In an effort to outdo Google's social search integration, Microsoft has tagged Facebook. Here's what the move means.

By Thomas Claburn   InformationWeek
May 11, 2012 09:05 AM

Posted on: Monday, 27 September 2010, 06:15 CDT

Microsoft’s Bing search engine is seen as the main threat to Google, not Apple nor Facebook, said the company’s chief executive officer Eric Schmidt on Friday.

Schmidt said in an interview posted online that while “Web search is not the only game in town, searching information is what it is all about.”

He said that both Apple and Facebook are well-respected competitors, but Microsoft’s fast growing search engine was the main competition for Google. “Bing is a well-run, highly competitive search engine,” he said.

“We consider neither to be a competitive threat,” Schmidt said, referring to Apple and Facebook.

Bing overtook Yahoo for the first time to become the number two search engine in the US in August, according to tracking firm The Nielsen Co.

While Bing rose to a 13.9 percent share of US search volume in August, Yahoo dropped from 14.6 percent in July to 13.1 percent in August, said Nielsen.

Although Google continues...

Microsoft has announced a new feature on their Bing Social search service – recommendations of people you should follow on Twitter when you perform a query.

This is a similar feature to what Twitter offers, and now Microsoft has joined the group and makes recommendations based on the keywords of the research.

This new feature is extremely advanced in some topics, like celebrities or bands, and it even tells you if the account is authentic, by displaying a blue and white checkmark next to the name.

Bing says that this is a way of “more relevant, real time and connected results,” said Mike Ching and Shubha Nabar, from Bing Social.

“Our work with Twitter and Facebook over the last year or so has helped us create what is in effect a “social layer” for search that brings social information into the search experience in real time.” 

Microsoft on Wednesday is launching Redu, a Bing-powered site that aims to act as a "homeroom" for people interested in learning more about the state of American schools. The Web site, to which Microsoft plans to link from Bing.com, aspires to be an online hub for those looking to donate to schools, volunteer locally, or work in education.

This week, Yahoo! advertisers can begin transitioning their paid search campaigns to Microsoft adCenter. During the transition, which is on-track for completion by the end of October, advertisers will continue to manage separate accounts on adCenter (serving ads on Bing) and Yahoo! Search Marketing (serving ads on Yahoo! Search). Once the transition is completed, advertisers will operate one single account on Microsoft adCenter that will power search advertising campaigns across Bing and Yahoo!’s combined audience representing 31.6 percent of U.S. search market share. 

Bing launched a new World of Warcraft (WoW) visual search gallery on Wednesday, hoping to wow some of the game's more than 12 million players.

Whether it's the Chestplate of Septic Stitches, the Bloodvenom Blade, or the Ring of Rotting Sinew, the new Bing gallery lets players search, filter, and view images, videos, information, statistics, and links, as well as comments and blog posts, for the game's most popular items.

In late 2009, when Microsoft introduced a downloadable application for the iPhone from Apple, it set off some excitement in the tech world. For years, Microsoft and Apple had been head-to-head in the war for personal computing.

Looking for a food cart in Portland, Ore.? There's probably one right in front of you. But maybe there's one up the street that's better. Now you can find out such things with a new mapping layer from Microsoft for its Bing Maps service.

After last week's proposed net neutrality de-evolution by Google and Verizon, I found myself wondering if the company that claimed its company goal was to "Don't Be Evil" had in fact turned evil. The same company that just four years earlier made a video bashing mobile carriers for wanting to give priority to certain traffic.

Yahoo’s transition to using Microsoft’s Bing for powering its searches begins this week for users in the U.S. and Canada, the company announced in a blog post today.

Microsoft is shuffling the top management of its MSN portal, six months after rolling out a major redesign of the site. The company has hired Ted Cahall, who left his post as CTO of AOL in January, as its new corporate vice president of MSN.

By Mike Swift
mswift@mercurynews.com

Just two years ago, Yahoo spent $79 million to rebuff a hostile takeover from Microsoft and preserve its independence. Now, a big part of Yahoo's future prosperity depends on how well it can join arms with Microsoft on a high-risk, high-reward technical project.

Google has long presented itself as looking out for the little guy. It easily could have used its wealth and power to gain preferential treatment from Internet providers but always said it would not because that could prevent the next start-up in a Silicon Valley garage from enjoying similar success.

But as Google has gotten bigger and entered new lines of business, it has revised some of its principles -- and it is drawing criticism from start-ups and public interest groups along the way.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the newest layer for Bing Maps and the newest Bing Map App in the gallery. The map app, dubbed simply, “OpenStreetMap” loads OSM maps as a new map style option.

