To learn more about Bing, also see our Search Engine Land’s Guide To Bing page.

September Search Share: Yahoo Continues Downward Slide

Oct 10, 2012 at 10:19pm ET by Greg Sterling

We're getting the usual sneak peek at comScore data from financial analysts ahead of the official release tomorrow. In terms of the market-share horse race, Google gained ground vs. last month. Bing was flat; AOL and especially Ask gained as well. Sadly, Yahoo experienced another month of decline -- to its lowest market share in memory. And now, behold the September comScore numbers: Google: 66.7 percent (66.4 percent in August) Bing: 15.9 percent (15.9 percent in August) Yahoo: 12.2 percent (12.8 percent in August) Ask: 3.5 percent (3.2 percent in August) AOL: 1.8 percent (1.7 [...]

Study: Malicious Search Results More Common In Bing & Image Search

Oct 8, 2012 at 2:42pm ET by Matt McGee

Almost two of every three malicious redirects in major search engines are found on Bing, according to a new report from the web security firm Sophos. Looking at data "from the last couple of weeks," Sophos found that 65 percent of malicious search results that its web appliance blocked were from Bing. Google was responsible for 30 percent of the blocked redirects. Image search is particularly vulnerable to this kind of attack. In a separate chart, Sophos says that 92 percent of the malicious redirects that it found were in image search results. Sophos is using its own technol [...]

Bing Now Handpicks News Writers For Its Social Sidebar

Oct 5, 2012 at 4:23pm ET by Matt McGee

Bing is dipping its toes into a form of what Google calls "authorship" with today's announcement that news writers are now being featured in Bing's Social Sidebar. U.S.-based searchers can now see journalists appearing in the "People Who Know" section of the Bing sidebar. These authors are often mixed in with those who appeared in "People Who Know" before -- people who've answered questions on Quora or who tweet regularly about the search topic. Here's a search I just did for "seattle mariners," which shows two authors in "People Who Know" along with several others. Those who are [...]

Bing: 33 Percent Of Google Users Will Use Bing More After ‘Bing It On’ Challenge

Oct 2, 2012 at 6:49pm ET by Matt McGee

It's been almost a month since Bing launched its Bing It On campaign -- a sort of taste-test challenge comparing Bing's and Google's organic search results. And now, after an independent survey of about 4,700 people who took the challenge, Bing is touting how it's changing the attitudes of many testers: We asked for people's impressions of Bing before taking the Challenge and then after they completed it. What we found was 64% of people were surprised by the quality of Bing's web search results. Over half of the people surveyed indicated their impression of Bing improved after seeing Bing' [...]

Twitter Opens Up To More Crawling, But Do Search Engines Want Its Search Results In Theirs?

Sep 27, 2012 at 10:05am ET by Matt McGee

Twitter recently updated its robots.txt file and, though the change opens up millions of pages to being crawled, there's no guarantee that the main search engines want what Twitter is offering. The Sociable seems to have been the first to notice Twitter's robots.txt changes, which now specifically allow Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex and other bots to crawl through some of Twitter's search results pages. Twitter: Change Made To Help With Discovery Twitter confirmed the change to us, saying: This change will help people find popular and helpful Twitter pages, such as the #olympics hashtag pa [...]

Google Doesn’t Require Google Search On Android, Despite What FairSearch & Microsoft Want You To Believe

Sep 13, 2012 at 6:39pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Fairsearch, a group backed by Microsoft and other Google competitors to lobby that Google isn't "fair" to them with its search results, has been having a event today to push its view of all that's wrong with Google. That includes building a myth that Google requires that all Android devices to use Google search. Google doesn't do that. It never has. But that's a good story the group still wants to tell. The FairSearch Event Today's mythbuilding came out of a panel called "Tech Executives: Exploring Barriers to Innovation in Mobile and Online Services," part of the FairSearch "Searching for I [...]

