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

Microsoft Hires Hillary Clinton’s Former Campaign Chief Mark Penn For Bing Strategy Role

Jul 23, 2012 at 9:43am ET by Greg Sterling

[caption id="attachment_128353" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Credit: MarkPenn.com"][/caption] By all accounts Microsoft is struggling. It's true that Bing is growing, but only slightly, while partner Yahoo continues to lose search share (to Bing) keeping the "Search Alliance" in the doldrums. Microsoft also recently took $6+ billion write-down on its 2007 aQuantive acquisition, resulting in a loss for its most recent fiscal quarter. Its core Office and Windows franchises are still healthy but their future is cloudy as PC sales continue to slow. Microsoft's Windows Phones and m [...]

As The Yahoo-Microsoft Search Alliance Falls Short, Could A Yahoo-Google Deal Emerge?

Jul 19, 2012 at 9:00am ET by Danny Sullivan

Once again, Yahoo is earning so little under its search deal with Microsoft that Microsoft is having to make up the difference due to a revenue guarantee. If the performance doesn't improve, Yahoo might go looking for a new partner, which could include Google. Let's explore how the deal has continued to falter, quarter-after-quarter, and how the seemingly inevitable failure might lead Yahoo back to one-time partner Google. The RPS Gap During its earnings call this week, Yahoo chief financial officer Tim Morse said there continues to be a gap between the expected revenue earned per search [...]

Foursquare Tips Now Integrated Into Bing’s Social Sidebar

Jul 18, 2012 at 1:24pm ET by Greg Finn

In May Bing rolled out its new social sidebar that tied together social data from both Facebook and Twitter. Today another source has been added to the mix. Bing announced that Foursquare tips will be tied into specific location based queries. The Foursquare data will appear in the 'People Who Know' section of the sidebar, directly within the results pages: The Foursquare data pulled will be from the 'tips" area of each location, no information was given about check-in data. Of course the tips shown will be customized to the users location and the topic they are searching for. Th [...]

No, Microsoft Didn’t “Disappear” Kogan From Bing Over The “IE7 Tax”

Jul 11, 2012 at 5:11pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Shopping site Kogan imposes an "Internet Explorer 7" tax. Kogan then mysteriously disappears from Microsoft's Bing search engine. Revenge? No, just a technical goof, says Microsoft, one that it is correcting. Kogan grabbed headlines last month when it began adding an additional 6.8% charge to purchases for those using Internet Explorer 7. Calling it the "Internet Explorer 7" tax, the fee was designed to encourage people to upgrade. This week, Kogan was blogging again about Microsoft, this time to say that its Kogan.com site was dropped from Microsoft's Bing search engine. That's still t [...]

Bing Adds Boatload Of New “Venue Maps” For International Markets

Jun 28, 2012 at 2:23pm ET by Greg Sterling

Microsoft announced today, that in conjunction with Nokia, Bing has added "more than 2,700 venue maps" in North America, Europe and Asia. You can access them online at Bing.com/maps ("explore venue maps"). In the US and UK markets venue (indoor) maps are also available on Windows Phones and through the Bing app for the iPhone. The following are the categories of venue maps on Bing (numbers indicate coverage in the US): Airports (85) Amusement Parks (1) Casinos (25) Community Centers (1) Convention Centers (2) Hotels (2) Malls (1370) Museums (1) [...]

Microsoft AdCenter Rollout Comes To Three More European Countries

Jun 27, 2012 at 4:32pm ET by Pamela Parker

The paid search part of the Search Alliance has conquered three more countries. Both Bing- and Yahoo-owned and operated properties, as well as publisher networks, in Germany, Austria and Switzerland are now powered by Microsoft Advertising's adCenter, the company announced today. Now both the algorithmic and the paid search portions of the Alliance have been rolled out in Austria, Canada, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Switzerland, the UK and the US. The remaining European countries -- Denmark, Finland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden -- are expected to be transitioned later [...]

