I have confirmed the Bing 411 service is closing by calling the service and hearing immediately the message:

Bing 411: On June 1st, we are discontinuing the Bing 411 service.

There were reports of this via LiveSide where they said they “received a tip” on this news. But this is indeed happening and Bing is closing down their 411 service.

Google shut down their GOOG-411 service back in 2010. Bing kept theirs live hoping to fill that void, but clearly with the rise of smartphones and voice search embedded on those devices, the need to dial an 800 number to do a search has become extinct.

Related Stories:

• GOOG-411 Winds Down, Bing-411 Parties On
• Verizon Enters The ‘Voice Search’ Fray With 1-800-THE-INFO
• Google Voice Local Search Launched
• Microsoft Announces Tellme Acquisition

Jingle’s 800-Free-411 competed with GOOG-411, which was closed down last year, and Microsoft’s Bing-411, which is still operating. However Jingle was the leader in the “free directory assistance” segment.

At one point I called free-DA “local-mobile search for the rest of us.” That was before the dramatic growth of smartphones, which have continued to erode traditional DA call volumes.

Marchex has evolved its business over time to focus on calls and has built a call-based ad network that spans traditional media, online and mobile. The company services national clients and small businesses through partners that include Canada’s Yellow Media/Yellow Pages Group, AT&T Interactive and Skype. Marchex also offers call analytics and several other products such as reputation management.

Jingle’s revenues for 2011 are estimated to be $26 million.

Postscript: Here’s a statement from Pete Christothoulou, Marchex COO:

They do own 1-800-Free411, but that is not the reason we acquired them (in fact, this is a declining minority of their total call volume).  There are many reasons for the acquisition, but the core rationale for the acquisition was:  1) mobile voice search is an important product for our call advertising network and we could own that core IP and market leadership position; 2) Jingle has strong mobile partnerships with both carriers and mobile network operators; and 3) Jingle has growing, high-quality call volume in an important digital media channel, mobile.  For these reasons, we wanted to combine their business into our Call Advertising Network and accelerate our strategy and increase our scale and effectiveness.

Related Entries

• GOOG-411 Winds Down, Bing-411 Parties On
• AdWords And Google Voice Hook Up To Form “AdWords Call Metrics”
• Billboard Showdown: Google 411 Takes On Ask’s Algorithm
• Microsoft’s Tellme Offers Improved Mobile Voice Search Experience
• TellMe To Launch New Mobile Local Search

Without mentioning Apple or Android, de la Vega lauded Windows Phones as offering a “breakthrough experience”  . . .  “unlike anything you’ve ever seen.” As the iPhone heads to other US carriers (i.e., Verizon) AT&T is shifting its focus to embrace a wider array of devices.

The new Windows Phone is partly designed around “hubs” that seek to express common tasks or use cases. The six Windows Phone hubs are “People, Music, Video, Photos, Games and Office.” The design and appearance are very different than the familiar Apple app-centric approach, though there are and will be apps for Windows Phones.

AT&T will offer Windows Phones from LG, HTC, Samsung on November 8. They all cost $199. T-Mobile is also a US carrier partner.

Overall there will be 60 mobile operators in 30 countries offering these devices. In total there will be nine phones (to start) from HTC, Dell, LG and Samsung when it launches later this month in Europe and in November in the US (in time for the holidays).

The home screen, pictured at left, features “live tiles” that update automatically and can be personalized.

It appears, from de la Vega’s remarks, that carriers will “own” some of these tiles (as one would expect, but ugh). The Outlook integration appears to be strong and PowerPoint 2010 also renders nicely on the phones, at least in the demo. The Office capabilities, Microsoft said, “are unique and incredibly powerful.” Enterprise users take note.

Boot time was impressive as was a demo of text entry, enabling fast typing with auto correct.

Android devices have a dedicated search button and so do Windows Phones. Pressing the hardware search button brings up the Bing homepage for mobile with built-in location awareness. Search suggestions appear to be based on other mobile users and not PC queries.

The search demo during the press conference involved finding a local Thai restaurant in New York. It showed off a nice integration with Bing Maps and local content, as well as the phone’s communication tools (e.g., SMS). There was also a demo of Bing “instant answers” using Tellme-powered voice search to initiate the query.

I have not used a Windows Phone for any period of time (though I’ve had one in my hand) so I can’t opine on how competitive they actually are vs. Android and the iPhone. But they do appear, from the demo this morning, to offer a competitive user experience and will likely get serious consideration from many smartphone buyers.

As I said the user experience appears very different from the iPhone and Android devices and will take some getting used to for switchers. This will either help Microsoft differentiate (as it hopes) and stand out in the market — or not. Kudos to Microsoft for not simply trying to emulate the iPhone experience, however.

