Often we navigate into streets and find it hard to recognize the Buildings with the immersive  the 360 environment. Microsoft Research wants to change that. Street Slide, a research project, aggregates all the photos from 360 degree bubbles and stitches neighboring images into long panoramas. The Result — You can see the full stretch of road along one street (like a filmstrip) that you can now pan across. However, this doesn’t stop you from zooming into individual positions to get the traditional 360 degree view, but the ability to zoom out and scan one stretch of street offers a level of freedom that makes exploration enjoyable and useful.

Watching says more than reading:

Street Slide is one of the implementations of Microsoft’s Seadragon technology they’re already using in Bing Maps Beta, along with an extension of its Photosynth collaborative geo-tagging photo project.

It’s great to see Microsoft Innovating after all these bad years. After all, its been long since they last used “Utility” over “Visual gimmick” to promote a product. Let’s hope that Street Slide will get the opportunity to move beyond the research paper domain and actually turn into a Bing Maps feature.

We write about Latest in tech, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Gadgets, Open Source, Programming. Grab them@taranfx on Twitter or below:

Well, the battle just got a whole lot dirtier, as The Financial Times has uncovered news that Microsoft has approached several news content providers, offering them money if they opt to “de-index” their sites from Google.

It all started with News content providers having a dispute with Google. News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch has threatened with legal action to prevent Google from “stealing” articles published in his newspapers.

Microsoft took utmost advantage of the opportunity, and added the fuel to the fire. Even though it was News Corp. that first approached Microsoft about the plan, The FT got to know that Microsoft has approached other news content providers to extend the deal by bribing them. However, on being questioned, both News Corp. and Microsoft declined to comment.

As usual, Google was neutral to the news, they didn’t have anything to say about this specific story, they had a general statement  “Economically it’s not a big part of how we generate revenue,” Matt Brittin, Google’s UK director.

Though it’s important for search engines to index news, the thing gets more serious for news content providers. due to growth of eMedia, many of them have been struggling for a long time and now finally trying to make profit from the internet and if it fails, they are in serious trouble.

Justification holds in the hands of News content providers, and If this continues, News agency will gain (by both saving their premium content and getting Money from Microsoft) but search quality overall lags.

What do you think? What is more important?

Microsoft announced back in June that it will add live updates from micro-blogging service Twitter to its search engine: Bing. However, it is now ready for going live, details described here. Following that, Google too announced plans for live Twitter updates integration in its search engine.

Microsoft mentioned about its public access to public Twitter feed and also got Bing Twitter search beta; only for U.S. residents as of now. Google promised to roll out Twitter integration in its search engine “in the coming months”.

Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online services group, said, “We are going to get access to all of the public Twitter information in real time.” Bing will also get the Facebook status feed at a later date. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, Facebook, said, “We are giving Bing a feed of data made open to everyone. No money exchanged hands. We are not trying to make money on data.”

Bing Twitter search grabs text of a Twitter update and any shortened links with it. However, Bing-Twitter search throws up results after indexing only a week’s Twitter updates. However, good part is Protected and deleted Twitter updates won’t be displayed into Bing-Twitter search.

Evan Williams and Biz Stone, founders of Twitter,  had acquired Summize.com to integrate the search engine to show it as Twitter Search. A few months later, we get to see real-time content pulled into mainstream search. There is one clear conclusion, Twitter holds the Key.

Though there is one major concern: Mass SPAM. A new kind of Twitter attack can bring down the quality of Search result, Everywhere.

On the positive side, if there’s a Twitter update: Apple Releases new iPhone 4G Lineup .. Google and Bing will have those instantly.

The Redmond giant over-hyped search engine, Bing, had a bad adoption during the last month (September), leading to give Google a sky-high search share of 80%, second-highest since last November share of 81.14%

For the last two months, as Microsoft conveys, Bing had a  gradual ascend in usage share against Google, was a sign of Bing’s inevitably catching up. Looking at the Spetember’s numbers, shall we do a similar interpretation of September’s numbers  as a sign of Bing’s ultimate demise, taken from live analytics firm StatCounter. A sampling of five billion or more US page views from Web sites accessed by StatCounter in September reveals that, of the world’s top three search services, Google’s usage share has climbed back just above 80%, and is flirting with last November’s peak of 81.14% — meaning Google is back to serving four out of five US-based general queries.

Though Open Source lovers, always had 95% share for google, for the rest of the users, it had been varying

Bing‘s usage share in the US descended by 1.13% to reach 8.51% for the month of September, while Yahoo’s dove by 1.1% to reach 9.4%. Google’s share among the top three has now climbed above where it stood in May (78.72%), when Microsoft changed the name of Windows Live Search.

While Bing’s ascent worldwide was much more of a crawl since last May, according to StatCounter statistics, its global usage share in September fell about a quarter-point to 3.25%, while Yahoo lost almost half a point globally to 4.37%. Google ate up both services’ loss worldwide, with global usage share now standing at 90.54%.

With the first day of October not even complete, StatCounter’s live assessment of trends for the remainder of the month don’t hold out much hope for recovery for Bing. Only 6.43% of StatCounter’s sampled US queries thus far for the day (as of 2:47 pm EDT) came from Bing, while Yahoo trended up at 9.62% — Google’s share thus far is over 82%. Fewer than 3% of searches sampled worldwide belong to Bing at present.

