To learn more about Microsoft and its Bing search engine, also see our Search Engine Land’s Guide To Bing page.

Bing Ads Redesigns Hub For Ad Manager Resources

Apr 1, 2013 at 10:10am ET by Ginny Marvin

Bing Ads has launched a redesign of its search advertising site. The site is designed to provide a single access point for content and resources about Bing Ads and search advertising on the Yahoo! Bing Network. It consolidates materials from the Bing Ads Community site, the Bing Ads search advertising support center and the help files found within the Bing Ads platform itself. The Bing Ads blog, forum and training materials as well as vertical insights (which covers the finance, health & fitness, home & garden and travel industries) and tool downloads like Bing Ads Editor are [...]

Bing’s April Fools’ Jokes Include A Slam On Google & A New SEO Tag

Apr 1, 2013 at 4:21am ET by Matt McGee

Bing is hopping on the April Fools' Day joke bandwagon later than Google and even Wolfram Alpha, but it's taking a swing at Google in one of the two gags that it just announced via separate blog posts. Bing Basic On its main search blog, Bing has an esoteric blog post that talks about "Bing Basic," a feature that lets searchers experience Bing's home page without the large, colorful and almost always beautiful, clickable photos. The post says Bing is running a test today and, if you know "a certain telltale query," this is what you'll experience: ...you'll get something a little more bla [...]

CPC Decline Ends: Rising 7% In Q1 Due To Mobile & PLAs [Covario]

Mar 28, 2013 at 2:07pm ET by Ginny Marvin

We may have seen the end of CPC stagnation. Covario's Global Paid Search Spend Analysis for Q1, released today, suggests that the cost-per-click trends of the last six quarters have reversed with CPC prices rising 7% from the previous quarter and 23% year-over-year. Overall paid search spend grew 9% quarter-over-quarter and 33% year-over-year. The following chart shows global paid search activity for Q1 ‘13: Google CPCs Rise 39% Year-Over-Year The study suggests that rising CPCs on Google a [...]

Bing Adds Search Filter To Sort Results By Time Period

Mar 27, 2013 at 5:25pm ET by Matt McGee

Bing has added a search filter that gives users the opportunity to limit search results to three recent time periods: Past 24 hours Past week Past month The options appear directly below the search box on Bing's search results page. It's a welcome addition, but one that Google has had for a long time now. In fact, Bing's time filter comes up a bit short of Google's in a couple regards: on Google, you can set a custom date range (but not on Bing) and, after limiting search results on Google to a specific time frame, you can also sort them by relevance or date. Bing's filter ap [...]

Microsoft “Research” Discovers The Obvious In Renewed Anti-Trust Attack On Google

Mar 26, 2013 at 11:55am ET by Danny Sullivan

Did you know that the higher a site is listed in search results, the more traffic that site is likely to receive? If you're a search marketer, or anyone with a dose of common sense, you do. But Microsoft had research conducted to yet again prove this point, in an attempt to influence the ongoing EU antitrust review against Google. Microsoft's Hired Gun Does Research In a Microsoft blog post today, Susan Athey, a Microsoft consultant and professor of economics at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, writes about how she worked with those from Microsoft's Bing search engine to c [...]

Bing Offers Recommendations for SEO-Friendly AJAX: Suggests HTML5 pushState

Mar 25, 2013 at 10:12pm ET by Vanessa Fox

Bing has announced support for HTML5 pushState as a way to implement AJAX on a site in a way that enables Bing to crawl and index the URLs and content. As Google has supported this implementation since early 2012, site owners finally have an AJAX option that can be crawled and indexed by both major search engines in the United States. (The ease of implementing is another story altogether.) Bing tells me that while they still support the #! version of crawlable AJAX originally launched by Google, they're finding it's not implemented correctly much of the time, and they strongly recommend pus [...]

Microsoft Shows Off Coming Improvements To Bing App’s Voice Search

Mar 22, 2013 at 2:23pm ET by Matt McGee

Microsoft has shared video of what was a confidential, employee-only demonstration of new voice search capabilities in its Bing app for Windows Phones. The demo, reported by MSFTKitchen, shows a substantially faster and more accurate voice search experience that also performs better in noisy situations. In the demo, Bing's new voice search system appears to respond about twice as fast as the existing system. The speed improvement gives Bing the ability to show search results while the user is still saying the search query. The Microsoft employee giving the demo says that the new s [...]