Bing Ads Testing Longer Headlines A La Google AdWords

Sep 10, 2012 at 6:18pm ET by Pamela Parker

Bing Ads (the new moniker for Microsoft Advertising) is testing an ad format that should be very familiar -- they're combining the first two lines of text on search ads to make a much longer headline. The US market test is currently running on a small percentage of searches on Bing and will be rolling out to Yahoo Search, as well. It will be seen on the first three ads appearing at the top of the page. The goal, says Microsoft, is to improve click-through rates. [caption id="attachment_132837" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Old Appearance[/caption] [caption id="attachment_132836" al [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing Ads

Microsoft adCenter Now Bing Ads Under Yahoo Bing Network

Sep 9, 2012 at 9:37pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Microsoft posted and then retracted their announcement of renaming the search alliance between Microsoft and Yahoo to the Yahoo Bing Network. Part of that announcement is that Microsoft adCenter, the name of Microsoft's search ad network, is now being renamed to Bing Ads. You can see the retracted blog post on the new Yahoo Bing Network blog. It says, "Introducing the Yahoo! Bing Network" and talks about how "Bing Ads, the platform formerly known as adCenter" is the new name for adCenter. The functionality and advertising network seems to be unchanged. Rather, this seems to be just a reb [...]

Confirmed: Amazon’s New Kindle Fire Tablets To Use Bing As Default Search Engine

Sep 7, 2012 at 4:30pm ET by Greg Sterling

Ubergizmo is reporting that Bing (not Google) will be the default search engine for the Amazon browser on the new Kindle tablets. (We were able to confirm this with Microsoft directly earlier this evening.) The original Kindle Fire used Google. Amazon is likely to sell several million of these new devices given their aggressive pricing (partly subsidized by ads). If so, that could provide a boost to Bing, especially in a mobile/quasi-mobile context. There are several alternative browsers currently available for Kindle Fire/HD including Opera, Maxthon and Dolphin. I would anticipate tha [...]

Bing Offers Own Version Of “Pepsi Challenge” Against Google: “Bing It On”

Sep 6, 2012 at 10:24am ET by Greg Sterling

Surely you remember (or have heard about) the now classic "Pepsi Challenge" ad campaign from the 1970s and early 1980s. Pepsi went around to public venues like shopping malls and offered people blind taste tests of its own caramel colored soda vs Coke. Overwhelmingly people preferred Pepsi to Coke. Microsoft is now trying something similar with search. (Blekko did something equivalent last year with its "3 Engine Monte" comparison.) In a new campaign and with a new website (Bing It On), the company is giving people the ability to compare search results side by side. Microsoft claims that [...]

More Than 10 Is The New 10 Blue Links For Bing

Aug 31, 2012 at 9:28am ET by Barry Schwartz

Bing has been experimenting with showing more than ten search results on a page, while Google is showing seven search results on a page in some cases. Now, Bing has decided to stick with the experiment in the June update. There have been some observant searchers who picked up on the change over at WebmasterWorld, where Bing would show a random number of search results, where it almost seemed like a bug. A Microsoft spokesperson said this is no bug, it is an experiment they are sticking with as part of the June update. Here is the statement: We’re continually testing and experimenting on [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Microsoft: Bing | Top News

Search Facebook Friends’ Photos On Bing

Aug 30, 2012 at 3:04pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Microsoft announced on the Bing Search blog that you can now search Bing to discover your friends' photos within Facebook. If you activated the social bar within Bing and enabled Facebook to connect to Bing, then your search results in the Bing social bar may have photos from your friends' Facebook feeds. You can also browse and search Facebook photos directly at bing.com/friendsphotos. Here is a screen shot of how it looks in the Bing Social Bar: Here is a screen shot of the full Bing Friends' Photos search page: Microsoft says "your Facebook privacy settings are alw [...]

Bing Completes “Global Ortho” High Resolution Imagery Project For Continental US

Aug 30, 2012 at 12:32pm ET by Greg Sterling

Back when Bing Maps was called Microsoft Virtual Earth (2006) the company bought Vexcel, a US Defense Department contractor that specialized in high resolution aerial photography and automated 3D image rendering. That acquisition became the basis of Bing Maps' subsequent ambitious aerial imagery and 3D mapping efforts. Microsoft then improved upon the camera that Vexcel had developed. In 2010 Microsoft embarked on what it calls its Global Ortho (GO) project. For the past two years Bing has been "collecting every square inch of the Continental United States and Western Europe at 30cm resolut [...]

