A reader pointed us to the Delta 2 rocket launch where Microsoft was a co-sponsor. If you look closely, you can see the Bing logo on the rocket ship.

While Bing’s logo went into space, Google today announced a partnership with DigitalGlobe to launch a satellite into space to provide “high-quality imagery in Google Earth & Google Maps.”

What about Yahoo? Well, they did bury a Time Capsule in earth in October 2006 which wont be opened until March 2, 2020. Not exactly space, but still feels a bit futuristic.

Does today’s speech from President Barack Obama to school children across the United States need any more controversy? Having listened to it, I personally can’t see many parents objecting. But I could see one tech company not happy: Microsoft. Competitors like Google got called out as “good” things to aspire to while a Microsoft’s Xbox was something he suggested should be turned off.

From his prepared remarks, which should be pretty close to the exact speech he delivered: Microsoft gets the bad news early:

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

Turn that Xbox off! OK, perhaps some of the time. And you could argue that Microsoft is getting some Obama love here. It’s an Xbox he’s mentioning, not a Sony PlayStation or a Nintendo Wii.

Still, Microsoft probably would have preferred to have the love that Apple got later on in the speech:

Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine.

No one’s putting the Xbox along with accomplishments like saving lives!

There’s more love for Google, as well as Twitter and Facebook:

Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

Google, Facebook and Twitter alongside landing on the moon, fighting a world war or civil rights. Communication changes, true — though made possible by underlying infrastructure changes, that of the internet, not to mention the telephone system itself.

I also found it remarkable that of six brand mentions in total that I spotted (did I miss more?), five of those were tech oriented (the remaining one was the Harry Potter books).

See also related discussion on Techmeme.

Postscript: Video of Obama’s speech is now up on YouTube:

TechCrunch reports Microsoft is continuing with the Bing TV commercials but this time promoting the Cashback program.

Most recently, Bing doubled the Cashback rewards to drive more awareness to the program. That double reward increase was so successful on some sites that Microsoft had to pull the program four days early. Maybe TV commercials end up being cheaper than double rewards? Here is the ad:

Microsoft announced that they have created a “Bing stimulus package” using the Cashback program, in an attempt to encourage searchers to use Bing more often.

Cashback is a way for Microsoft to give searchers who buy products from select merchants, after discovering those merchants through Bing, a gift, a discount. In the past, Microsoft Cashback was offering up to 35% off on certain products, now Microsoft has boosted those rewards to up to 50% off for select merchants.

I have used Cashback in the past to get discounts and it does indeed work. It is a bit confusing for searchers to get the rewards, but it is worth the process to save up to 50%. To get the rewards, search for what you are looking for at Bing and then look for the Cashback rewards icon on the search ads. Then make sure to follow the steps exactly and you can get up to 50% back.

Microsoft has claimed Cashback has worked to grow share and they are throwing a lot more money at it now.

Postscript: I tried out the double rewards this morning and although the merchant had a 12% cashback, I received half (i.e. 6%) back. I have shown this to Microsoft and they are investigating.

Postscript 2:: On August 19th, Microsoft sent me a check for the difference missing in my Cashback rewards. Microsoft actually used FedEx priority overnight services to send me that check, which was nice, but not necessary.

Google has been recently promoting AdSense over the radio, in fact, @AdSense tweeted about the radio commercial, asking if “you heard it, and where.” A Google spokesperson confirmed the AdSense radio ads in a statement to Search Engine Land:

Google is currently running radio ads to promote AdSense. AdSense is an innovative program that helps website owners earn money by displaying text and image ads on their websites.

On a related note, two nights ago, I saw a commercial for Microsoft’s Bing Travel (remember Farecast). Ars Technica posted the commercial, which I personally think is a great commercial. Here is a video of the TV commercial for Bing Travel:

Microsoft is known to do commercials to promote Bing, but Google is known for often not using traditional means of promotion. Only until recently, has Google done promotion for their products, including Google MAps, Chrome and so on.

I heard the AdSense radio ads were targeting “mommy bloggers,” but then I saw additional tweets saying it also targeted “finance site owners.” So I assume there is a wide range of flavors of these ads. If you do hear any or get them recorded, please send them our way.

Update: Eric Goldman informed me that he heard an AdSense commercial targeting health-related sites Monday night at about 6:30 on 104.9 in Sunnyvale. And Mark Levine has tweeted about the Mommy Blogger focused ad on July 27th.