Bing Snapshot Grows To Understand People, Places & Things With “Satori” Expansion

Mar 21, 2013 at 12:21pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Over the past year, Bing's been steadily growing the "Snapshots" it shows on the right-hand side of its pages. Now, Bing says those are taking another leap to better understand relationships between people, places and things, using an expansion of what it calls its "Satori" technology. Bing writes on its blog today saying: Today, we are inviting people to check out Snapshot to experience our expansion of Satori. Since its introduction in June, we have expanded Satori to include a significantly larger number of entities from more domains with a deeper level of understanding about them. T [...]

SMX West: The Search Police Video With Google’s Matt Cutts & Bing’s Duane Forrester

Mar 20, 2013 at 9:47am ET by Barry Schwartz

One of the highlights from the SMX West show a week ago was the session named "The Search Police: Matt & Duane's Excellent Search Engine Adventure." The panel featured Google's Matt Cutts and Bing's Duane Forrester as Bill & Ted with Danny Sullivan playing Rufus. Matt (Bill) and Duane (Ted) both give presentations and then answer questions from the attendees. Here is the full video: There were a lot of nuggets that came out of this video, from the next Penguin and Panda updates to link networks being discredited and penalized to a discussion of whether the PageRank indicat [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Microsoft: Bing SEO

New PPC Report: Bing Ads Vs. Google AdWords In 6 US Verticals

Mar 20, 2013 at 8:15am ET by Ginny Marvin

AdGooroo has released a new study titled Yahoo! Bing PPC Performance Metrics that analyzes advertiser participation and performance metrics on the Yahoo! Bing network through Bing Ads compared to Google AdWords. The study looked at U.S. advertisers in six verticals during Q312. Backing up one of the loudest complaints among advertisers about the Yahoo! Bing network, the study found that AdWords out-delivered Bing Ads by serving 7.3 million more ad impressions in the Shopping and Classified category. A surprise, however, was to see Bing Ads come out ahead in the Financial Services categor [...]

Is Bing Testing “Subjectship” Rather Than Authorship In Its Search Results?

Mar 19, 2013 at 3:17pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Some are spotting new author images appearing in Bing's search results today, similar to the way Google shows author images. Except, they're not really author images. They're what I'd call subject images, something that might be coming more formally to Bing. Author Images At Google Here are two examples of authorship images as they appear on Google: The first is a picture of Kara Swisher, next to a search that brought up an article that she wrote on the new season of Game Of Thrones. The second is for myself, for an article I wrote about a test I ran to see if my two boys would ch [...]

Bing Webmaster Tools Adds Site Move Tool

Mar 18, 2013 at 9:32am ET by Barry Schwartz

Bing announced a new feature for Bing Webmaster Tools - the ability to inform Bing of a site move. The new Bing Site Move Tool allows you to not just move from one domain to another domain but also from within a site; URLs to URLs. Moving From Within The Same Domain Name If you are moving and redirecting many URLs from one place to another within the same existing site, this scenario is useful if you want to notify Bing of a major URL move within the same site. This comes in handy when you’ve redesigned your site architecture and are now redirecting many URLs to new locations, and you w [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Microsoft: Bing Webmaster Tools | Top News

Bing Ads Makes Campaign & Ad Group Targeting Improvements

Mar 13, 2013 at 11:27am ET by Ginny Marvin

In its Februrary release, Bing Ads made changes to how ad group and campaign targets relate to each other. Prior to the release on February 18th, ad group targets overrode campaign targets. Now, both target settings will be considered together to improve ad relevancy and delivery. Here is the company's summary of the change: If you are using ad group level targets, Bing recommends looking for any intended or unintended differences in chosen targets at your campaign and ad group levels. Also in the February release, keyword research tool upgrades and Bing Ads Intelligence rolle [...]

“Better Than Google” Claims: Why Doesn’t Anyone Believe Them?