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER and ASHLEE VANCE - Published: August 1, 2010

Edwin Perello discovered that Bing, the Microsoft search engine, could find addresses in his rural Indiana town when Google could not. Laura Michelson, an administrative assistant in San Francisco, was lured by Bing’s flight fare tracker. Paul Callan, a photography buff in Chicago, fell for Bing’s vivid background images.

Like most Americans, they still use Google as their main search tool. But more often, they find themselves navigating to Microsoft’s year-old Bing for certain tasks, and sometimes they stay a while.

“I was a Google user before, but the more I used Bing the more I liked it,” Mr. Callan said. “It’s more like muscle memory takes me to Google.”

Bing still handles a small slice of Web searches in the United States, 12.7 percent in June, compared with Google’s 62.6 percent, as measured by comScore, the Web analytics firm. But Bing’s share has been growing, as has Yahoo’s, while Google’s has been shrinking.

And while no one argues that Google’s dominance is in immediate jeopardy, Google is watching Microsoft closely, mimicking some of Bing’s innovations — like its travel search engine, its ability to tie more tools to social networking sites and its image search — or buying start-ups to help it do so in the future.

By Kristin at the Bing Community

Today, we’re announcing the release of the updated Bing Webmaster Tools. After the Bing launch, we reached out to the webmaster and SEO communities to see how we could improve the webmaster tools. Your feedback was very consistent: you wanted more transparency to see how Bing crawls and indexes your sites, more control over your content in the Bing Index, and more information to help you optimize your sites for Bing.

Jeff Bertolucci, PC World, Jul 20, 2010 6:05 pm

It's good to see the smart folks at Google Search are keeping a close eye on the competition. The company's official blog today announced a series of minor but useful tweaks to the popular Google Image Search, which has mushroomed from a relatively tiny index of some 250 million images when it launched in 2001 to more than 10 billion today.

Some of the new features are, ahem, borrowed from Microsoft's third-place Bing search engine, which has endeavored to out-innovate Google Search ever since its May 2009 debut.

Google's most notable Bing-like upgrade is called "instant scrolling." Rather than view a static page of thumbnail images, and then click a link at the bottom of the page to see more, you can now view images as one continuous scroll. (Actually, this feature predates Bing. Microsoft's long-forgotten Live Search had it too.)

Google Image Search displays up to 1,000 thumbnails per page. I tested Bing's auto-scroll feature, which maxed-out at 985. Take that, Bing.

Another of Google's Bing-esque upgrades is a hover pane that appears when you pause the cursor over a thumbnail. While Bing's pane shows only details about the image, such as resolution and file size, Google displays a larger preview as well.

By: Nicholas Kolakowski - 2010-07-10 

Microsoft's Bing continued to make incremental gains against Google in the U.S. search engine market, according to Experian Hitwise. Bing has continued to build out Web portal-like features to attract users.

Microsoft’s Bing continued its pattern of incremental gains, according to research firm Experian Hitwise, which reported the search engine grew to occupy 9.85 percent of the U.S. search engine market in June.

That represents a 7-percent change from May, when Hitwise estimated Bing’s share of the market at 9.23 percent. Meanwhile, Google continued to dominate with 71.65 percent of the U.S. search engine market, dropped nearly a percentage point since May. Yahoo dipped only slightly, from 14.43 percent to 14.37 percent.

Since launching in summer 2009, and despite some early predictions of its imminent demise, Bing has managed to seize between 9 and 12 percent of the search-engine market, depending on the survey. While those numbers are dwarfed by Google’s, which holds between 66 and 72 percent of the market, Bing’s growth over the past year suggests the Website is capable of longer-term survival, even after Microsoft ratcheted down its initial multimillion-dollar marketing push.

Internet giant aiming to acquire ITA Software for $700 million.

Google Inc.'s intention to buy ITA Software Inc. for $700 million, announced Thursday, could put the company in control of widely used technology that, among other things, helps power a key aspect of Microsoft Corp.'s rival search engine.

Google said in a statement that ITA Software's technology "opens exciting possibilities for us to create new way for users to more easily find flight information online."

Among other clients, Microsoft uses ITA Software's technology to include airfare pricing and availability information in Bing, according to ITA Software's Web site.

Bing is a search engine unveiled amid a great deal of fanfare last year. Microsoft has touted Bing's ability to provide accurate, up-to-date information on airfares as an important aspect that helps distinguish the search engine from competitors, including Google.

In this release of Bing one of the biggest investments we are making is in the area of entertainment. As the content on the web has exploded, it has become difficult to navigate and find what you are looking for. In the field of entertainment, 76 percent of people use search to help find and navigate their entertainment options online, but only 10 percent say they have a trusted place to go.