Here is that commercial.

The ads feature ordinary people asking for information and receiving nonsensical, “speaking-in-tongues” answers; one early spot has a woman seeking directions to Euston station.

The TV campaign will run solidly for a month and then in two-week bursts until mid-June. It will be backed by a digital campaign across Microsoft’s network and on media including social networking websites.

Highfield said that a key aim of the campaign was to contrast the “visually rich” Bing with the relatively austere-looking Google.

From the description, the campaign sounds like the one that launched Bing in the US. Advertising such as this does work to gain awareness. The question then becomes: will people like the experience?

It’s unclear how much of a role the mostly humorous TV ads for Bing played in the early success of the new Microsoft search engine. But I would argue in general they were helpful and raised curiosity at a minimum, backed up by a massive online ad campaign and PR.

By analogy, Verizon’s ads on behalf of its “Droid” line of phones in the US have been successful in appealing to men, tarring the market-leading iPhone to some degree as a “girlie device” and boosting Android awareness overall. So it’s quite possible that the forthcoming Bing campaign can peel off a slice of the audience from Google.

However, don’t expect the ads to have any immediate, significant impact on the distribution of search market share in the UK.

There’s new aerial and Bird’s Eye imagery across many countries on several continents. The full list is below.

The Bing Maps World Tour shows the updates on the map.

Now, Ballmer is putting his thoughts in writing … well, electronic writing … via a post on Microsoft’s new blog. Says Ballmer:

Engagement in China and around the world is very important to us, in part because we believe it accelerates access to 21st century technology and services and helps provide the widest possible range of ideas and information. We have done business in China for more than 20 years and we intend to stay engaged, which means our business must respect the laws of China. That’s true for every company doing business in countries around the world: we are all subject to local laws.

At the same time, Microsoft is opposed to restrictions on peaceful political expression, and we have conversations with governments to make our views known. In every country in which we operate, including China, Microsoft requires proper legal authority before we remove any Internet content; and if we remove content, we give users notice.

The statement is similar to what both Ballmer and Gates said last week. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing here is that Ballmer, much like Gates, has started blogging. And both in the same month. The Microsoft Blog launched about three weeks ago; Ballmer has written two of its posts.

Today we sent a letter to the Article 29 Working Party notifying them of our intention to make a change to Bing’s data retention policy.

Specifically, we are reducing the amount of time we store IP addresses from searchers to 6 months.  Currently we keep that information for 18 months before we delete it.  Generally, when Bing receives search data we do a few things: first, we take steps to separate your account information (such as email or phone number) from other information (what the query was, for example). Then, after 18 months we take the additional step of deleting the IP address and any other cross session IDs associated with the query. Under the new policy, we will continue to take all the steps we applied previously – but now we will remove the IP address completely at 6 months, instead of 18 months.

Google and Yahoo have yet to agree to this, but Microsoft’s move puts pressure on them to do so. Google has argued in the past that it needs to store user date to improve the quality of search:

Back in March 2007, Google became the first leading search engine to announce a policy to anonymize our search server logs in the interests of privacy. And many others in the industry quickly followed our lead. Although that was good for privacy, it was a difficult decision because the routine server log data we collect has always been a critical ingredient of innovation. We have published a series of blog posts explaining how we use logs data for the benefit of our users: to make improvements to search quality, improve security, fight fraud and reduce spam.

Currently Google “anonymizes” IP addresses on its server logs after nine months. Again, what Microsoft is agreeing to do is not just make anonymous but completely delete IP addresses after six months.

Google will likely have to match Microsoft’s position and will have difficulty continuing to argue that IP data retention for more than six months is necessary for any purpose. Yahoo may, upon implementation of the Microsoft-Yahoo Search deal, automatically be opted in to this via Microsoft’s compliance.

Here are previous posts on this subject:

• Google Halves Data Retention Time Against Backdrop Of EU Pressure, US Regulatory Scrutiny
• European Groups Says Search Engines Must Delete Search Data Within Six Months
• Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, & Other Search Engines Must Comply With EU Privacy Rules
• Microsoft To Anonymize Log Data; Calls For Industry Standards Along With Ask.com
• EU Group May Serve Google With Letter Over Data Retention Policies
• European Union Questions Google’s Data Retention Policy

However the Chinese government, for its part, issued a bland statement that suggested it likely wasn’t going to allow Google to operate unfiltered or negotiate with the search engine. According to a Bloomberg report:

“The Chinese government administers the Internet according to law and we have explicit stipulations over what content can be spread on the Internet,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a regular briefing in Beijing today. Chinese law prohibits hacking and other forms of online attacks, she said, declining to say whether that law also applies to state agencies.

Meanwhile the state-controlled People’s Daily called Google a “spoiled child” and, according to the Washington Post, predicted that it would not make good on its threat to leave China. Some cynics also don’t believe that Google will exit the market and suggest that the company is bluffing. However Google has placed itself in a position where it has little “wiggle room” without concessions from the Chinese, which don’t appear to be forthcoming. We can thus probably expect a shut down of Google.cn in the coming weeks.

According to another Bloomberg report Google employees in China are being put on involuntary “holiday” for an uncertain period of time.