Bing is hosting one of those viral video contests, asking people to submit a jingle about Bing via YouTube. The contest is named the “Bing Jingle Contest” and the winner can earn a $500 American Express gift card.

Here is a video by the Bing interns explaining how to participate:

If you don’t want to watch it, all you need to do is submit your video by July 31,2009. Make sure to tag your video “BingJingle” and you should automatically be included. There are of course many legal conditions, so read the full details before making your Jingle.

It is a bit funny to me that Microsoft is using Google’s YouTube as a platform for the contest.

Now a third major ratings service has released search engine share figures for June 2009, and like the others, they show that Bing made only a tiny gain in the wake of its launch and major ad campaign.

The comScore figures have gone out to the financial analyst community, and the comScore press release with them usually arrives a week after that. But Mark Mahaney at Citigroup gave permission to cite figures in his report, which includes analysis for investors (too early to call, Bing has a “solid product” but faces “large uphill battle”).

For June 2009, here’s the search share handled by each of the major players in the United States:

• Google: 65.0%, unchanged from May 2009
• Yahoo: 19.6%, down from 20.1%, a 0.5% drop
• Bing: 8.4%, up from 8.0%, a 0.4% rise
• Ask: 3.9%, unchanged from May 2009
• AOL: 3.1%, unchanged from May 209

In terms of search volume, actual number of searches handled:

• Google: 9.135 billion, down from 9.307 billion, a 172 million search drop
• Yahoo: 2.755 billion, down from 2.877 billion, a 122 million search drop
• Bing: 1.179 billion, up from 1.149 billion, a 30 million rise
• Ask: 552 million, down from 555 million, a 3 million drop
• AOL: 439 million, down form 438 million, a 1 million drop

The volume figures are important. With Bing showing a 0.4% rise in share, while Yahoo shows a 0.5% drop, it’s easy to assume that Bing “stole” share from Yahoo. However, what happens each month is that the overall “pie” of searches gets larger or smaller in general. In the summer, the pie often shrinks as people are out of school and not searching as much.

So Yahoo’s drop? The 122 million searches that it lost didn’t all flow into Bing, which shows a 30 million rise. Of course, normally you’d also have expected Bing to also have shown a summer drop. That’s also important to consider, in fully measuring the gain. For example, if it had normally fallen by 50 million searches, then to show a 30 million rise would mean in reality an 80 million overall gain.

Aren’t interpreting stats fun? Suffice to say, Bing did well to be up, but it’s uncertain who they pulled away from (especially since the Bing marketing and publicity might have generated “new” searches that wouldn’t normally have existed), and we remain very much in watch and see mode.

For those keeping score at home, here’s how it looks with the other rating services, on a share and gain basis, with June 2009 cited first, then May 2009 and the change:

• comScore: 8.4%, up from 8.0%, a 0.4% rise
• Compete: 6.2%, up from 6.5%, a tiny 0.3% gain
• Hitwise: 5.25%, down from 5.64, a .039% drop

On a weekly basis, Hitwise found a rise from the beginning of the month in June to the end of the month. More on that in the related stories below:

• Bing: comScore sees Gains; Compete Sees Same Old, Same Old (early June 2009 figures)
• Hitwise: Bing Both Grows & Drops In June; Google Still Tops (full June 2009 figures)
• At One Month, Bing Says Unique Users Up; Compete Says Barely Any Gain In Searches (full June 2009 figures)
• Report: Search Ad Spending Stabilizes While Bing Gains On Google, Yahoo
• Report: Google Has Nothing To Fear From Bing Itself (interesting consumer behavior survey from JP Morgan)

For those who want an early peak into July, here’s the past five days of share data from Compete:

Bing figures don’t include searches at Club Bing, which add about another 1.5% or so share, roughly. Bing started June in the 5.5% to 6.0% range, so it’s picked up about 1% share according to Compete, since June.

As I keep saying, while there’s a temptation to draw conclusions from the early figures, we really want to see what happens around October and November. People will be back from school then, the months will be more “regular” in nature and the Bing marketing campaign will likely have ended or ramped down. Will word-of-mouth have spread by then? Will behaviors have changed?

Monday’s can be rough for many people, so I thought I share with you a funny video named “Googling with Bing.” It basically is a Bing commercial, but they replace the word “search” with “Google.”

Hat tip to TechCrunch for spotting this.

