Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has released an application for the Apple App Store. The application is available for free. The application lets you set up bookmarks, improve web browsing, share results through e-mail, copy and paste URLs, exploit location settings, and lock in parental controls. [Bing Search Blog]
Google threatened to pull all of their operations out of China. Now Motorola will be making Bing the default search engine for their handsets heading to China, including those powered by the Android operating system. Bing Maps will also be the default GPS and mapping application too. This may not bode well for Motorola and Google’s future relationship. [Engadget]
In order to become a top search engine, you have to make the right deals with the right people. Google has a deal with the Mozilla Firefox web browser and Apple for the iPhone to make sure that they are the default for both. Microsoft has put out a clever TV marketing campaign for Bing and is now offering FarmVille cash to Facebook users.
Microsoft was able to increase their Facebook Fan page to over 400,000 fans within 24 hours because of a FarmVille promotion. You will notice in the banner, it says “Become a fan of Bing now and get FREE Farm Cash.” FarmVille players received 3 “Farm Cash” buy simply becoming a Bing Fan. The cost of 25 Farm Cash is $5. This means that Microsoft provided $240,000 worth of game currency. Bing now has over 570,000 Facebook Fans and Google has about 525,000. [BusinessInsider]
Mozilla Director of Community Development Asa Dotzler was not very happy with the anti-privacy comments that Google CEO Eric Schmidt made. As a result Dotzler suggested that Firefox users switch to Microsoft’s Bing.com and gave instructions regarding how to switch from the default Google search engine.
“I think that the thing that bothers me most about Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s comment is that it makes clear that he simply doesn’t understand privacy,” stated Dotzler. “That a company with so much user data on its servers is led by someone who just doesn’t understand privacy is really scary to me and it should be scary to you as well.”
Dotzler was referring to an interview that Schmidt had on CNBC when he was asked if Google users should trust their search engine as a “trusted friend.” Schmidt responded “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Dotzler added that Bing has a better privacy policy than Google too.
What are your thoughts about Dotzler’s statements? Do you think his words are convincing enough to switch your default search? Let us know in the comments.
I was looking through some of the referral traffic from Pulse2.com and I discovered one of the hits came from Bing.com/twitter. Microsoft is being quiet about the service as of right now which is why they are calling it Twitter Beta. The URL of the service is http://www.bing.com/twitter/. The original Microsoft and Twitter deal was announced on October 21.
At the top of Bing Twitter is a list of the hottest topics on Twitter. For example a lot of people are searching for MP34FREE, New Moon, Thanksgiving, AMAs, Black Friday, and Bengals right now on Twitter. Underneath the Hottest Topics are a list of blog posts being tweeted about that are related to each of those topics.
The two most recent tweets by Twitter users are displayed beneath those blog post links and Bing gives you the option to retweet it by clicking this icon:
When you conduct a Twitter search on Bing, there are results for blog post links and the 4 latest tweets related to the keyword(s) you entered. Once again the blog post links have the two latest related tweets underneath them. The 4 latest tweets related to the keyword(s) you entered is collected in real-time from Twitter.
I did a search on the keyword “Twitter” and the 4 latest tweets were changing about every minute. There is an option to “See more Tweets about” the keyword you enter in case you missed one of the results that you liked.
What are your thoughts about Bing Twitter search? Do you foresee yourself using this service often? What is your Twitter application preference? Let us know in the comments. I personally like TweetDeck the most.
At the 1:50 minute mark in the video above, Robert Pattinson is handed a gift bag with Bing written on it. Pattinson had no idea what the Microsoft search engine was. The event took place at the Westwood red carpet film premiere which was being sponsored by Microsoft. At the time of the question Pattinson was being interviewed by Ryan Seacrest.
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) decided to take Jonathan Mann’s Bing jingle and teach it to a bunch of middle school students in Pennsylvania. Mann won a $500 content that Microsoft held for creating a song about Bing. TechCrunch’s MG Siegler criticized the song so Mann retaliated by making a song about the editor.
I literally cried a little bit when I saw this video. On the one hand I’m happy I was able to provide some kids with an excuse not to do school work for a few hours. On the other hand, not sure how I feel about these kids being indoctrinated into the cult of, well, whatever. It’s kinda creepy. But on the other-other hand, the kids do look damn happy. So…oh well?
Hopefully the students at Keith Valley Middle School get some sort of compensation for synchronized singing and dancing Microsoft services. Especially because the school cheerleading instructor spent about 12 days teaching 6th graders the dance.
Microsoft Corporation is constantly researching ways to improve search. At the TechCrunch50 event earlier today, Microsoft gave a demo of Visual Search on Bing.com. The Visual Search engine uses images instead of text. The images are arranged by categories and various other parameters.
As of right now Visual Search is just an index of photo albums tagged with certain parameters. For example when I selected the Digital Cameras category, Bing showed me a bunch of cameras that I could click on. Then I narrowed the results to between 5 and 10 megapixels and the cameras out of those parameters disappeared. Nothing really new there. I’ve seen this technology before on e-commerce websites like eBay.
I’m just going to label this announcement as a “meh” since I’ve seen it before. Image searches have longer load times than text especially in countries with slow Internet connections. The Visual Search requires Microsoft Silverlight too.
