Bing has added tweets from Twitter on the Bing News search results pages. The tweets are public updates from the Twitter stream related to the news query. For example, search for [japan] on Bing News and you will see a box on the right that says "Public updates for japan." You can pause the stream of tweets, if you want to slow down the stream. You can also click through to read the tweet by the Twitter user directly on Twitter.com. Finally, you can click on the "more updates" link to be taken to Bing's Social Search results for that query. Min-John (MJ) Lee, Senior Program Manager [...]

Related Topics: Microsoft: Bing News Search | Microsoft: Bing Social Search

Bing is introducing a totally redesigned version of its toolbar, called the "Bing Bar." Apparently it has been "rebuilt from the ground up," says Microsoft's Stefan Weitz. Indeed, it operates more like a kind of "dashboard" than a conventional toolbar with links to various sites. And yes, the Bing Rewards loyalty program is still in force. The new toolbar, which is graphically more pleasing to look at than a conventional toolbar, enables users to get lots of different types of information via drop-down windows: news, weather, maps, multiple email accounts, movies, games and so on -- in addi [...]

Related Topics: Features: General | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing Maps & Local | Microsoft: Bing News Search | Microsoft: Bing Videos | Toolbars & Add-Ons

Get out your slides, this is a great statistic: 53 percent of mobile searches on Bing have a local intent. This was casually told to me yesterday by Microsoft's Stefan Weitz during a briefing call about a dozen other things. I stopped him and made him repeat and confirm the number. He did. It's from Microsoft's internal analysis of their mobile search query data. There are a few other local search numbers floating around that get frequently cited. A big one is Google's "20% of search is related to location." This is a PC-centric estimate by Google that excludes some of the gray areas where [...]

Related Topics: Google: Maps & Local | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing Maps & Local | Microsoft: Bing News Search | Top News

Back in October, Bing announced that it uses over 1,000 signals used to determine how to rank pages. Google has typically quoted using more than 200. Game on! I predicted Google would quickly find a way to match Bing's figure. Yesterday, it did. Google's 200 Factors For several years now, Google has said that it uses more than 200 signals to rank pages. The figure has been designed to explain the complexity of deciding what pages show up first, but never as some type of "bragging" rights of having a more complicated algorithm. Schmidt: Listing Google’s 200 Ranking Factors Would Reveal Busi [...]

Related Topics: Google: Marketing | Google: SEO | Microsoft: Bing News Search | Microsoft: Marketing

It's back, the prospect that Microsoft might try to make Rupert Murdoch happy by offering a "get listed with Bing" exclusive deal. Later, I'll revisit the topic in a coordinated fashion. But for now, I've collected a number of thoughts I've put out on Twitter, in blog comments and elsewhere. First, I'll point readers back to my post from earlier this month, Why An Exclusive Wall Street Journal (or News Corp) Deal Wouldn’t Help Bing. I still suspect that News Corp’s most valuable news content of all its properties remains the Wall Street Journal. So what happens if the WSJ is out of G [...]

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Google: News | Microsoft: Bing News Search | Top News