Bing recently introduced its updated people search feature and today, Microsoft is adding a few improvements to its people search that will make it even easier to find information about celebrities, politicians, athletes and many people with public LinkedIn profiles. Bing’s search box now auto-suggests names as you type. Because many people share the same name, this also means that it’s now easier… → Read More
Bing‘s social sidebar, which shows relevant entries from your Facebook friends, Twitter, Klout, Quora and other services, just got a lot more interactive. You can now like Facebook posts in the social sidebar and add their own comments. In addition you can now also see all of the existing comments on a post right in the sidebar, too. This, Microsoft believes, will make the social search… → Read More
So what does a high Klout score actually get you? The influence-measuring startup already offers prizes through its Klout Perks program, and there are bragging rights (unless your friends think you’re a loser for caring about your Klout score). Now Klout is asking users who are influential on a given topic to answer short, factual questions through the new Klout Experts program. It sounds like the… → Read More
The daily deals hype around Groupon, LivingSocial and all of their clones has markedly cooled down over the last few months, but that isn’t stopping Microsoft from launching Bing Offers, a new local deals aggregator for the U.S. market, today. The odd thing about this launch is that Bing previously offered a very similar feature called Bing Deals since 2011 – a service that now seems… → Read More
Last week, a study by German antivirus testing company AV-Test claimed that Microsoft’s Bing delivered “five times as many websites containing malware as Google.” Unsurprisingly, Microsoft does not agree with these findings and today, the company released a full rebuttal of AV-Test’s study. The researchers, Bing argues, used its API to execute queries instead of performing… → Read More
Microsoft today launched updates for five out of its six Bing Apps for Windows 8. With this update, the News, Finance, Sports, Travel and Maps apps – all of which are installed by default on Windows 8 systems – now all sport a number of new features and improvements that, as Microsoft puts it, “make it easier to customize and personalize them to best suit your needs.” The… → Read More
Bing users can now easily share the images they find with their friends on Pinterest. Starting today, Bing’s image search will feature the standard Pinterest ‘Pinit’ button on every photo details page, so the integration isn’t all that deep, but according to Microsoft, this will save avid Pinterest users “some of the hassles they face” when they try to… → Read More
Klout, the service for measuring online influence, is boosting its integration with both Bing and Instagram today.
On the Bing side, the news follows last fall’s announcement of a strategic investment from and partnership with Microsoft. That announcement included the unveiling of a feature in Bing that would show Klout scores for select people. (And Bing continues to surface more data on that… → Read More
Microsoft’s Bing search engine now knows quite a bit more about people and places, thanks to an upgrade to its Satori entity engine and a partnership with LinkedIn. This means Bing now features the profiles of “web-active” users, professionals and celebrities in its Snapshots bar and has a significantly better understanding about places and things. Today’s update… → Read More
Bing Maps just got a large update that brings a more detailed map of the ocean floor to Microsoft’s mapping service. This new bathymetry data is based on the data compiled by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. The update also introduces a new base satellite image from TerraColor with a resolution of 15 meters per pixel, as well as new high-res satellite imagery that covers a total… → Read More
Sonar, a social discovery service (and TechCrunch Disrupt alumni) which was among the top apps at last year’s SXSW in Austin, is today announcing new investment from Bing Fund. This angel fund and incubator program from Microsoft was publicly revealed this summer, allowing Microsoft to partner with entrepreneurs, who can then receive subsidies to use Bing APIs in their applications, as well as… → Read More
At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference this morning, Microsoft’s CFO Peter Klein was asked about the importance of Bing for the company. According to Klein, Microsoft decided to launch its own search engine because it saw it as a “massive business opportunity,” not only as a stand-alone search engine, but also to help it improve other parts of its business. → Read More
In an effort to create more synergy between its products, Microsoft’s search platform Bing has announced that Office 365 Premium is now available to users. The five apps included in the add-on for the newly launched Office 365 and Office 2013 make it easier for users to insert information and images directly from Bing searches into their documents. They are: Bing Finance for Excel, Bing Maps for… → Read More
Microsoft just announced a major update to Bing’s social search results. Just like Facebook is now integrating Bing deeper into its search tools, Microsoft is adding more Facebook content to Bing, too. In total, Microsoft says, “five times more of your friends’ content on Facebook is now searchable in the sidebar.” In addition to the photos you could already see in previous versions, Bing now also… → Read More
Mark Zuckerberg put the ball in Google’s court today at Facebook’s big Graph Search launch, saying “I would love to work with Google.” For now, though, Facebook hands off queries its Graph Search can’t answer to its internal Bing-powered web search engine. If relations with Google thaw out, it seems Facebook might look to integrate some of Google’s data. → Read More
