I wrote about the epic battles that are brewing between spammers and content farms—which are turning the web into a massive garbage dump—and search providers, which have to choose between profit and customer satisfaction. This is a serious problem. The content farms are “dumbing down” the web by churning out thousands of mostly low-quality articles, every day, on topics that Google tells… → Read More
At the “Who Will Win the Spam Wars” roundtable at the BigThink conference this morning Google’s Matt Cutts, Bing’s Harry Shum and Blekko’s Rich Skrenta got together to discuss recent dramatic turns of events in the search market, most notably Google’s accusations today that Bing is using Google user data gleaned from Internet Explorer and the Bing toolbar to improve its own results.
Cutts took… → Read More
Sometimes, all it takes is a little spark to set off a major forest fire. That is what seems to have happened with my New Year’s Day post on Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google. Over the last two months, there has been an avalanche of articles echoing my post, including New York Magazine, Business Insider, GigaOm, TechCrunch, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal.
I had a feeling that… → Read More
The recent victory of IBM’s Watson computer against human competitors in an exhibition round of Jeopardy got computer scientist Stephen Wolfram thinking about how regular search engines might fare in such a match-up. So he took 200,000 known Jeapardy clues and ran them through six search engines (Google, Bing, Ask, Blekko, Wikipedia Search, and Yandex). He excluded known Jeopardy sites from the… → Read More
A couple of weeks ago, comScore came out with a report that said Microsoft’s Bing had reached an all-time high market share of 11.8% in November 2010.
According to rival Compete, however, Bing’s market share is actually much larger than that. → Read More
This semester, my students at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley researched the VC system from the perspective of company founders. We prepared a detailed survey; randomly selected 500 companies from a venture database; and set out to contact the founders. Thanks to Reid Hoffman, we were able to get premium access to LinkedIn—which provided a wealth of information. But some of the… → Read More
Today Microsoft is holding a ‘Bing Search Summit’ in San Francisco, where it’s showcasing some of the latest addition to its search engine, as well as some new features for its mobile applications on iPhone and Android.
The overarching theme here has been to highlight numerous minor enhancements the Bing team has been making to help improve its search experience. The goal: boil search down to the… → Read More
Panoramic photos of streets are now standard in online and mobile maps, with Google Street View being the most well-known example. Bing has its own version of 3D streetside photos layered on top of maps, but soon it will start adding the ability to go inside buildings and look around thanks to a partnership with EveryScape. The feature will be called “Interior Views” and it will allow people to… → Read More
Bing has just made a small improvement to travel search, adding the ability to add natural language queries to flight search. So instead of selecting your airport, destination, dates or other options to conduct a flight search, you can type in your parameters in the search box to retrieve results.
For example, you could enter a search for “Flights from Chicago to SFO in January.” In the results… → Read More
Microsoft this morning announced several new efforts to gain some ground in the booming social/casual gaming market. The company will be debuting an all-new version of MSN Games (see preview here), bring new social games to instant messaging client Windows Live Messenger and expand Bing Games internationally.
Last but not least, Microsoft has struck a partnership with social games publisher … → Read More
Search engines like Bing and Google will swear up and down that their natural search results are determined by one thing and one thing only: the all-knowing, all-powerful Algorithm. Sure, paid results might pop up at the top or to the side, but they are always highlighted as such. But sometimes the temptation is too great and the natural search results, which are supposed to be sacrosanct, are… → Read More
Online analytics company Compete has just published its ranking of the top 50 websites for September 2010, giving some insights into current visitor trends (and not absolute numbers, as the company tends to undercount traffic for most websites).
Compete’s data compilation shows increasing traffic to Microsoft’s search engine Bing (up 11.7 percent for the month and 108.5 percent for the year) as… → Read More
Today, Facebook and Microsoft deepened their existing relationship around search. At an event in Silicon Valley, both companies announced a new phase in their partnership, especially as it relates to social search. Bing will be adding more Facebook social data into its main search results.
Starting today, if you do a search on Bing, it will try to recognize your Facebook account through instant… → Read More
Today in Mountain View, CA, Microsoft is holding a special event to showcase some of the new features of Bing. And as we noted yesterday, it’s got a special guest: Facebook. According to our invite, the two companies are planning to “talk about the new directions and future opportunities of search and a demonstration of some new search innovation by Bing.” I’m here live taking notes. The event… → Read More
Tomorrow morning Microsoft is holding a special event to showcase some new features of its Bing search engine (and yes, they have more up their sleeves than the nifty HTML5 demos they showed off a few weeks ago). And we’ve just gotten word that the Bing team will be accompanied by Facebook where they’ll “talk about the new directions and future opportunities of search and a demonstration of some… → Read More
SearchIgnite, a provider of paid search optimization solutions which claims to manage more than $600 million in pay-per-click (PPC) spend annually, has released its latest report on the paid search market in the United States. According to the company, spend on paid search ads increased close to 6% year-over-year.