Assuming Google does formally leave China, it is far from certain that Bing will be the beneficiary. Microsoft, prior to this incident, said China would be the top priority for Bing this year. While there could be gains by Bing, Baidu will likely further consolidate its control over the Chinese market.

“Microsoft is committed to the China market and the search market in China is the most important strategic market for Microsoft,” the company said on Tuesday in emailed responses to questions from Reuters.

China has the largest internet and mobile markets in the world; the scale is massive and the obvious basis for the quote above. There are 350 million Chinese Internet users and 700 million mobile phone subscribers according to various estimates. However, the Reuters piece pegs the value of paid search in China at only 2 billion yuan ($293 million) currently. (See Chris Sherman’s 2008 discussion of the Chinese search market for more detail.)

As is widely known, Baidu is the search-market leader in China with somewhere between 63 percent (comScore) and 75 percent (iResearch) share of query volume.  Google is number two with up to 31 percent (Analysys International). In Q2 Bing had 0.3 percent of the Chinese search market (iResearch).

The Reuters article suggests that there has been some growth in Bing’s Chinese usage since its launch in June:

Since Microsoft launched Bing’s China beta version in June, the number of users who have visited the site at least three times a month has increased 30 percent as of October.

The Chinese Internet is heavily censored by the government, which has been an ongoing source of controversy for American companies and search engines doing business there. Google and Yahoo have been roundly and repeatedly criticized for their participation in that censorship.

NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff wrote a column in November in which he called for a boycott of Bing because of its heavy apparent censorship of politically sensitive topics in China:

If you search a term on Bing that is politically sensitive in China, in English the results are legitimate. Search “Tiananmen” and you’ll find out about the army firing on pro-democracy protesters in 1989. Search Dalai Lama, Falun Gong and you also get credible results. Conduct the search in complex Chinese characters (the kind used in Taiwan and Hong Kong) and on the whole you still get authentic results.

But conduct the search with the simplified characters used in mainland China, then you get sanitized pro-Communist results. This is especially true of image searches. Magic! No Tiananmen Square massacre. The Dalai Lama becomes an oppressor. Falun Gong believers are villains, not victims.

What’s most offensive is that this is true wherever in the world the search is conducted – including in my office in New York. If Microsoft felt it had to bow to Chinese censorship within China’s borders, based on the IP address, that might be defensible. But when Microsoft skews its worldwide searches to make Hu Jintao feel better, that’s a disgrace. It becomes simply a unit of the Central Committee Propaganda Department.

Microsoft responded to the column in a blog post, but largely sidestepped the thrust of the criticism asserting instead that these results were the by-product of bugs rather than censorship. Google, for its part, has also tried to sidestep similar criticism and justify its compliance with Chinese government rules, even suggesting that it’s helping to improve the censorship climate in China.

The search battle in China will soon move off the desktop and onto mobile devices.

The iPhone, after a slow start, has sold reasonably well there. The iPhone is predominately a Google search device. In addition, Google will be using Android handsets — and voice search in Mandarin — as a way to gain share in the market. Baidu is also making an effort to get its mobile search application pre-installed on handsets to prevent Google from making large gains in search via mobile. Currently Nokia handsets are dominant in China but that will change as more smartphones are adopted, which should favor Google.

Given how entrenched Baidu appears to be on the PC and how Google is well positioned in mobile, it will be challenging for Microsoft to make significant gains. But even a small share gain means lots of potential volume given the size of the Chinese market.

Now the EU regulatory authorities and Microsoft have struck a deal over browsers. The deal requires Microsoft to offer consumers the choice of many browsers on the Windows OS. According to the NY Times:

European regulators dropped their antitrust case against Microsoft on Wednesday after the software maker agreed to offer consumers a choice of rival Web browsers. The settlement averted a second costly legal battle for the American software giant.

Neelie Kroes, the European competition commissioner, said the agrrement with Microsoft was an “early Christmas present for more than hundreds of millions of Europeans” who would get “effective and unbiased choice” between competing browsers.

EU consumers will get to choose from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, AOL and six other lesser-known browsers.

IE reportedly has approximately 60 percent of the market across Europe. But see StatCounter data for slightly different numbers below. Opera was the source of the complaint that was concluded with this settlement.

Microsoft responded to this criticism with their blog post named committed to comprehensive results. Microsoft said they fixed a bug over the summer and discovered a new bug over the weekend with image search and using Simplified Chinese characters outside of the PRC. Microsoft said the “bug” will be fixed before the Thanksgiving holiday, which is this coming Thursday.

Kristof from the New York Time doesn’t seem to believe Microsoft and says he is “very skeptical” that this “bug” will be fixed properly. Kristof has shared dated screen captures of the queries that generated “bugs” or censored results.

Censorship, search engines and China have a long history. China, Censorship & Google Redux from Greg is likely one of the more recent write ups we have on the topic.

Here’s what a Bing Maps version of London looks like:

The Bing version is quite a bit cleaner and more pleasing in my view. Many of the Bing Maps capabilities, such as “Birds Eye” aerial imagery, had been available through multiMap prior to this however.

Now Bing Maps proper will be available in the UK. The Bing Community blog details the changes to the mapping interface and features, including new navigation and mapping layers that can be turned on or off. Many of these improvements parallel recent upgrades made in the US to the Bing Maps interface and features.