Posts Tagged ‘Microsoft Bing’

Microsoft updates its Bing Maps application with more features, including one that integrates Flickr photos into its Streetside view, which presents an eye-level view of terrain. In the future, Microsoft plans to add real-time video, interior panoramas and constellation viewing to Bing Maps. The Bing road map for 2010 includes an increased focus on knitting together data from multiple sources for its results pages and structuring results more efficiently with help from third parties.

Microsoft has integrated new features into its Bing Maps application as it continues to battle Google for U.S. search engine market share. The latest features continue the bulking-up of Bing Maps that has taken place over the previous few months and follow the road map for Bing that Microsoft laid out in January at the Consumer Electronics Show.

One of the new features is a technology preview of the Streetside Photos application, which attaches geotagged Flickr photos to a particular location in Bing Maps’ eye-level Streetside view of terrain. Historical photos will also be incorporated, allowing users to see a particular neighborhood as it looked in the past. Microsoft is working on video overlay technology that will attempt to unite real-time video with street-level imagery, something it promises to demonstrate in more depth by the end of 2010.

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Maybe the idea of using Bing for search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t such a big deal after all.

While many have touted the importance of a Microhoo deal which would give Bing and Yahoo a significant portion of the search engine market and make the combined entity more important in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), it seems that Bing has hit a snag.

According to figures released last week from StatCounter, Bing saw its market share in the U.S. and around the globe drop for the first time since it was unveiled earlier this year. In what may make matters worse for the Microsoft/Yahoo partnership, Yahoo also saw its U.S. market share drop more than a full percentage point in September.

Both Yahoo and Bing’s drop appears to be a direct gain for search behemoth Google. According to StatCounter, a combined Bing/Yahoo search presence had 20.14 percent of the U.S. search market in August, compared to 77.83 percent for Google. But in September, Yahoo and Bing saw their share drop to 17.91 percent while Google increased to 80.08 percent.

“The trend has been downwards for Bing since mid-August,” said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen. “The wheels haven’t fallen off but the underlying trend must be a little worrying for Microsoft.”

However, it may be too early to count out Bing as last month Nielsen reported that the Microsoft product held 10 percent of the search engine market.

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) on Monday launched an enhancement to Bing that allows users of the search engine to find certain items by viewing images instead of sifting through pages of text-based Internet links.

For instance, a search on HDTVs yields rows of images of flat-panel televisions. The results can be grouped by manufacturer, display technology, screen size, and resolution. Similarly, a query on new cars renders pictures of various models that are sortable by automaker, mileage, price, and vehicle type.

At present, Bing’s visual search engine is in the beta stage and is limited to several search categories predetermined by Microsoft. But company officials believe the technology has big potential and could help Microsoft close the gap with market leader Google.

“It’s clear that images play a big part in helping consumers with a variety of search activities,” said Bing product manager Todd Schwartz, in a blog post Monday. A study by Microsoft found that consumers can process image results 20% faster than text-only search results, according to Schwartz.

“Visual search is a new way to formulate and refine your search queries through imagery, particularly for sets of results that tend to be more structured,” wrote Schwartz. “What you’ll see is an amazing new visual search experience,” said Schwartz.

Bing’s visual search capability, which is powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight Web display technology, is the latest sign that Redmond is pulling out all the stops in its effort to catch Google. The company in July announced a far-reaching deal with Yahoo under which Bing will become the primary search engine on Yahoo’s Web properties while Microsoft gains the right to add search technology previously developed by Yahoo to Bing.

Still, Microsoft has, to put it mildly, its work cut out. Google holds about 83% of the worldwide search market, according to the most recent numbers from market watcher Net Applications. Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) holds 7%, while Microsoft, mostly through Bing, owns a mere 3.5%.

Microsoft isn’t giving up. In his blog, Schwartz said the software maker will roll out more new Bing features—including additional visual search capabilities–in the coming months.

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• Information Week

LegitScript, an online pharmacy verification service, and KnujOn, an Internet compliance company, have released a report analyzing Microsoft’s sponsored search results for Internet pharmacies displayed on bing.com. The report indicates that 89.7% of the Microsoft Internet pharmacy advertisements reviewed by the authors were fake or illegal Internet pharmacies.