Microsoft’s ad campaign for Bing took a(nother) turn for the clever tonight on The Daily Show with a new campaign called “Fast Forward.” It’s the first in a week-long run of advertising that will see Microsoft paying for several minutes of commercial time, only to air a 30-second spot in place of several ads.

The ad that aired on The Daily Show is somewhat tough to describe, and Microsoft has yet to make a copy of it available publicly. It begins with a Snuggie commercial, but after a few seconds the video fast-forwards (with accompanying sound) through the Snuggie spot … a hair replacement ad … hanging tomatoes … and other commercials, too. Finally, the audio goes silent and Bing’s message is shown on two slides:

“Getting You What You Want Faster / It’s What We’re All About”

As soon as the spot ends, the regular program resumes — meaning two extra minutes of The Daily Show tonight. That’s sure to win some goodwill from Jon Stewart fans.

As I said, it’s a very clever spot and if you’re watching the program live, there’s almost no way not to watch because it looks like your TV has suddenly decided to zap the commercials without any help.

The ad, or one like it, is scheduled to air on other cable networks between now and June 17. Here’s the schedule:

• June 12: CMT’s Top 20 Countdown
• June 14: Nick@Nite’s George Lopez
• June 15: VH1’s Charm School with Ricki Lake
• June 17: MTV’s Real World/Road Rules Challenges: The Duel 2

If you see the ad (or saw it), let us know what you thought in the comments.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz: Here is that commercial:

CEO Eric Schmidt has weighed in on the Bing launch — and he’s not sounding panicked, not that I would expect him to be. But he certainly puts out a conflicted message that Bing isn’t a serious competitor and yet argues that it’s serious enough that talk of a Google monopoly seems “unwarranted.” Plus, a somewhat passionate message that Microsoft can’t expect to buy its way into search share. A look at his interview with Fox.

First the clip, then below that selected quotes along with some analysis:

Schmidt: It’s not the first entry for Microsoft. They do this about once a year.

Well, maybe every two years. In 2005, Microsoft pushed MSN in a big way. Fairly soon after, things morphed into Live Search with a more limited push. We’re two or three years past, and it’s a major new brand that Microsoft is putting out there. Somehow, it still feels a bit different than what they’ve done before. I guess it’s a sense to me that this is the dice being thrown down the table for the final time.

Schmidt: They’ve got a bunch of new ideas, and there are some things that are missing. We think that search is really about comprehensiveness, freshness, the scale and size of what we do, and it’s difficult for them to copy that.”

Whoa. This is the same Eric Schmidt who has repeatedly said over the years that Google constantly has to fight to win its search share, since users are only “a click away” from switching. But now it turns out that it’s hard for Microsoft to copy Google’s key components. Well, if that’s what search is about — and if Microsoft can’t match it — fair to say Google’s not really in danger of losing its audience in a flood of clicks — and it can stop trying to push that message. Hang on to that thought.

Will Google hang on to the number one position? “I certainly hope so,” Schmidt said, touching on Google being innovative, that’s there still lots of work to do and technology to deploy.

Schmidt: We are spending all of our time on exactly what we’ve always done, which is innovation. I don’t think Bing’s arrival has changed what we’re doing. We are about search, we’re about making things enormously successful by virtue of innovation.

We’ll see. When I continue to hear people amazed that Bing does things that Google does as well — but they don’t realize it — I have to think Google’s pondering if they’ll need to do some broader consumer marketing. As I wrote earlier:

Techmeme is beginning to collect stories of people talking about tips and tricks on using Bing. Some of these aren’t unique to Bing; other search engines offer them, as well. But one good part about the Bing launch is that as people explore it, they’ll rediscover things that search engines generally can do but which are often overlooked or not realized by even tech-savvy people. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is a case in point. After seeing the Bing demo, he found it “astounding.” Trust me, Google could do a product demo of its various services that would blow his mind. Problem is, they don’t.

Google’s never really had to market itself to consumers, to trot its stuff. The recently held “Searchology” event didn’t cover anywhere near the range of what Google offers. But if the praise for Bing keeps largely rolling in — if people keep discovering features that aren’t necessarily unique to Bing — Google may find it has to step up. And Yahoo, too, could do a demo of its services that would blow people’s minds. But then again, Yahoo’s not a search engine anymore, I hear.

How about Yahoo?

Schmidt: Yahoo is different strategy than Google, and she articulates it in that context as well. Google is really about getting all the information and organizing it for you. Yahoo is a different strategy. We think ultimately Bing will evolve to a different strategy as well.