Bing Maps Introduces 38 Million Sq Kilometers Of New Satellite Imagery

Jun 26, 2012 at 12:57pm ET by Greg Sterling

As the "mapping wars" heat up Microsoft is introducing a huge new body of satellite imagery into Bing Maps. It's not clear whether any of this will extend to mobile given the apparent substitution of Nokia Maps for Bing in Windows Phone 8. The new imagery covers vast amounts of land on almost every continent. According to the Bing blog post, "The total area covered in this data release is nearly 38 million square kilometers." The company says that this single update constitutes more data (165 terabytes) than all the previous releases combined (129 terabytes). Bing also said that its [...]

Bing’s Image Search Gets A New Look, Updated Features

Jun 21, 2012 at 2:10pm ET by Matt McGee

Bing has updated its image search today with a new look and some tweaks to its search and discovery features. The first thing you'll notice, aside from the fact that puppies are really cute, is the tight tile-based layout that Pinterest often gets credited for making popular in the past year or so. Both Flickr and Yahoo have recently rolled out similar layouts -- Yahoo, in fact, rolled out a very similar look and feel just yesterday. Image search on Bing has also been updated to the minimalist user interface that Bing.com launched in early May. There are also bigger thumbnails and a [...]

Bing’s May Search Updates: Domain Cleanup, Recourse Links, Related Searches

Jun 13, 2012 at 4:20pm ET by Matt McGee

Back in March, Bing began sharing regular updates about changes that it's made to search quality and the user search experience, much like Google has been doing since late last year. The latest Bing update was published earlier today and, rather than sharing surface-level information about dozens of changes like Google does, Bing has chosen to go fairly in-depth on three changes. Bing's post doesn't specifically refer to these changes as happening in May but, for the sake of future consistency, I'm calling these "May updates" in the headline. Here's a look at what Bing shared. Improve [...]

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

Bing Is For Doing Things It Tells You Not To Do

Jun 12, 2012 at 3:04pm ET by Danny Sullivan

"Bing Is For Doing" is the catchphrase being used in new ads for Microsoft's Bing search engine. But in a bit of irony, one new ad literally suggests jumping off a cliff but then warns in small print, "Do not attempt." I first saw the ad on Sunday when watching the Mad Men finale and again while watching a show on Hulu yesterday. It starts with "Kevin Cook" using the new social features in Bing to ask friends for any recommendations to do in Hawaii: Along comes his friend Neil Black who suggests jumping off a cliff. OK, a big rock, though some of the videos he links to call it a cliff j [...]

Bing Integrates Qwiki Videos Into Search Results

Jun 12, 2012 at 10:01am ET by Matt McGee

Bing's search results are getting a bit more interactive with the integration of machine-generated videos from Qwiki. The companies have just announced that some search results -- currently those where a Wikipedia page appears -- will offer searchers a chance to see and hear a Qwiki video about the search topic. The integration shows up as a single line below the main search result with a small "play" icon and a "Watch the Qwiki" call to action. Clicking that launches Qwiki's machine-generated video right in the search result. Various elements that appear in the video are clickabl [...]

Bing Gets Its Own Knowledge Graph Via Britannica Partnership

Jun 7, 2012 at 4:29pm ET by Matt McGee

Bing's search results are getting a bit more informational thanks to a new partnership with Encyclopedia Britannica. They're calling it "Britannica Online Encyclopedia Answers," and it adds extra information about a search result right within the search results page. As the screenshots below show, it looks quite a bit like Google's recently-launched Knowledge Graph feature, but there are some differences that I'll mention below. I've used red arrows to highlight one of the main differences with how Google presents this data and Bing's version -- Bing links out to several third-party [...]

Bing’s New Social Search Now Available To All In US

Jun 1, 2012 at 9:03am ET by Barry Schwartz

Bing announced that the new social search sidebar which was available for testing a few weeks ago, is now available as the default search service for all US based searchers. The next time you go to Bing.com, your search will be layered in social elements on the right hand side. For more on how that works, see our story Bing Relaunches, Features New Social Sidebar. As part of this US launch, Bing has kicked off a new marketing campaign named Bing Summer of Doing. Here is one of the first commercials from Microsoft for the "Bing Summer of Doing" campaign: [...]

