bing Crafts DonorsChoose Search Incentive

    Microsoft may have found a way to convince many more parents, grandparents, and teachers to use its search engine.  Starting today, individuals who make Bing their default search provider will get the chance to donate $3 of Microsoft’s money to a school-related project of their choice.

    The process, which is possible thanks to a partnership with DonorsChoose.org, isn’t overly simple, but neither is it too complicated.  To start, individuals just have to visit a "Help Bing Give to Schools" page and click on the "Choose Bing and Donate" button.

    Next, it’s necessary to check a box next to the statement "Make this my default search provider," and provide an email address in order to receive a donation code.

    Finally, would-be donors just have to check their email, grab the code, pick a project at DonorsChoose.org, and apply the code.

    This is a clever promotion on Bing’s part.  Lots people must be willing to try a different search engine for the sake of helping children, and due to Facebook and Twitter share buttons (along with word of mouth), many of them could hear about this opportunity.

    Of course, there’s nothing keeping anyone from switching back to Google or Yahoo once everything’s said and done, but Bing seems likely to see at least a small permanent bump in users because of the promotion.

  • Bing Takes Users to Mars

    Microsoft has added Mars imagery to Bing Maps and to its WorldWide Telescope project. The imagery comes straight from NASA itself.

    "Microsoft Research and NASA are providing an entirely new experience to users of the WorldWide Telescope, which will allow visitors to interact with and explore our solar system like never before," says Bing’s Chris Pendleton. "Viewers can now take exclusive interactive tours of the Red Planet, hear directly from NASA scientists, and view and explore the most complete, highest-resolution coverage of Mars available."

    Bing Mars Imagery

    "The beauty of this is that the Bing WorldWide Telescope Map App has been updated with the new imagery, as well," adds Pendleton. "This means users of Bing Maps can immediately enjoy the new imagery of the Red Planet from within their browser via our Silverlight site."

    The Worldwide Telescope Mars experience can be downloaded here. On the Bing Maps Silverlight site, users can simply click the "Map Apps" button, select "WorldWide Telescope", and select "Mars" from the Collections list.

  • Bing Captures Bigger Share Of U.S. Search Market

    Bing had the most search growth for the month of June, growing 7 percent month- over-month to capture 9.85 percent of the U.S. search market, according to the latest figures released by Hitwise.

    Google accounted for 71.65 percent of the search market, but saw a one percent drop in growth month-over-month.  Yahoo’s search growth was flat, accounting for 14.37 percent of the market and Ask captured 2.19 percent of the search market, with 2 percent growth month-over-month.

     

    Hitwise-Search

     Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing May 2010 with June 2010, automotive, business and finance, entertainment, news and media, shopping and social networking categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

    Among the top three search engines, Google delivered the most visits to automotive, health, shopping and travel categories. Yahoo saw gains in the automotive and shopping categories.  Bing saw triple-digit growth in three categories – automotive, shopping and travel – including a 199 percent increase in the Shopping category.

     

    Search-Traffic

     

    Longer search queries – those averaging five to eight words long – increased 1 percent from May 2010 to June 2010. Two-word searches comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 23.42 percent of all queries. Four- to seven-word searches all increased 1 percent. Shorter search queries – one to four words – were flat from May 2010 to June 2010.
     

     

     

  • USA.gov Search Now Powered By Bing

    The U.S. General Services Administration has launched a newly redesigned USA.gov featuring new mobile applications and better search functionality.

    "Revamped with direct input from the public, USA.gov leverages cutting-edge technology to provide faster, easier, more innovative government services directly to the American people," said Dave McClure, GSA Associate Administrator of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies.

    "Through mobile apps, citizens can leverage government information to make decisions affecting their daily lives, whether checking airport wait times in line at the airport or scanning a bar code at their local store to check for food and product recalls."

     

    USAgov

     

    USA.gov’s new search engine, powered by Bing, is nine times faster than the previous website and helps users navigate through government information with "related search-as-you-type" function.

    Initially featuring 17 mobile applications, USA.gov said it plans to expand the number and invites the public to share feedback on app they find useful by using government information available on data.gov and usaspending.gov.

    The USA.gov mobile apps gallery features product recalls, U.S. Postal Service tools, U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s MyTSA, USA.gov Mobile, National Institutes of Health’s mobile MedLine Plus and body mass indicator calculator, Environmental Protection Agency’s ultraviolet index, U.S. Department of Agriculture’s My Food-a-Pedia, National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s alternative fuel station locator and FuelEconomy.gov, Department of State’s America.gov mobile and U.S. embassy locator, EPA Mobile, FBI’s most wanted, Federal Emergency Management Agency mobile, NASA app, and Veterans Affairs mobile.

    USA.gov provides information from and links to more than 10,000 pages of federal, state, and local government information. Information on student loans, child care, small business licensing regulations, visa information, and more are available through the website.
     

     

  • Bing Launches Tour De France Bing Maps App

    Microsoft’s Bing has been doing some really interesting things with Bing Maps, and more specifically Bing Maps Apps. This week, the company launched a new map app for the Tour De France, which starts today and runs through July 25th.