Yep, Bartz has been playing a different strategy — that they’re not a search engine, as my Bartz Continues Torpedoing Yahoo Search post gets into more. But Google offers many of the same features that Yahoo does, so they’re not so different as either CEO makes out. They compete for many of the same users in areas outside of search.

As for Bing, they think they ARE evolving a different strategy with the entire “decision engine” thing. They’re not to me (as State Of Search: Google Will Stay Strong Despite Bing & Yahoo explains more). Perhaps Schmidt doesn’t see Bing as different as Microsoft thinks it is.

Would Schmidt be nervous about a Yahoo-Microsoft partnership? He notes how Google protested any combination like that a year ago (they did?!!!), worried that Yahoo’s search would get combined with Microsoft’s “Windows monopoly” and “could be used to exclude choices.”

Schmidt: We like the fact that there are all these search choices. It’s a very competitive market. Any time that Microsoft causes a merger or acquisition or deal and restricts choices, it’s a bad outcome for customers.

Well, anytime anyone does a deal that restricts choices, I guess it would be a bad outcome. And Google’s done plenty of its own (see Hey Firefox – Let Us Pick Our Own Search Engine! for one example). Need another? It’s native to upload photos in the latest Android photos out there to Google’s Picasa. But Flickr? Better go find a third-party app.

Schmidt: But you earn that. You don’t just buy it with ads. You earn it, and you earn it customer by customer, search by search , answer by answer. And we believe that today we beat our competitors because we’re so focused on comprehensiveness, speed, freshness and having the depth that people really care about.

Schmidt sounded a bit passionate — maybe irritated? — to me on the earn it part, almost as if folks at Google have been watching the Bing adfest that’s been running and wondering if folks need reminding that it’s not all about marketing.

I agree. Google has earned its place (see The Google Hive Mind). That’s not to say it hasn’t bought ways to help it gain. It’s estimated to have spent more than $1 billion in distribution deals over the years. I don’t think those distribution deals would have worked in the long-term, if it wasn’t that Google also provided a quality service. Google couldn’t buy the love, but it certainly was able to buy a lot of first dates.

By the way, those ads are funny. See some of the Bing commercials here, but also watch one below:

And now watch some of these from 1998:

Plenty of same clever ideas of search overload or irrelevant results (especially see the HotBot ad — “he shows up for everything”). Clever without quality underneath doesn’t help.

Could Schmidt see a partnership with Yahoo? “We would love to,” he said, talking coming within an hour of a deal on ads last year but having to give it up due to the US Department Of Justice’s concerns that it would make Google too dominant in search. He then said:

Schmidt: I would offer Bing’s arrival as proof of the competitive of the market.

But wait? Didn’t he start the interview saying how uncompetitive Bing was to Google, how it couldn’t copy what Google does, how eventually it will turn into something else other than a Google competitor (you know, like Yahoo). And now Bing’s competition? Oh yes, in fact:

Schmidt: Google is literally one click away. Since Bing’s arrival, for example, people have been switching to try it, and then they switch back. It’s very easy to switch from one to the other. In many of these other markets, that’s not true. In our case, its’ so competitive, I think these concerns are completely unwarranted.

Wow, what a 180 degree turn within a 5 minute interview. Bing — not a challenge to Google — now is.

Let’s be clear. Yes, anyone can switch easily from Google. It’s not like Google a habit or anything:

Oh yes, it is. Heck, just watch how hard it is for Larry Dignan to “trust” using another search engine:

I felt like I had to verify my Bing results with a Google search. Bing was my default in the browser, but the trust wasn’t there. Microsoft’s challenge is pretty clear: Marketing may get you to try Bing, but will you trust the results? Simply put, any lingering Bing buzz I had wore off.

Well put. I’ve been forcing myself to use Bing as part of the evaluation process, as well — and I also feel I want to trot back to Google to see if I got the “right” answer. But sure, Google’s a click away.

Still, it’s not like Google forces the consumer to search with it. And what’s the Department of Justice going to do if Google gets to a 90%+ share naturally through consumer choice? Cause Google to send people randomly away?

Really, I expect the legal fight ultimately to move away from consumer share and more into an area about whether Google simply has control of too much of the internet ecosystem. Fights In The Google Monopoly Debate Miss Key Points discusses this more.

For related coverage, see Techmeme.