Mar 11, 2013 at 10:53am ET by Greg Sterling

Microsoft continues to run online its Pepsi-Challenge style ads "Bing It On," in which a majority of users prefer Bing in a "blind comparison test" with Google. Despite the commercials and despite Microsoft reporting that after extensive testing users preferred Bing 2:1, people generally express skepticism. People simply don't buy the campaign. Another recent study conducted by Butler University found that Q&A engine ChaCha bested Google in terms of the quality of answers provided (across nearly 4,000 queries). And last week, YP released the results of an extensive study of local sea [...]

Google On Bing Attack Ads: “Others Should Focus On Building Good Products”

Mar 10, 2013 at 1:14pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Google has largely ignored Bing's Scroogled campaign, the one attacking it over the pay-for-play change to Google Shoppping & Gmail privacy. But today, Google search chief Amit Singhal pushed back a bit, saying Bing perhaps should focus on making better products rather than attacking Google. Speaking at the SXSW conference, when taking a question posed via Twitter about how Google views Bing's attacks, Singhal responded to say "We focus on our users." Then he continued: "Others should focus on building good products, too" to audience applause. You can read more of his talk here: Li [...]

Microsoft’s ViralSearch: Search Engine For Measuring Tweets & Viral Content

Mar 6, 2013 at 2:45pm ET by Barry Schwartz

VentureBeat reports Microsoft announced a new research project named ViralSearch. ViralSearch lets you search and navigate cascades of people passing content on social media and distinguish between things that are not just popular but also became viral in a sense that they are being passed from one person to the next over many generations. ViralSearch does this by analyzing news, videos, and photos shared within Twitter. It looks to see how many shares there were throughout the user base, over time and over generations of users. For example, in this screen shot, it shows a story Tim O [...]

Microsoft Says Goodbye To “Scroogled” Ad Campaign

Mar 4, 2013 at 9:36am ET by Greg Sterling

Microsoft's "Scroogled" ad campaign, which attacked Google over paid inclusion in shopping and Gmail over privacy, is coming to an end. KQED reports that Microsoft will stop TV, newspaper and social media ads promoting the Scroogled message: "That part is about finished," Stefan Weitz, Microsoft senior director of online services, said on Thursday. Microsoft launched the Scroogled campaign last November to attack Google's all-paid-inclusion shopping search results. Our stories below cover more about this: Bing Attacks Google Shopping With “Scroogled” Campaign, Forgets It’s Guilt [...]

Bing Maps Adds Variety Of Hi-Res Image Improvements

Feb 28, 2013 at 2:41pm ET by Matt McGee

Bing Maps has announced a series of updates to its high-resolution imagery, including expanded coverage, better mapping of ocean floors, cloud filtering and more. The prime features that Bing is touting involve what it calls "top of the world" imagery -- those hi-res, top-down images. Improvements there include: Cloud cover filtering: Bing processes its base satellite imagery and reduces cloud cover in areas where views are often blocked by persistent cloud cover. Bing's example photos of Oahu show how that works: Another improvement involves the addition of ocean topography from [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Microsoft: Bing Maps & Local | Top News

Wisconsin State Court OKs Bidding On Trademarks In Paid Search

Feb 22, 2013 at 8:00am ET by Pamela Parker

[caption id="attachment_65488" align="alignright" width="240"] Image courtesy Shutterstock.com.[/caption] A Wisconsin appeals court this week affirmed a circuit court's ruling that it's OK to use trademarks as keywords to trigger the display of paid search ads. The court's conclusions are in line with search engines' policies with regard to trademark bidding and with a Federal case decided last year in California. The Wisconsin case, which involved two personal injury law firms, centered around what it means to "use" a name for advertising purposes. In the 2009 lawsuit, the owners of [...]

Bing Improves Search Auto Suggestions: Now Faster & Better

Feb 21, 2013 at 9:10am ET by Barry Schwartz

Dan Marantz, Senior Program Manager Lead at Bing announced on the Bing Search Blog that they have made two improvements to the auto-suggestions. Bing's auto-suggest is now faster and a lot more accurate, according to Bing. Bing said two "themes" are behind the change including navigational queries coming to the forefront of auto-suggest and search history being more extensively used within auto-suggest. They sped up the auto-suggest by using a technique called "ghosting" where Bing will show the suggestion in blue highlighted text in the search box and then show alternatives below. You c [...]

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

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