If Windows Phones sell well they will lift Bing’s mobile fortunes. Smartly however, Bing has diversified and can be competitive in mobile, across platforms, if Windows Phones don’t succeed. But if they were to become a bit hit it would help in a major way. No doubt Google will build an app or otherwise find a way to integrate with the devices.

Microsoft is supporting Windows Phones with a huge (capital H) marketing campaign that should start right about  . . . now.

One interesting question to consider is which devices Windows Phones will most directly compete with? Will they, with their partial enterprise emphasis, steal BlackBerry share or will they compete most directly with the iPhone and Android?

More competition in the market is better and so I’m pleased to see Microsoft launch what appears to be a solid user experience. Now we just have to wait for consumers to render their verdict in November.

The conventional wisdom was that “free DA” would become a booming segment in mobile, with lots of usage and potential ad revenues. Many of the large telco-incumbents that provide traditional, paid 411 services rushed to create their own free services to compete with GOOG-411 and Jingle (800-Free-411), the market leader. Those included AT&T’s 1-800-YellowPages and Verizon’s 1-800-THE-INFO. Both of those services still exist, though they’re not promoted.

There were several other services that also emerged including most notably Bing 411, which began as LiveSearch 411 and 1-800-Call-411. The backbone of the Microsoft service is based on Tellme, which the company acquired in 2007.

Bing-411 is and has been the best of the free 411 offerings, including GOOG-411. Bing-411 has more content (e.g., directions, traffic, weather, movies) and a broader array of features and capabilities.

However despite the potential consumer appeal of free DA services — consumers pay $1.75 or more for 411 calls — there has never been significant usage, comparatively speaking.  Surveys by Opus Research and comScore found that 66% to 77% of respondents have “never heard of” or “never used” specific free DA options.

The “brand” recognition of traditional 411 combined with a lack of sustained promotion for the free alternatives has meant a lack of mainstream awareness, let alone adoption. Furthermore, many people have weaned themselves off 411 calling altogether because they know it costs money and they’ve now got alternatives (search, apps) on the handset. The rise of smartphone and voice-powered search now means that people have much less need for directory assistance than in the past.

Most 411 calls now happen in the car and over 90 percent of those calls are for business name searches. However “what city, what listing” can’t compare to 250,000 apps and access to the full internet. Accordingly traditional 411 call volumes are declining between 15 to 25 percent annually as smartphone penetration grows.

At some point in the last three years Google decided that GOOG-411 was mainly a tool to collect “utterances” and a foundation for other services. According to an October 2007 interview at the Web 2.0 conference Google’s Marissa Mayer said that Google was using the service for several reasons other than as a potential advertising platform:

You may have heard about our [directory assistance] 1-800-GOOG-411 service. Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model … that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.

The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. … So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we’re trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.

In its “farewell GOOG-411″ post Google said something similar:

GOOG-411 was the first speech recognition service from Google and helped provide a foundation for more ambitious services now available on smartphones, such as:

• Voice Search – search Google by speaking instead of typing.
• Voice Input – fill in any text field on Android by speaking instead of typing.
• Voice Actions – control your Android phone with voice commands. For example, you can call any business quickly and easily just by saying its name.

Google never tried to monetize GOOG-411, though it could have. The decision was probably based on the idea that it wanted to drive as many calls as possible (to capture speech utterances) and didn’t want to do anything to create barriers or objections to usage.  Google is now suggesting that non-smartphone users (75 percent of the US market) substitute its SMS-based search service (466453) after GOOG-411 shuts down in November.

People should also try Bing 411, which Microsoft quickly reminded us yesterday was still going strong. Indeed, I think most people would be surprised by how useful the service is and how it can complement smartphone-based search. But Microsoft too has had its doubts about Bing-411 as a mainstream tool and potential ad platform.

Now there’s an opening, however, as Google is exiting the market. The question is whether Bing can exploit that opportunity to its advantage.

Postscript: Gary Price has a nice rundown on the full list of content types offered on Bing-411.

The report, which can be downloaded from the ChaCha site, was sponsored by ChaCha but the authors said, “While ChaCha sponsored the study, it was fully removed from the planning, testing, analysis, and reporting of this work.” The methodology was very specific and relatively elaborate. I summarize it below.

Both Google Voice Search and Yahoo oneSearch with Voice (powered by Vlingo) use automation for voice search. ChaCha uses humans to interpret voice queries, which are submitted through an 800 number: 1-800-2-ChaCha. Queries can also be submitted via text or online.

Here are the bottom line findings from the report:

Source: Albright Communications/MSearchGroove

Here’s how the two categories were defined:

• Natural language queries: queries submitted as questions using normal conversational syntax
• Keyword queries: queries seeking the same results as the natural language queries but reduced to the least number of keywords . . . necessary

What the table and findings above show is that in a “natural language” context, ChaCha was substantially better than Google and somewhat better than Yahoo/Vlingo. In a keyword query context the results are somewhat closer, but ChaCha still comes out on top.

