Just about a month ago, Microsoft announced that it would end free access to its Bing Search API and start charging a minimum of $40 per month for the service. Today, the company is officially launching the Bing Search API on its Windows Azure Marketplace, but unlike its previous announcement, the company has decided to continue to offer a free tier as well. Developers will still be able to make up to 5,000 queries per month for free. This, says the Bing team, will still allow most existing developers to use the service for free. → Read More
Last week, Bing began the initial phase of rolling out a major redesign, in fact the “most significant” redesign in its three-year history. Today, the wait is over. This afternoon, Bing officially turned on its new design, and has made it available for everyone in the U.S. You can check it out here. → Read More
As all the major search engines continue to add social search features to their feature line-up, it can often look as if there isn’t any space left for startups in this space. Wajam begs to differ. The Montreal-based company is probably one of the most ambitious players in the social search market right now and after launching its latest efforts for Google last month, it is now ready to bring its enhanced social search results to Bing and Yahoo as well. → Read More
Just a day after it announced its well-received updates to its search result pages, here is some more good news for Bing: according to the latest data from Experian Hitwise, Bing-powered searches — that is searches on Bing.com and search.yahoo.com — now account for 30.01% of all U.S. searches. By itself, Bing grew 16% year-over-year and 5% month-over-month and now accounted for 14.32% of all U.S. searches in April 2012. Yahoo grew somewhat slower, but still at a respectable 5% month-over-month and 7% year-over-year. → Read More
While Google keeps cramming its search results pages full of tools and social content, today Bing confirmed with me the full roll out a redesigned search results page that completely clears the left sidebar, and replaces the tabbed header with a cleaner set of links. Bing’s Facebook integration is also more subtle now, instead of plastering names and faces beneath Liked results.
This more relaxing, dare I say zen, design gives Google a more claustrophobic and exhausting feel by comparison. Microsoft seems to have realized that if it can’t match Google’s algorithmic prowess, it could win with sleek design that doesn’t bombard you with a thousand options. Here’s how the designs of two search engines compare… → Read More
Soon when you logout of Facebook, you could be greeted with a full recreation of the Bing home page, complete with pretty photo and an active search box. Facebook has wasted no time launching the new logout page ad unit it unveiled on Wednesday. This morning TechCrunch reader and MyJobLinx co-founder Raj Singh’s Facebook logout page featured a Bing search box that when used opened a Bing search results page in a separate tab.
[Update: Facebook has confirmed that Bing is the first advertiser to use its new logout page ad unit.] The new featured placement for Bing is likely an extension of Facebook’s partnership Microsoft, where Bing powers the social network’s internal search engine. → Read More
LeGuide.com Group, a pan-European publisher of online shopping guides, comparison websites and the like, has acquired online shopping portal Ciao from Microsoft.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but LeGuide.com says it paid for the Ciao assets in cash and didn’t need to take on debt to finance the transaction. → Read More
LeGuide.com Group, a pan-European publisher of online shopping guides, comparison websites and the like, has acquired online shopping portal Ciao from Microsoft.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but LeGuide.com says it paid for the Ciao assets in cash and didn’t need to take on debt to finance the transaction. Read more over at TechCrunch Europe. → Read More
According to Israeli businesspaper Calcalist (in Hebrew), Microsoft has acquired San Mateo, California-based video search technology company VideoSurf for about $70 million.
We’ve confirmed the acquisition with multiple sources, although we haven’t been able to nail down the exact price (yet). One source who requested anonymity pegged it at $70 million too, though.
VideoSurf raised $28 million from a couple of tech heavyweights, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg, along with Al Gore and Current Media CEO Joel Hyatt and other investors, including Pitango VC and Verizon Ventures. → Read More
According to Israeli businesspaper Calcalist (in Hebrew), Microsoft has acquired San Mateo, California-based video search technology company VideoSurf for about $70 million.
We’ve confirmed the acquisition with multiple sources, although we haven’t been able to nail down the exact price (yet). One source who requested anonymity pegged it at $70 million too, though.
VideoSurf raised $28 million from a couple of tech heavyweights, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg, along with Al Gore and Current Media CEO Joel Hyatt and other investors, including Pitango VC and Verizon Ventures.
Read more at TechCrunch Europe. → Read More
Microsoft this morning blasted out an email to all subscribers of its Bing Daily Deals offering, informing users that the service will henceforth be known as ‘MSN Offers’. It’s a confusing move, but then Microsoft has a history of making confusing moves when it comes to naming and branding its products and services.
The company claims it didn’t want people to mix up the daily deals it offers with its Bing Deals service, which essentially aggregates daily deals from a range of third-party providers. → Read More
Microsoft appears to be readying the formal launch of a Bing-branded daily deals website powered by white-label group buying platform service provider Tippr, a well-informed source tells me. You don’t have to take my word for it: Microsoft and Tippr are testing the service right now, and the Bing-exclusive daily deals site is hiding in plain sight (see here and here, or check screenshots below).