Study: Bing And Yahoo Search Share Largest On Internet Explorer Browser

Aug 28, 2012 at 2:45pm ET by Greg Sterling

Internet Explorer (IE) is the browser where the most "non-Google" searches happen, according to data from ad network Chitika. The company analyzed "hundreds of millions of ad impressions [in the US and Canada] from within the Chitika Ad network" earlier this month. Chitika was seeking to determine search engine usage on each browser. Overall Chitika found that Google generated 74.7 percent of search traffic across all five browsers examined. Yahoo was second with 12.3 percent and Bing third with a 9.74 percent share across browsers. By comparison the most recent comScore data show Google [...]

Bing Brings Quora Content Into Its Social Sidebar

Aug 22, 2012 at 2:40pm ET by Matt McGee

Bing continues to expand the content that may show up in its social sidebar, with news today that its Quora integration is complete. The integration involves Bing showing top Quora contributors in the sidebar when there's Q&A content on Quora that's related to the Bing search term, much like the sidebar might show content from Facebook or Twitter if that's relative to the search. Here's a screenshot of integration that's being shown on both Bing's and Quora's announcement: Quora isn't a new partner for Bing; it was included in the partner list when Bing originally announced the s [...]

Bing Previews Rich Search Experience For Windows 8

Aug 16, 2012 at 11:01am ET by Greg Sterling

Windows 8 is almost ready to hit the market. When it does it appears that it will deliver a new more "immersive" search experience, via Bing. In the video at the bottom of this page, Microsoft's Stefan Weitz demonstrates that new experience on a Microsoft Windows 8 tablet (presumably a Surface device). Windows 8 Bing appears to be very fast and it's highly visual, one of the most appealing aspects of the Bing experience. From my vicarious perusal of the materials the most compelling new feature appears to be what Microsoft/Bing is calling "snap." Initially, search results appear in a gri [...]

Yes, Bing Has Human Search Quality Raters & Here’s How They Judge Web Pages

Aug 15, 2012 at 9:16am ET by Matt McGee

A web page that definitively satisfies a searcher's intent is "Perfect," and should appear at the top of Bing's search results. On the other end of the scale, spammy web pages and pages that almost no searcher would find useful are deemed "Bad." That's a bit of how Bing instructs the people in its Human Relevance System (HRS) project to grade web pages. It's explained in a 52-page document that Bing calls the "HRS Judging Guidelines." The HRS project is similar to the Quality Rater program that Google uses. Microsoft's version has been around in some form since shortly after MSN Search b [...]

Bing Adds Friend-Tagging To Social Sidebar

Jul 30, 2012 at 3:10pm ET by Matt McGee

Bing has just announced a small tweak to how its Social Sidebar functions -- but it's one that overcomes one of the Sidebar's true limitations. The change is this: When using the Social Sidebar, you can now tag up to five Facebook friends with whom you want to share your search results. Before this change, the Sidebar would automatically show a few connections under the "Friends Who Might Know" or "People Who Know" tabs. But you were limited to notifying/asking those suggestions, or to asking all of your friends at once via the "Ask Friends" feature. And that was hit and miss, because there [...]

For Olympic Medal Count Info, Yahoo Gets Gold, Google Silver & Bing Bronze

Jul 30, 2012 at 12:46am ET by Danny Sullivan

Want to know the how various countries are doing in the London 2012 Olympics? For finding out using a major search engine, I give the gold to Yahoo, with Google narrowly missing to earn silver and Bing getting bronze mainly by virtue of being third in a three contestant race. Ready, Set, Search! Checking for results today on my phone, I was pretty impressed with Google's Knowledge Graph box that came up at the top of my results, showing the medals won by various countries. Kazakhstan was ranked seventh? Cool to discover! Plus, I was able to quickly learn this was for winning gold in road c [...]

Microsoft Begins Rolling Out AdCenter Update

Jul 24, 2012 at 7:18pm ET by Pamela Parker

Microsoft's AdCenter has just released some new features, including the ability to measure tablet traffic via Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, the ability to have more ads per ad group, and increased site exclusions for syndicated ads. The company has been working diligently in recent months to match Google AdWords' features and make it easier for advertisers to simply import their existing AdWords campaigns into adCenter. Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, the desktop Excel add-on used for research, will now allow users to find tablet-specific information, including traffic, keyword [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing Ads

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