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.
Delaware advertising firm Denizen has filed a lawsuit against JWT and their subsidiary WPP. Denizen claims that WPP stole one of their patented concepts. The patented product-placement concept that Denizen has was used by WPP for an advertisement that they made for Microsoft search engine Bing.com.
Around 2002 Denizen and WPP almost made a partnership. The talks about a partnership fell through late in 2006 but the two companies made a confidentiality agreement. Denizen is now accusing WPP for blending content and characters from the TV show The Philanthropist to promote Bing.com.
JWT was the company that Microsoft hired to handle the $100 million Bing.com marketing campaign. “WPP intends to solicit customers by continuing to use Denizen’s proprietary, trade secret information to solicit customers for WPP and its affiliates,” stated Denizen’s complaint.
Stephen Wolfram made an announcement today giving an update about his search engine. For those of you that do not know about Wolfram Alpha, it is one of the most sophisticated search engines that exist today.
It can calculate complex math problems and can even use A.I. to output anything related to a keyword search. Wolfram Alpha originally launched back in May.
Over the summer Wolfram Alpha classified over 54,000 bugs and suggestions and fixed what was not working in the past. The company even launched a partnership with Microsoft to license technology over to Bing.com.
Wolfram Alpha’s search technology licensing to Bing.com will also be beneficial for Yahoo! users. Bing.com will be powering Yahoo!’s search technology for at least 10 years.
Microsoft Corporation has supposedly been turning developers away from using their APIs due to the process involved. Developers that want to access Bing APIs have to fill out a form and a Hotmail ID is required. The form also has a usability defect that makes it difficult to fill out properly.
Some people have been complaining that the company name is limited to 100 characters and the URL field is limited to 80 characters. Twitter user jwynia wrote, “The Bing API sign-up form allows 100 characters for company name, but only 80 for website? Isn’t it likely that the company name is in www?”
At the same time, some people don’t mind the process at all and even prefer Bing’s API over Google’s. Why? Twitter user dxprog wrote, “Messing around with the Bing API. I’d use Google, but they don’t support image searches with theirs. Wow, Google. You? Behind the times?”
Microsoft Bing wants to give Google a run for its money. The Bing team believes that if they index real-time data, that will give them a leg up. The service that has the most real-time data as of right now is Twitter which provides user-generated data, delivered within seconds.
“There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter,” stated Microsoft Search Technology Center general manager Sean Suchter. ”Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real-time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres.”
As of right now, only a few prominent Twitter users are being indexed such as Al Gore and Ryan Seacrest. Eventually the company will expand to other users. Microsoft is so serious about search engines that they plan to commit about $11 billion over the next 5 years in that technology.
Microsoft Bing search market share has increased to about 12% since it launched. This is exciting for Microsoft considering Live.com didn’t do as well in fighting Google’s market share.
At a luncheon in Chicago last week, Steve Ballmer said that he was willing to spend 5%-10% of the company’s operating income over the next 5 years.
Microsoft’s operating income in 2008 was $22 billion. That means that Microsoft would end up spending as high as $5.5-$11 billion over the next 5 years. ”We invested in Xbox for years and now it generates nice economic returns for us,” added Ballmer.
Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine. Microsoft is currently making the transition from Live Search to Bing. Microsoft has also gone as far as advertising on TV to hosting a 3 hour special on Hulu.
The New York Post is reporting that Google co-founder Sergey Brin is so upset by the launch of Bing that he has put together a team of Google’s top engineers to work on an urgent upgrade to their search engine. Brin is leading the team to figure out how Bing’s search algorithm differs from Google.
“New search engines have come and gone in the past 10 years, but Bing seems to be of particular interest to Sergey,” stated an NY Post source. Usually Brin is not as involved at day-to-day operations at the company, but works more on the high-level operations.
When Microsoft launched Bing, they put aside about an $80 to $100 million marketing budget together. This is not a bad amount compared to the failed bid for the acquisition of Yahoo! Microsoft offered Yahoo! to be acquired for $44.6 billion, but Yahoo! turned down the offer.
Bing’s market share helped Microsoft’s search market share jump from 9% to 11%. Bing’s homepage is similar to Google, but features a colorful image on the homepage everyday. There is not much of a difference between Bing and Google, but what gives Google the advantage of their major investment in Mozilla and close-knit relationship with Apple.
Google is the default search engine for both Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari. Google is also the default search engine Safari on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Google gets a lot more hits due to being the default. It will not be surprising to see Bing become the default search engine for all future versions of Internet Explorer and for Microsoft Windows 7.
With the launch of Bing, Microsoft Corporation is getting ready to take Google’s algorithm and marketing power head-on. Another service that Google that Microsoft wants to challenge is the 411 service.
The 1-800-GOOG-411 offers local business listing information, but 1-800-BING-411 has several other options on top of local businesses. Bing 411 offers movie listings, local traffic, and weather conditions. Bing 411 also has saved searches. Not bad, Microsoft. Consider you added to my contacts list and GOOG 411 removed. At least until GOOG 411 provides additional services.
As many of you all are aware, Microsoft is getting ready to launch a new search engine called Bing. Bing will be fully launched by June 3 and looks very similar to Live.com based on the screenshots that I grabbed from TechCrunch.
Even though the homepage and design look very similar to Live.com in terms of glossiness and high-quality images, the algorithm behind the search has been altered quite a bit according to Microsoft SVP Yusuf Mehdi.
Every time that you search for a particular topic such as health, travel, shopping, sports, news, etc., there is a customized layout. For example, when search for travel deals there is an itinerary page that comes up, powered by Farecast. When searching for shopping deals, the Microsoft Cashback program is pulled up.
Check out some of the screen shots after the jump of Bing. The internal code-name for Bing is called Kumo as of right now. (more…)