Google commanded no less than 80.2% of all U.S. PPC ad spend in the third quarter… → Read More
Google has Google Instant. Bing has guided search and (soon) swimming whale videos on its home page. Yahoo, well, Yahoo now has an expanding accordion search box. Starting today, when you do searches related to music, movies, or news, a set of results will be packaged together at the top in a box with vertical tabs along the side. It is similar to Google’s Universal Search Onebox and the Bing… → Read More
If you ask that question on Yahoo Answers, you’ll probably get something about how a husband’s Xbox was once used for Netflix, but now it doesn’t work. If you ask that question on WolframAlpha, you’ll get get some abstract data about money spent on various things each year. If you ask that question on Bing, you’ll get a bunch of old content. Both Ask.com and Google give you the answer if you dig… → Read More
Microsoft has released an updated Bing for Mobile iPhone and iPod Touch app.
The updated app brings with it new features for the mobile versions of Bing Travel and Maps. → Read More
Naturally, it’s down at the moment, but when it comes back up, you should notice something different about Twitter’s “Who To Follow” feature — it’s even better.
When it launched back in August, I noted that the feature, which recommends users for you to follow, was like steroids for Twitter’s social graph. Just looking at my stats between then and now, I’ve added about 50 people to follow — and… → Read More
Today at a special event marking the launch of IE9, Microsoft announced some compelling new features for Bing that will be enabled by the new HTML5/CSS3 functionality available in IE9 (which will presumably work in other modern web browsers, too). Bing will be launching these new features in a preview form in a month.
You may be familiar with Bing’s daily background image (a feature that Google… → Read More
Yahoo is getting ready to turn over search results on Yahoo Search to Bing later this week (it only took a year). There are some changes Yahoo announced today. It is shutting down SearchMonkey on October 1, as well as MyBlogLog, and Yahoo BOSS will no longer be free. MyBlogLog has long been one of Yahoo’s walking dead, but SearchMonkey and Boss were still loved by developers.
Also, for Website… → Read More
An insane number of searches on the web involve people asking questions. Sometimes they’re good questions, sometimes they’re stupid questions, sometimes they’re insane questions. Just start typing something into Google beginning with the words “How” or “Why” for proof of this — the auto-suggest speaks for itself. Sadly, Google isn’t great at answering questions because they’re a search engine… → Read More
The spectactular search deal Microsoft and Yahoo struck last summer doesn’t extend to all country markets. In Japan, Yahoo search will be powered by Google in the future, as announced [JP] on the Google Japan blog and by Yahoo Japan itself [JP, PDF] earlier today (Yahoo Japan‘s current search engine is provided by Yahoo in the US).
Yahoo Japan says the date the switch becomes effective has yet to… → Read More
Delivering news digitally in a personalized manner is a nut many a startup – as well as many established Internet companies and publishers – are desperately trying to crack.
A newly-founded Palo Alto startup called Hawthorne Labs is one of them.
Today, the company released their first application, dubbed APOLLO, for the iPad (iTunes link – screenshots and video below). Their lofty ambition is to… → Read More
Sure, D-Wade and Chris Bosh may be teaming up to play together in Miami. But LeBron James has a new partner of his own: Bing.
Tomorrow night, millions of people around this country (and likely the world) are going to be tuning into ESPN to watch the NBA star announce his decision about where he’ll be playing basketball for the next several years. ESPN has created a special program for the event… → Read More
Last Thursday, Google placed a major $700 million bet on a new strategy. It announced an agreement to purchase ITA Software, a leading provider of flight information (fares, schedules, availability) to most of the key online travel sites, travel search engines, and airlines. ITA’s existing customers include Bing, Orbitz, Kayak, Expedia’s Hotwire, Continental, US Airways, American Airlines, and… → Read More
Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Krishna Subramanian, co-founder of mobile ad exchange Mobclix.
Mobile search is still one of the big unclaimed prizes on the mobile web. Everyone from Google and Yahoo to Apple is going after it, but Microsoft’s Bing may stealthily become the king of the castle by aggressively promoting Bing through mobile apps. Let’s look at each player’s mobile… → Read More
Bing is on a roll. Yesterday, it released Bing Entertainment and a new iPhone app. And today it is following up with an update to its mobile web search at http://m.bing.com. Bing only recently became a search option on the iPhone, but it really wants to become your default mobile search engine. In fact, if you are not careful, Bing will take over as your default search engine the first time… → Read More
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