Most of the Internet pharmacy advertisements analyzed in the report did not require a valid prescription. The authors were able to order a prescription-only muscle relaxant from a Microsoft-sponsored Internet pharmacy advertisement without any prescription.

Also, the authors ordered another prescription drug from a Microsoft-sponsored advertisement that tested positive as counterfeit.

Search engine advertising programs allow website owners to purchase visibility on the first few pages of search results, where online ads are listed as “sponsored sites.” Because Microsoft receives revenue when an Internet user clicks on a bing.com advertisement, it is generally accepted that online ads should not facilitate unlawful activity.

LegitScript President John Horton said, “We were able to purchase potentially addictive drugs without a prescription or any age verification via bing.com ads. We also received counterfeit medication. Microsoft profits from these illegal ads, which put Internet users at risk.”

The study also found disclosure gaps in bing.com’s advertising program, showing how an advertisement that appears to have been placed by a legitimate pharmacy links instead to a “rogue” online pharmacy.

“We urge Microsoft to fix this problem,” Horton and Bruen stated. “By continuing to allow these advertisements, Microsoft is facilitating prescription drug abuse and the proliferation of counterfeit drugs, both of which put our most vulnerable citizens at risk.”

The full report is available here.

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• Net Security

As if Twitter wasn’t already addictive enough, now the folks at Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, have figured out a way to make it even more mesmerizing.  The site is called BingTweets, and it… well, you can probably guess what it does.  It presents you with a combined view of the search engine, the current list of Trending Topics, and a live feed of current tweets that match the Bing search criteria you enter in the “Search Bing & Twitter” field.

I’m not much of a Twitter hound myself, but I admit to becoming somewhat enraptured by the synergy between the search results and the tweet feed. By searching for “PCMag,” for example, I received not only handful of useful (and official) links, but also commentary about some of the recent stories we’ve covered. If I entered an even more well-traveled topic, such as Harry Potter (the sixth movie was released today, after all), the feed spun almost as wildly as a malfunctioning slot machine.

BingTweets struck me as an efficient and enjoyable way to get sources of established and of-the-minute opinion at the same time, in the same window–a real convenience and patience saver. The most significant drawback I noted with it was the generally impersonal experience it offered. Because you can’t log in to the service, you have no access to what your friends are saying (unless they just happen to be discussing whatever search term you enter).  As Twitter is as much about maintaining close (140-character) relationships as forging new ones, this limits BingTweets’s usefulness on a personal level. (A “Share This” feature in the upper-right corner lets you tweet, e-mail, text, or post to various social networking sites your BingTweets results, which at least is a nice to way to hopefully engage your friends.)

The service compensates somewhat for this shortcoming with an expanded, and highly useful, Trending Topics box. Expanding on what’s available on the Twitter site itself, you have instant access to not just the hottest overall topics, but specific people, places, and products–just click one of the tabs in the box to narrow down your Topic search to those areas. It, like the rest of BingTweets, is a handy feature that makes Twitter–at least for the casual user–easier and a bit more fun.

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• App Scout

New stats from monitoring service StatCounter suggest that for the second time since its launch, Microsoft’s Bing has surpassed Yahoo Search as the second most used search engine in the United States. Shortly after publicly debuting the new service, Bing already jumped over Yahoo Search – if only for one day – which many attributed to the launch momentum. But Bing has proven to be a very solid product that many seem keen to try out even after a month.

According to the new data, Bing took 12.9% of the US market like comScore had earlier measured. With the strong jump, Bing comes out ahead of Yahoo Search (10.15%), while Mountain View remains the undisputed king of the mountain with a US market share of 75%.

StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen comments on the leapfrogging of Yahoo Search by Bing, saying: “The jump in Bing?s share may reflect a positive review of the search engine compared to Google which appeared online in the New York Times on the 8th and in the print version on the 9th July.” I’m not really sure if that is in fact the reason and if this isn’t just the service’s regular growth path. After all, Microsoft has shown a remarkable drive to keep the momentum for its decision engine going, recently adding Twitter messages to search results and bringing the search platform to its Hotmail service. Surely one newspaper article can’t be the only reason for its steady rise in share?

In any event, while Google shouldn’t be particularly worried about losing its dominance on the search market yet, the other players in the field better be watching Bing’s progress very closely. Microsoft is doing it right, and users are noticing, too.

Source:

• Washington Post