One might expect this result given the involvement of human beings at ChaCha vs. pure automation with the others. From a pure user experience perspective, putting aside the back end, the report finds that ChaCha offers greater accuracy and reliability than either search engine when it comes to voice input.

The methodology:

All searches were performed by a single individual on the iPhone 3G. Here’s an abridged but otherwise verbatim description of the methodology used by the report’s authors:

To assess overall performance of the voice-enabled search services in a typical range of use cases and scenarios, we created 18 queries representative of mobile search usage and trends.

The queries covered search categories considered common in the mobile environment, such as navigation, directions, local information, general information on timely topics, and specialized or unusual long- tail topics. We included specific queries that represent the most popular mobile search terms in 2008, based on mobile search data publicly reported by AOL and Yahoo, as well as social queries. We did not include transactional queries . . . associated with downloading music and applications . . . and purchasing goods and services via a device.

Microsoft’s Tellme and Nuance Voice Control were not included in the study.

Today, two years to the day after the acqusition, Tellme made two related announcements about improved speech technology and an upgraded mobile user experience. (Here’s the enterprise-facing release.) On the consumer side of the equation, Tellme has introduced a “one-button” approach to initiate calls, dictate text messages and conduct searches with Microsoft Live Search:

The new service puts many of the most popular phone functions behind a single button.  Windows phone users just press the side button of their phone to:

• Send a text by saying “text” to open a text box, then speak the text message and send to call anyone in their contact list
• Initiate a call simply by saying “call” and then the name of anyone in their contact list
• Search the Web with Microsoft Live Search by speaking your request, such as “weather in San Francisco, California”, “Pizza in Kansas City” or “mother’s day gift ideas”

The Live Search mobile client has had a voice front end for some time, but that’s now been upgraded. Tellme’s technology is also being integrated at the network/OS level into Windows Mobile 6.5, which will reportedly ship later in the year.

Theoretically anything that you could do with search on the handset using Microsoft Live Search you can now do with voice faster and more easily. I saw the service demo’d briefly and it appeared to work very well. Tellme is arguing in its press materials that voice offers a better user experience than “touch” (i.e., the iPhone). However the iPhone has voice search clients available from Vlingo and Google. Vlingo is also behind Yahoo’s voice-powered oneSearch client.

There is clearly enormous potential for voice search to transform the mobile user experience and increase search volume dramatically. So far that has not happened. But the promise is there. Tellme’s deeper integration into Windows Mobile could represent a strategic differentiator for Microsoft and Windows Mobile phones but we’ll have to see once we get a chance to “live” with the service.

Tellme’s capabilities will also be an integrated feature of the new Kumo/Kiev/Live Search successor in mobile. I have some additional thoughts in a post at LocalMobileSearch.

Now Bloomberg and CNET report that another Yahoo executive, Larry Heck, will be working on Microsoft search. Heck was, until now, Vice President of the Search & Advertising Sciences at Yahoo Labs. Before that he was Vice President of R&D at Nuance Communications, “where he led teams responsible for natural language processing, speech recognition, voice authentication, and text-to-speech synthesis.”

This suggests more emphasis on voice search (read: mobile) at Microsoft. But the company has an overabundance of speech assets already, having acquired Tellme in March, 2007.

Fair enough.

Yet in many ways, local is a perfect microcosm of the entire issue of product integration and the challenges surrounding determination of what brands or properties to retain and which to fold. Assuming Microsoft is successful with its bid, it won’t have to act quickly to promote or shutter any of the combined company’s local properties. But executives will be making choices during the transition about where to deploy resources and thus will be picking “winners” and “losers.” Here’s a tour of the local properties and the choices that may need to be made.

Local search destination sites

At one time Yahoo Local was the undisputed leader in local search and dynamic maps; it was the most innovative product in the market. It still has a great deal of community content that is not equaled by Microsoft’s newer Live Local property. It also has been creative and more expansive with what I like to call the “product definition,” including a range of additional content types, including events.

Yahoo Local:

Live Local/Maps:

While Yahoo Local is a more “differentiated” product – Live Local is similar to Google Maps – Microsoft’s mapping platform, Virtual Earth, is much deeper and more powerful at this point. In addition, Yahoo Local has more “brand recognition,” consumer awareness, and engagement than Live Local. Thus, I would expect some sort of combination of the two products, replacing Yahoo Maps with Virtual Earth and seeking to integrate Yahoo community content and features into a redesigned offering.

Yellow pages

The “yellow pages” sites of Yahoo and Microsoft continue to exist because they still serve a segment of the population that is looking for “name and number” information. Yahoo Yellow Pages was one of the earliest and most successful online yellow pages, but now looks very tired, in contrast to the other local resources in the market. By comparison, Microsoft yellow pages is a slightly modified version of Live Local and runs on that same platform.