    "The 97th Tour de France will be made up of 1 prologue and 20 stages and will cover a total distance of 3,642 kilometers," says Bing’s Chris Pendleton. "I was looking at Le Tour de France site and they have this PDF route map – a bit antiquated. I’m going to go out on a limb and say you might want to check out the Bing 2010 Tour de France map app  for a better experience."

    Bing Tour de France Maps App

    Key features of the app include:

    – Each stage of the event being displayed on the map with pushpins to indicate the start and finish

    – Interactive profiles displayed along the top of the map, which lets you see elevation and slope changes for the selected stage

    – Stage description and weather prediction

    – Daily results.

    Pendleton says the best experience is in Bird’s Eye View (enhanced). More info about the app can be found here.

  • New “Bingbot” Will Crawl Non-optimized Sites More Easily

    Microsoft has announced that it will be bringing the Bing web crawler out of beta on October 1st. It will be rebranded as "the Bingbot" and replace the existing msnbot. "It will still honor robots.txt directives written for msnbot, so no change is required to robots.txt file(s)," a Bing representative tells WebProNews.

    "Improvements to the bot enable more efficient crawling, and increase the ability to crawl content on sites not optimized for search," he says.
     
    Robot - This is not the real Bingbot, but it will be here in October.Rick DeJarnette has more about the change on the Bing Webmaster Blog:

    Instead of the old msnbot 2.0b showing up in your server logs, the updated user agent will be:

    Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

    The HTTP header From field will also change as shown below:

    From: msnbot(at)microsoft.com

    will become

    From: bingbot(at)microsoft.com

    If Bing finds separate sets of directives for Bingbot and for other crawlers, directives for bingbot will take precedence, the company says.

    I find the part about increasing the ability to crawl content on sites not optimized for search to be particularly interesting. I wouldn’t exactly call this an invitation to ignore SEO. Obviously Google is still the biggest search engine anyway, but even as far as Bing is concerned, good SEO practices will likely still help your rankings.

    Also keep in mind that optimizing for Bing is becoming increasingly important. Not only is Facebook giving more reason for people to search (where Bing provides the web results), but the Yahoo/Bing integration will be here (likely) before the holidays.

  • Bing Changes Could Attract More Users, More SEO Focus

    As we talked about in a recent WPN article, it’s time to start taking your Bing optimization seriously if you haven’t been already. For one, Bing will soon power Yahoo search. For two, Bing deliver’s Facebook’s web search results, while Facebook is giving people more reasons to search with them.

    Bing is making changes of its own. It’s been a very big week for the search engine (or "decision engine") if you will. It’s up to you to decide if any of these changes will have a direct effect on you, but some of them may attract more users in general, and if nothing else, that gives you even more of a reason to give Bing a fair amount of your focus.

    Do you intend to increase the effort you put into Bing optimization? Let us know.

    Bing has made some design changes and added a bunch of new features. For starters, the quick tabs have moved from the left pane to the just below the search box.

    "Secondly, you will see a new design aesthetic applied to Bing," says Bing Corporate VP Brian MacDonald. "We have tried to bring you an experience grounded in clear readable typography that helps you find your way and organize information. With the new design the rich content in Bing really stands out from pages that are clean, light, open and fast. Result pages are not presented in a one-size-fits-all-layout – instead, Bing results pages are richly and visually organized, making the whole search experience feel dynamic and alive."

    What do you think of this new Bing? Is it a step in the right direction? Share your thoughts here.

    Bing's New Design

    Bing has launched some new entertainment features for music, games, TV, and movies. In addition to an entertainment hub at bing.com/entertainment, users can now find richer search results in these categories.

    "76 percent of people use search to help find and navigate their entertainment options online, but only 10 percent say they have a trusted place to go," says Bing Senior VP Yusuf Mehdi. "So we see a great opportunity to help customers make important entertainment decisions — from deciding what movie to buy or see, which TV shows to watch online or on your TV, what music to listen to, how to find and safely play your favorite casual games – Bing is making a first step today to help make entertainment on the web easy and fun, so you spend less time searching for entertainment and more time doing the stuff you love."

    Bing is now putting lyrics to songs on the search results page, as well as full length streaming of over 5 million songs (in partnership with Microsoft’s Zune branch). Users can stream any of these songs once at their full length. After that, the song will allow for a 30-second preview. Of course users are given the option to buy songs from Zune, iTunes, or Amazon.

    Bing's new Music offerings

    Bing is now providing info on over 35,000 games, including reviews, cheats, and walkthroughs. In addition to that, Bing is offering about 100 games that can be played right from Bing.

    "Just Search, Click. Play . So you can now search for your favorite casual game, and with one click, be playing the game," says Mehdi. "This is cool for a couple of reasons. First, it’s easy. Second, hosting the games inline means you can be sure they are actually games and not malware. Finally, the Microsoft Games team included some fun social features that allow you to actually invite friends from your social network to play with you right from the game."

    Bing is now offering thousands of episodes from over 1,500 shows (including some HD). They also provide guide information.

    Bing has also enhanced its search experience around categories like autos, finance, and movies, and health is reportedly getting an overhaul as well.