For the record, this offering is notably different from Microsoft’s earlier launch of Bing Deals, which basically aggregates daily deals from a number of partners, including group buying service providers like Tippr, Groupon and LivingSocial. → Read More
On the rare occasions that I’m not sitting in a chat room and writing about phones, I usually play the role of “hang-out coordinator” among my friends. You probably have too: messaging people to see who’s available, finding out who wants to eat what, getting ETAs from prospective partiers, the works. It’s a bit draining to say the least, but if you’re usually stuck with that responsibility and you have a Windows Phone, then Bing’s newly-launched “We’re In” app may be just right for you. → Read More
The combined search market share of Microsoft’s Bing and Bing-powered Yahoo (AKA BingHoo!) keeps creeping up. The latest market share figures from comScore’s qSearch service are out, and the combined BingHoo! climbed to 30.2 percent market share of total explicit searches (excluding the effects of slideshows, contextual search, and Google Instant), up 0.2 percent from May. Google remained steady at 65.5 percent share.
When you drill down into the data, Bing keeps adding share (up 0.3 point to 14.4 percent), and Yahoo seems to have stabilized at 15.9 percent for the last three months. And Bing’s year-over-year growth in market share is an impressive 41 percent, compared to 6.4 percent growth for Google. That’s not a bad growth rate for Bing two years after launch. → Read More
While the tech world is buzzing about the launch and implications of Google’s new social network, Google+, it’s worth noting that Google isn’t just in a war with Facebook, it’s at war with multiple companies across multiple industries. In fact, Google is fighting a multi-front war with a host of tech giants for control over some of the most valuable pieces of real estate in technology. Whether it’s social, mobile, browsing, local, enterprise, or even search, Google is being attacked from all angles. And make no mistake about it, they are fighting back and fighting back, hard. Entrepreneur-turned-venture capitalist Ben Horowitz laid the groundwork for this in his post Peacetime CEO / Wartime CEO, saying Larry Page “seems to have determined that Google is moving into war and he clearly intends to be a wartime CEO. This will be a profound change for Google and the entire high-tech industry.” Horowitz is exactly right.
Before I investigate each battle front in the war, it’s important to highlight the fact that perhaps no other tech company right now could withstand such a multifaceted attack, let alone be able to retaliate efficiently. Sure, Apple might get pushed around by Facebook, so it integrated Twitter into iOS5, and sure, Amazon and Apple have their own tussles over digital media and payments, but at the end of the day, Google is in this unique and potentially highly vulnerable position that will test the company’s mettle and ability to not only reinvent itself, but also to perhaps strengthen its core. Let’s take a quick look into the GooglePlex, which may now resemble more of a military complex, plotting out strategies and tactics for this war. Google must battle on at least six fronts simultaneously. → Read More
We all want solutions tailored to our needs for a lot of things, online and offline, but does that include a search engine that shows results for queries based on dozens of factors (and more importantly, hides from you certain results based on those factors)?
Well, I’m inclined to think that’s not such a bad thing at all, or at least not that big a deal.
DuckDuckGo, a tiny alternative search engine, begs to differ, and this morning they spread the word about a new website they’ve set up to give home to an illustrated guide of the ‘search engine filter bubble‘ concept and why they think it ducks sucks. → Read More
A la 2006, today, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo collectively announced that they will be partnering to create schema.org, a resource for site owners and developers to learn about structured data and gain insight into how to improve their sites’ search results. The site adds more than 100 new forms of website markup for content ranging from movies to places in an effort to standardize, and thus improve, how websites are crawled and presented in search results. “The site aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages”, Google’s announcement reads. → Read More
We recently broke the story of a small search software outlet named Masterobjects taking on Amazon.com in a notable patent infringement lawsuit, later also taking Google to court. Now it’s apparently Microsoft’s turn to get sued by the company, and my guess is more will follow. → Read More
Yesterday, in a massively botched press launch, Bing released some new features that begin to really tap into the huge amount of social data exposed through its partnership with Facebook. The alliance isn’t a new one — the companies have had a friendly relationship ever since Microsoft made a $240 million investment in Facebook that valued the social network at $15 billion in 2007, and Bing launched Facebook’s Instant Personalization last October.
But Bing’s Facebook integration up until now was a little superficial — if you ran a query relevant to something your friend had previously ‘Liked’ on Facebook, you’d see that in a special module embedded in the search results page. Beginning today, things are getting much more interesting: Bing will actually reorder search results based on friends’ Likes (in other words, your friend’s recommendations won’t just be relegated to a standalone widget, they’ll influence the Ten Blue Links). → Read More
A couple days ago, the headlines blared that Bing now has 30 percent search market share in the U.S. Not so fast. Those numbers were based on Hitwise estimates. Today, comScore came out with its own qsearch estimates, which is what Wall Street analysts following Google report. The comScore numbers tell a slightly different story.
If you include all searches, then the combined market share of Bing (13.3 percent) and Yahoo (17.7 percent), which is powered by Bing, is indeed 31 percent. But this “core” search number includes Google slideshows, contextual search in places like Yahoo News, and Google Instant. Every time you go through a slideshow on Yahoo, for instance, related search results appear below, inflating its numbers.
But ComScore strips out those numbers to come up with what it calls “explicit search” (you know, when someone actually types a query into a search box). When you look at explicit search, Bing and Yahoo combined only had 29.5 percent market share in the first quarter of 2011. → Read More
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