Welcome to the the Microsoft Bing Search Engine Community! We are really excited about the Bing Search Engine! Its going to be quite a learning curve for a while. Come on in and join our little club here and get answers and help others. Join Today!

Bing, the new search engine Microsoft plans to release, place a fresh focus on "the right ideas," like "organic results, layout and advertising," according to Director-Emerging Media/Client Strategy David Berkowitz of 360i, which demoed the pending product. "If it's as good as it looks in the demo, this will be the most impressive search experience Microsoft has offered," he vowed. The Bing search engine places emphasis on image and videos; on a more practical level, it filters data and ecommerce to give users more specific product information, like inventory in stock and prices at retail stores.
Kumo was the code name for Bing within Microsoft.


A search for "iPhone," for example, would also generate invitations to download certain apps. "On the left side of the search query you'll find a navigation column that shows related searches, search history and filtering options," said co-founder Jay Bhatti of people search engine Spock. Bhatti saw Bing during a test run in Live Search, MediaPost writes.

"It would keep the top of the page and right side clear for advertisements." According to Bhatti, the ads appear to blend more with the content, making them less noticeable and thus perhaps more clickable.

"Historically, one problem for Microsoft has been serving up relevant ads," Berkowitz observed, confirming Bhatti's surmise: "They haven't been as relevant as they could be. But I've see firsthand they are trying to fix that."

The Bing layout is composed of three columns, with search results in the middle, and sponsored related search terms on the right-hand side. The left column contains related searches and a single-session search history, making it easier to return to previous queries, reports PC World, which hastened to add the most interesting tool on the left are the search categories — which are directly related to searches.

A search for "Bose Lifestyle 48" generates categories for images, review, manual, prices, and repair. But searching for something like a music artist will generate categories that enable users to locate song lyrics, albums, artist biographies, and tickets.

Microsoft tested Bing internally from March, but has not provided a launch date, though word has it the engine will go live in the next handful of weeks — coinciding with the debut of a major ad campaign.

In April 2009, Microsoft/Windows Live Search dominated all of 9.9% of US-based searches, up 7.2% year over year. It fell behind Google, at 64% of market share; and Yahoo, at 16.3%.

Among shopping-specific search engines, however, Windows Live Search enjoyed a 615% increase in total visitors and was the fastest growing shopping search provider in April. This increase is due in part to the well-received Live Search Cashback program, in which Microsoft promises to pay consumers back for purchasing products its search engine helped find.

Searches on shopping-specific engines comprise between one and two percent of total search activity.

A premature Twitter message and a leaked memo have confirmed previous rumors that Microsoft's Live Search service is to be reborn as Bing. The Twitter message, posted on Sunday night, confirmed that the search engine would receive a new brand and a new interface, and this was swiftly followed by the release yesterday of an internal Microsoft e-mail from Satya Nadella, Senior VP responsible for R&D in Microsoft's Online Services Division. The memo and associated screenshots show off a new layout for Microsoft's search engine with the new Bing branding, giving a clear indication of the future of the Live Search site.

The Bing name has been expected ever since Microsoft bought the registration of the Bing.com domain name late last year. As the memo explains, the name can mean both "cloud" and "spider" in Japanese—neatly appropriate both to a search engine, and to Microsoft's broader online service ambitions. The e-mail announced that Bing was now accessible from the Microsoft corporate network, and exhorted employees to use and test the search engine to help improve it. Though the memo described Bing only as the "codename" for the new search engine and interface, the domain name purchase and branding visible in the screenshots suggest that the product will also go live with the Bing name.
Bing_whois.jpg

Just as predicted from the earlier tweet, the screenshots show a new user interface in addition to the new branding. The new interface and user experience were issues highlighted in Nadella's e-mail, as he stressed statistics indicating how unsatisfactory current web searching is, and enumerated a variety of Bing features to attempt to ensure that it stood out from the crowd.
Bing_taylor_swift.png

The Live Search team has already been busy this year, adding things like the Oscars and ski conditions, releasing a Firefox add-in and expanding instant answers to IE8's search box, as well as telling QnA to leave and go to MSN. These minor features are unlikely to make much difference in Microsoft's continued war against Google.

More important is the issue of branding, which has long been an issue for Live Search. The Live and Windows Live brands have suffered dilution and a lack of focus; their application to various products and services has appeared haphazard and inconsistent. The straight Live brand now appears all but dead; Live Search and Live Mesh are the only notable products to carry it, and if Live Search becomes Bing it surely cannot be long before Live Mesh too is renamed. The brand has never been a strong one; even Live Search, a Live-branded services, is adorned with inexplicable Windows logos. Other online services, such as Hotmail, do not even use the Live brand; rather, they are, for no obvious reason, branded Windows Live. This is in spite of their online, cross-platform, service-based nature.

The Windows Live brand is, however, getting more coherent. Windows 7 will omit features that have hitherto been a standard part of the Windows platform—an e-mail client, an instant messaging app, movie editing software, etc.—and instead depend on a suite of applications under the Windows Live brand, the Windows Live Essentials. This move gives the Windows Live branding much greater visibility—Microsoft is expecting many OEMs to preinstall Essentials—and something closer to a well-defined purpose—Windows Live is for all the extra, value-added consumer-oriented features that people want on top of the base operating system. Both the Windows Live client applications and the associated online services have seen a lot of work as part of the Wave 3 updates, and more improvements due with Wave 4, which should hit around the time of Windows 7's release.

The move away from the meaningless Live brand and towards a new, verbifiable name will help both the search engine and the Windows Live products. "Live" is sure to disappear, leaving only "Windows Live" for the current set of software and related services that add value to the Windows platform, providing focus and clarity, and the search engine will gain a name that can be properly marketed and advertised. It may be a small step, but if the world is ever to Bing for information as often as it today Googles for it, it is a necessary one.