Microsoft: Yes, We Do Send Takedown Requests To Bing, Too

May 25, 2012 at 7:17pm ET by Matt McGee

Microsoft says it does send copyright-related takedown requests to its own search engine, Bing, in addition to the multitude of requests that it sends to Google. This comes on the heels of yesterday's news that Microsoft is the number one submitter of copyright-related URL removal requests to Google. It sent more than 500,000 such requests in the past month, asking Google to remove URLs that host pirated copies of Microsoft products and other copyright-infringing material. TechDirt pointed out that some of the URLs that Microsoft asked Google to remove were still appearing in Bing's sear [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Legal: Copyright | Microsoft: Bing | Top News

Microsoft Integrates More Nokia “Infrastructure” (Traffic, Geocoding) Into Bing Maps

May 25, 2012 at 11:38am ET by Greg Sterling

Slowly Bing is handing over more of its mapping "back end" functions to Nokia, as part of the deal that brought the two together for the Lumia-Windows Phone partnership. Yesterday Microsoft announced that in 24 countries, including the US and UK, Nokia (Navteq) will be delivering traffic data to Bing Maps. The company also said that it would start using Nokia’s geocoding services in several (unnamed) countries to improve directions. In May last year I wrote Bing Maps To Be Powered (Replaced) By Nokia? A source argued to me that over time Nokia would gradually replace most of the [...]

Bing’s Visual Search Is Gone (Has Been For A While, Actually)

May 22, 2012 at 7:30pm ET by Matt McGee

The fact that almost no one noticed might be one reason why Bing has dropped its Visual Search feature ... something that apparently happened months ago. To be clear, this isn't traditional image search that we're talking about; that's still available at bing.com/images. We're talking about the "Visual Search" tool/interface that Bing launched in 2009 with a unique interface that used Silverlight technology to let searchers view a large set of images and data. In our article about the launch, we used this screenshot as a sample of the Visual Search interface: The independent Micr [...]

Former Yahoo Executive Pleads Guilty To Securities Fraud Charge Related To Microsoft Deal

May 22, 2012 at 12:06pm ET by Pamela Parker

The Search Alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft had some unintended beneficiaries (now casualties). Yahoo's former senior director of business management, Robert Kwok, has pled guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud, after being accused that he told a mutual fund manager in July 2009 that the deal between Yahoo and Microsoft was imminent. Among its many provisions, the deal -- officially announced in late July of 2009 -- called for Microsoft to pay Yahoo $50 million annually, for three years, for implementation costs. The mutual fund manager, Reema Shah, formerly of Ameriprise F [...]

Bing Offers Advice On Google’s Penguin Update: Diversify

May 21, 2012 at 9:40am ET by Barry Schwartz

Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft Bing, wrote a blog post on the Bing Search blog named Penguins & Pandas Poetry. The post is about Google's latest Penguin update and how SEOs and webmasters need to be better prepared for such updates. The basic advice is simple, SEOs and webmasters need to do one thing - diversify. Duane is not just saying, focus on Bing and make sure your site does well there too. Yes, if you lose all your Google traffic, ranking well in Bing is nice but since Bing only has about 30% marketshare, you are still missing out on a lot of traffic. [...]

Bing Search API Now On Paid Platform

May 17, 2012 at 2:04pm ET by Barry Schwartz

About a month ago, Microsoft informed us the Bing API would no longer be free and today is the day they migrated the Bing Search API to the paid platform. Microsoft said for the time being, the Bing API will still be free - to try out. But those with over 5,000 queries per month will have to start paying after the free trial is over. The pricing structure is posted here and currently reads: 2,500,000 queries for $5,000.00 2,000,000 queries for $4,000.00 1,500,000 queries for $3,000.00 1,000,000 queries for $2,000.00 500,000 queries for $1,000.00 250,000 queries for $500.00 100, [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Microsoft: APIs | Microsoft: Bing

Bing’s New Social-Friendly Search Interface Now Live

May 15, 2012 at 7:31pm ET by Matt McGee

The new Bing interface, with a healthy dose of social connections and discovery, is now live for all users. Bing's announcement today says that anyone can access the new interface at www.bing.com/new, but you should also see a new message atop the Bing home page that invites you to try "the best search, now with people from your social networks." Even without clicking the "Check it out" link or first going to www.bing.com/new, I was shown the new, three-column display on a search for "seattle restaurants." When Bing announced the new interface last week, it included "Snapshots" - [...]

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