    Bing has posted a closer look at some more new features including Bing News, Bing Finance, Combined Flight Answers, Auto Suggest, and Visual Search here, and here’s even more specifically on Finance. Here’s a closer look at new Shopping features.

    Bing is also available as a default search option on the new iPhone, and Microsoft has been heavily encouraging users to switch to it. That could be another factor in increased Bing usage. Here are some more reasons the future looks bright for Bing.

    Are Bing’s changes an improvement? Tell us what you think.

  • Bing Highlights Why You’ve Been Using Google News

    Along with many other features Bing has launched this week, it has revamped Bing News, which now includes some new features.

    For one, you can set your local hometown to get headlines from. Google has let you do this for quite some time, but Bing hasn’t, and now it does. Although you can include multiple locations in your Google News mix if you wish.

    Bing News Gets New features

    But that’s not all…

    "You can easily tab through the details on the top stories, see more stories ‘above the fold’ and get the details of local weather," says Bing Senior Product Manager Jacquelyn Krones. "Now it’s the perfect place to start your day: get the headlines, figure out what to wear based on the forecast, and really get into the details on stories that interest you the most."

    "For instance, let’s say that you are very interested in what Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is doing in Silicon Valley," she adds. "We’ve revamped our ‘story page’ for those times when you can’t get enough of a specific news event."

    A story page will show several stories from various sources, sorted by best match. You can also switch it to most recent.  There is also a "latest stories" module that shows a timeline that indicates how many stories related to the topic were published throughout the week.

  • Likes Mean Relevance in Facebook Search

    Likes Mean Relevance in Facebook Search

    Nick O’Neill at All Facebook reports that Facebook has confirmed that "all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them." He also calls this Facebook’s "war on Google."

    While utilizing likes and the open graph as a ranking factor in search should help Facebook improve its internal search, it doesn’t represent much of a threat to Google search. Google indexes the web. Facebook indexes activity from Facebook users. There’s a pretty big difference, regardless of how big Facebook is.

    There is certainly something to be said for Facebook search, however. There’s no question that a lot lof people are using Facebook and spending a lot of time there, so having some kind of search strategy for Facebook is not a bad idea. Naturally, the Open Graph will play a huge role in this, and that means taking advantage of Facebook’s social plugins. As I’ve written about before, Facebook likes (as well as Twitter retweets) are like the new links in some ways.

    Facebook is definitely making a lot of moves to keep users getting the info they want from within Facebook. Fan pages essentially turn Facebook into a news reader. They’re working on a Q&A product. They’re launching content destinations themselves (like this politics page). However, no matter how much information Facebook is able to give users, that amount will always be limited, and will not be able to deliver the web in the way Google can. Of course, that’s why they have Bing results for web search.

    Facebook Search Results

    As far as search market share, it is probably Bing that stands to gain the most out of improved Facebook search. I don’t know how often people are going to go to Facebook for web searches, but the more people do search on Facebook, the more they are going to see those web results from Bing, when the actual (limited) Facebook results don’t deliver what they want. If Bing can deliver what they want in the top three results (the amount that is commonly displayed in Facebook search results), Bing only stands to gain.

    Optimizing for Bing is very connected to optimizing for Facebook and soon optimizing for Yahoo.

  • Mobile Version of Bing Gets New Features

    Microsoft announced that Bing has upgraded the mobile version of its search engine for high-end smartphones. Supported devices include: Windows phones, iPhones, Android, Palm, Kin, and Zune HD devices.

    We’re talking about the site at m.bing.com – not Bing’s mobile apps, just to be clear. New features include:

    • The Home page now features the Bing image of the day 

    • Location detection through the GPS on your phone

    • Local Search with suggested listings nearby and category search

    • Find places nearby, save them to a favorites list, and share that list with friends 

    • Smooth panning and scrolling of interactive maps 

    • More details on local listings, like parking info, price, cuisine, and ratings 

    New Bing Mobile Features

    Bing also reminds users that they can set it as the default search engine on their iPhone 4s. This was announced as Steve Jobs unveiled the device. Keep in mind it’s not the default option, but a default option.

    Bing has had quite a big week. They have launched a redesign and a bunch of new features. They also upgraded the Bing iPhone app with social search results.

  • Bing iPhone App Upgraded with Social Search Results

    Microsoft has released a new update to the Bing app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

    The app now lets users connect their Facebook and Twitter accounts to see combined status updates from their friends. They’ve also integrated search results from your friends using this data.

    "So if you search for a movie, you’ll see movie showtimes first, then anything your friends may have said about it next," says Justin Jed of Bing for mobile. "This is also handy for local businesses or products where you want to see what your network is saying. Last, when you find something you like using the app, you can easily share it with your network on Facebook, Twitter, or through email."

    Bing iphone App gets an upgrade wtih Facebook and Twitter

    The app also now has visual scanning of barcodes and cover art. This means you can use your iPhone’s camera to scan the barcode of a product or the cover art of books, CDS, DVDs, or video games (much like Google Goggles). When you do this, you’ll get descriptions, reviews, prices, links to places to buy, etc.

    There are also some enhancements to the Movies and Shopping sections of the app.