Yahoo Yellow Pages:

MSN Yellow Pages:

I would expect both of these sites to disappear over time, especially Yahoo Yellow Pages. The combined local search product would probably support a perfunctory “yellow pages” offering, in the way that MSN handles it today. But Microsoft would likely direct traffic to a hybrid Yahoo Local-Live Maps site as discussed.

(There is a kind of parallel “shelf space” strategy that might apply to this entire discussion, where multiple properties are maintained and run off unified platforms and databases, which decreases costs and preserves consumer traffic volumes across the “network.” However, traffic trends will likely indicate and help determine whether a particular destination is preserved or folded.)

Verticals (Jobs, Cars, Real Estate)

Though many people don’t include these verticals in the discussion of “local,” they are explicitly about local markets; it’s the internet driving leads and sales offline. (For that matter, one could equally include travel in this discussion, and travel as a category will present similar challenges because both companies have strong travel assets.)

Unlike the maps category, where Microsoft clearly has the stronger product, in jobs, cars, and real estate there is a kind of rough equivalence between the competing sets of properties. If I had to choose one as a cluster, I’d probably say that the Yahoo properties are stronger and somewhat more fully developed.

Yahoo HotJobs (tied into the newspaper consortium):

MSN Careers (in partnership with CareerBuilder):

Yahoo Autos:

MSN Autos:

Yahoo Real Estate:

MSN Real Estate:

As you look at and use these three sets of properties, you’ll see that it’s difficult to differentiate them visually and in terms of functionality. As suggested, you would want to maintain both sets of destinations at least for a time, but doing so over the long term might not make sense if you’re trying to build strong, unified consumer brands.

Search

One of the questions near to the hearts of readers of this site is the question of “core search” and how a combined company would handle it. Microsoft has invested very heavily in search but remains the number three player. Yahoo is number two. I’m not an engineer, but let’s assume that Microsoft’s technology and relevance are on course to surpass Yahoo at this point. Yahoo remains the stronger brand and has more market share. You thus wouldn’t want to shut down Yahoo in favor of Live (or some successor search brand). As with Maps, you might substitute Microsoft’s platform behind Yahoo’s brand. That probably would be a common scenario if the deal goes forward.

Yahoo (local) search (“best sushi new york“):

Live (local) search (same query):

Finally, Microsoft would presumably inherit the newspaper consortium deal, which is a local ad network and ad serving deal with most of the major US newspaper groups except Gannett, New York Times, Washington Post, and Tribune Company. It’s a huge local asset and set of relationships, although unwieldy.

Mobile

Mobile includes a heavy dose of local, of course. And here the assets are arguably more complementary than duplicative. For example, Yahoo has no voice search or free directory assistance product. Microsoft’s 1-800-Call- 411 (built on the Tellme back end) is a best-of-class offering that fills a hole for Yahoo. By the same token, Yahoo’s new mobile development platform “Go 3.0” goes head-to-head with Google’s Android, and to a lesser degree, Windows Mobile.

Yahoo has broader and deeper mobile carrier relationships around the globe than Microsoft, and its consumer brand strength is greater even in the nascent mobile market. Furthermore, beyond adopting the “open” Go platform initiative, Microsoft could also favor Yahoo mobile content on Windows Mobile devices.

Overall, you can see how the question of which products to support and which ones to fold reproduces itself again and again in virtually every area of local. There promises to be considerable drama before Microsoft can close a deal with Yahoo. But assuming it does, as these examples show, that may turn out to be the easy part.

Greg Sterling is the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence and a senior analyst at Opus Research’s Local Mobile Search program. He publishes Screenwerk, a blog focusing on the relationship between the Internet and traditional media, with an emphasis on the local search marketplace. The Locals Only column appears on Mondays at Search Engine Land.

We haven’t had a chance to test drive or play with any of these new features, but here is the list from the official Microsoft press release: Maps and Directions

• Live Search for use with BlackBerry® Devices. Live Search designed for use with BlackBerry devices is in beta and will be available for download for free on Tuesday, Oct. 16. It is a new offering designed for use on BlackBerry OS 4.0.2 or later phones, and customers with GPS-enabled phones can use location awareness to enhance their searches.

Of note here is the expansion of 3-D coverage, combination of Birds Eye and 3-D views, and the introduction of user generated content, including the use of Google’s KML (now a standard). Regarding the mobile developments, there’s more available information at LiveSearchMobile.

We’re also told there will be additional information on the full range of enhancements later this evening on the Live Search blog and the Virtual Earth blog.

Postscript: New Live Search Maps Features Coming is now up from the Virtual Earth blog; the press release is also now live and discussion is going on Techmeme.

Third Screen is a strategic acquisition for AOL, as mobile becomes a more important category and advertising becomes the source of more and more revenue for AOL.