Today at Facebook’s press event, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced its latest product, called Graph Search. Two of the members of the Graph Search team, Lars Rasmussen and Tom Stocky, were very high up at Google. Facebook is calling it a “Dream Team.” Zuckerberg made it very clear that this is not web search, but completely different: What’s more interesting than… → Read More
Microsoft updated Bing’s image search results pages with larger thumbnails and less white-space earlier this year and today, the company is taking this one step further by also introducing a new way to explore imagery on Bing. Instead of loading the actual page with the image after you click on a thumbnail, Bing now brings up a large image viewer that, as the company says, places “the image center… → Read More
A few days ago, Bing rolled out its redesigned social sidebar for the desktop and the company just announced that it is now also bringing this new design to its search results pages on the iPad. The new social sidebar – one of the marquee features of Microsoft’s search engine – now makes social search results from Facebook, Twitter, Klout and Foursquare on Bing significantly easier to read. As is… → Read More
Bing‘s social sidebar, which displays relevant results from friends and experts on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, is one of the defining features of Microsoft’s search engine. Today, Microsoft is giving the social sidebar a bit of a facelift by removing the dark gray background and making the overall design more streamlined and less cluttered. → Read More
Microsoft just launched a full-on offensive campaign for holiday shoppers called “Scroogled.” Yes, it’s what you think it is, it’s an attempt to tell people not to get screwed over by Google this holiday shopping season.
This is a Bing campaign, in case you weren’t sure. It’s pretty strong words, coming from any company. My thing? Don’t call competitors out unless you have the goods to back it… → Read More
Better late than never. With less than two weeks to go before the U.S. presidential election on November 6, Microsoft’s Bing just unveiled Bing Elections. The site features news results from major U.S. publications that can be filtered by political preference (right, left, center), as well as an interactive map with election results and sentiment analysis across key issues based on data from… → Read More
Not too long ago, Google and Bing seemed fully focused on adding as many social features to their search engines as possible. For Google, that meant adding lots of Google+ features and for Bing it meant making the best out of its exclusive relationship with Facebook. Since then, though, it seems the two search engines’ strategies have changed, with Google slowly deemphasizing social search and… → Read More
ComScore just published its latest U.S. search market numbers and things aren’t looking too good for Yahoo. Yahoo’s Bing-powered search lost another 0.6 percentage points and now has just 12.2% of the market. That’s down from 12.8% in August and 13% in July and June. → Read More
John D. Rockefeller, the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, late on Tuesday sent letters to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo alerting them to how their search engines are being gamed through search engine optimization tactics as part of a wider scam involving moving services, which has seen affected consumers lose personal possessions and pay thousands of… → Read More
Bing has a bit of an image problem and despite its best efforts, Microsoft claims, many people still have the perception that Google is simply “better.” To combat this, the company is launching its Bing It On challenge today. The challenge is essentially a Pepsi Challenge for search results. Microsoft says that in these blind tests, “people preferred Bing web search results nearly 2:1 over Google… → Read More
Microsoft and Quora just announced a new partnership that will bring content from the popular Q&A site to Bing’s social sidebar. Unlike some of Bing’s other integrations with social networks like Facebook, the Quora integration focuses less on content from your friends and more on bringing content from Quora’s topic experts to Bing. Just like the launch of Quora’s embeddable quotes earlier… → Read More
When the iPhone launched in 2007, there were three key components of the device that relied on Google:
1) Maps
2) YouTube
3) Web search
Let’s look at that list today, following the news that YouTube has been given the boot in the latest beta build of iOS 6: → Read More
Microsoft’s Bing search engine launched its social sidebar last month and the company has been adding features and support for additional social networks ever since. The core of Bing’s social efforts, however, is its Facebook integration and the company today announced a nice new feature for Facebook users on Bing. The social sidebar already allowed users to ask their Facebook friends questions… → Read More
This wasn’t exactly a secret anymore, but today, Microsoft officially unveiled its Bing Fund, a new angel fund and incubator program sponsored by Bing and “backed by the experience, expertise, and resources of Microsoft.” The idea here, says Microsoft, is to “partner with like-minded entrepreneurs—great talent that is innovating online to solve big problems and create amazing new experiences.”… → Read More
With Google and Apple making back-to-back announcements about their new mapping efforts in the last few weeks, Microsoft obviously felt a bit left out. Today, however, the company is launching its largest imagery release in its history: Bing Maps today features a full 165 terabytes worth of new data that spans about 1 million square miles. What’s maybe even more interesting, though, is that the… → Read More
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