Microsoft Go Social With Bing And Leave Out Google+
Microsoft is boosting Bing Search with more social networking features to truly take on Google’s dominant search engine. Bing will drill deeper into Facebook’s social network and Twitter’s messaging service but leave out Google+.
Here are the new features of Bing Search:
- Core Search loses many of the social annotations that Bing has added over the years
- Snapshot provides additional information about a particular search listing, without having to leave Bing
- Sidebar serves as a new home for social integration with search
Microsoft’s Bing Will Power China’s Baidu
Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, will be used by Baidu to provide English language search results by the end of 2011. Baidu holds 80% of the search engine market in China. Google’s has pull its search engine from China following a high-profile dust-up over censorship of search results.
Microsoft Bing Integrates Facebook Into Search
Microsoft likes Facebook so much that they are integrating the coveted “like” data into its Bing search engine. Bing will start prioritizing websites that a user’s friends have liked in the past. Users can also receive personalized search results based on the opinions of their friends by simply signing into Facebook. Bing will also begin to determine search engine rankings based on the number of likes it generates.
Bing Maps Can Calculate Taxi Fares Before Google
Microsoft is trying to outdone Google by introducing a taxi fare calculator withing Bing Maps. This feature is great for tourists and locals. Google time to innovate Google Maps with more features.
Microsoft Bing Adds Music, Videos, Games To Retain Users
Microsoft needs to gain market share in the search arena and to steal more users away from Google, the company is bringing in the muscle of its modest entertainment empire. New features on the Bing search engine allow users to stream music, watch videos and play games all within the Bing domain. Check it out now on Bing.
Read more about this on the Bing Blog.
Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal Gets Green Light
Antitrust regulators in the U.S. and European Commission have given the green light to allow Yahoo to use Microsoft Bing search for a slice of ad revenue. Yahoo will focus on attracting big advertisers and share the revenue with Microsoft.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said, Yahoo gets to do what we do best: combine our science and technology with compelling content to build personally relevant online experiences to our users and customers.
Apple May Ditch Google And Make Bing Default On iPhone
According to a story published by Business Week, Apple may be making Microsoft’s Bing the default search app. Currently Google search is by default the iPhone search engine. Apple now sees Google as the rival after the popular search engine company launch the Google Nexus One smartphone.
Microsoft Sued Over Bing
Microsoft has been sued over using the name Bing by Bing! Information Designs LLC., a small computer-based design firm. The small firm claims that Microsoft’s use of the name dilutes the value of it and confuses the public about the companies’ relationship to each other.
Microsoft did not care much about this at all saying We do not believe there is any confusion in the marketplace [between the search engine and the design firm. And also the small firm only register their company name in May 26 (according to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office records) this year even though they have set up shop in 2000. Why?
Microsoft filed the name Bing on March 2009. Is there any merit in the suing? Very ambitious indeed.
Microsoft Bing App Now On iPhone
Microsoft is now providing the free Bing App for the iPhone. You can now download it on Apple App Store. The app, will allow you to do Web searches and other specialized queries such as images, videos, maps, business locations, and news. The app also features voice search for maps and the web.
Microsoft Bing Suffers Outage
Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, suffers an outage today with users getting a browser error message rather than a search bar. The search service was down for at least 45 minutes before being restored around 7:10 p.m. PST.
Here is what Microsoft said:
The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences.
As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior. Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time users were unable to use bing.com.
We strive to maintain a high standard of operational excellence at Bing. We are running a post mortem to find out how our software and processes need to be improved to prevent anything like this from happening again.