What’s important to note is that StatCounter’s statistics focus primarily on searches conducted through just those three services, tossing out about 2% of searches as “Other.” Worldwide, Bing is not the world’s #3 search engine — Baidu, based in China, is; and a competitor to StatCounter tracks Baidu’s traffic as somewhat more significant than “Other.”

A live sampling of global searches as assessed by NetApplications (with figures for Baidu recomputed to exclude searches it generates automatically for itself) shows Bing with 3.39% of global search traffic for the first day of October, well above that of #5 provider Ask.com (0.58%). Baidu comes in at 4.38%, with Yahoo at 6.84%.

source: betanews ]]> http://geeknizer.com/google-kicks-bing-recovers-search-share-80-percent/feed/ 3 http://geeknizer.com/google-search-replaces-bing-on-yahoo-uk/ http://geeknizer.com/google-search-replaces-bing-on-yahoo-uk/#comments Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:24:22 +0000 Tarandeep Singh http://geeknizer.com/blog/?p=1773 Read more »]]> This could be one of those things that Microsoft least expected, and Google waited for weeks.

When Microsoft made its deal last month with Yahoo to provide the search infrastructure for its home page, using technology from Bing, it left open and non-exclusive the fate of several deals the one-time #2 search provider had already made, especially with carriers. Specifically, does Bing become the default search provider for services that had previously made a deal with Yahoo? The answer appeared to be no.

Today, that suspicion was roundly confirmed, as one of the world’s largest cooperative portals with Yahoo — one which still bears the Yahoo brand.

In a move first discovered by the UK-based blog Connected Internet, BT’s Web portal BT Yahoo became a carrier of Google search rather than Bing.

Source: Connected Internet

Google and Yahoo tried to agree a deal in 2008 in the US to replace Yahoo sponsored listings with Google’s higher value listings, but the deal ran into Justice Department issues and didn’t complete.  This deal in the UK clearly goes one step further by replacing not only Yahoo’s sponsored results, but the whole Yahoo web search engine i.e natural results, with Google’s. Image and Video results appear to be still coming from Yahoo though.

The non-exclusive nature of the Microsoft deal could mean that a multitude of lucrative deals Yahoo made last year with mobile carriers, including UK-based Virgin Mobile, may leave an opening for something other than Bing search. Yahoo had re-announced its Yahoo Mobile service last February, at the pinnacle of which was the mobile edition of its oneSearch mobile search platform, with voice search features. Google’s mobile search has similar functionality, pointing to the possibility that mobile services as well as PC pages could open unforeseen doors for carriers that haven’t seen any lucrative value in Microsoft’s presence in mobile in recent months, to perhaps move to Google without disturbing the spirit or even the letter of their Yahoo deals. Mobile carrier deals are where the money is.

“Nobody gets it,” he said about the deal, unveiled Wednesday after more than a year in the making.

Under terms of the 10-year deal, Microsoft’s Bing search engine and adCenter platform will power Yahoo’s search-based advertising business, while Yahoo’s sales team will handle both companies’ premium search customers.

Ballmer attempted to explain why the deal will benefit both companies and to perhaps repair some of the damage to Yahoo’s stock price.

While Microsoft’s stock went up after the deal was announced, which seems like a Good news for Microosft, Yahoo’s dipped. As of now, Friday morning, it is trading at US$14.64, down 15 percent from where it was before the deal and half the price Microsoft originally offered to pay for each share of Yahoo when it made its $44.6 billion unsolicited bid last February.

Wall Street had expected Yahoo to come away from the deal with a sizeable cash payment from Microsoft up front for its search assets, but that wasn’t the case, which largely explains why investors reacted negatively.

Ballmer acknowledged that since there was no exchange of money in the deal, investors and analysts are clearly puzzled.

“Economics is where people get even more confused,” he said. “What happened? Nothing got bought. Nothing got sold.”

Still, Ballmer said he’s not sure why Wall Street would be sour on a deal in which Yahoo will generate about $500 million in operating income and a savings of about $200 million in capital expenditures once it closes. “That’s one that stuns me,” he said.

For Yahoo, the big boon of the deal is it’s taking significant operating and R&D costs out of its business while retaining 88 percent of the search revenue it is already getting, because Microsoft will pay Yahoo traffic acquisition costs at an initial rate of 88 percent during the first five years of the agreement, Ballmer said.

Both companies will get scale out of the deal, allowing them to reach a larger network of advertisers and users. This will lead to improvement of the search product, but not financial improvement as far as revenue growth right away, he said.

“The more queries you can see, the more you can tune your product, The more advertisers advertise on your system and the more relevant they make their ads for your users. The advertising is part of the actual user experience.”

Even as he defended the deal, Ballmer on Thursday seemed conscious of the fact that Microsoft blundered in search by not investing early enough, and suggested that the company has learned a lesson from the long time it took to close the Yahoo deal — time in which Google continued to grow its already sizeable market share in search.

“In our business in this industry, probably the greatest source of economic value creation is choosing to be in the right businesses early enough, When you don’t choose to be in early enough you have a problem. When you choose to stay out of a business that is economic value creation, you won’t grow with the market. If you are picking the right things that’s a very important call.”

He is certainly not happy. But is market mis-interpreting or do they understand something better than Yahoo and Microsoft?

Since then, we have seen a bunch of news about Micro-hoo! deals. With no final news coming out, it was getting fishy. But today, the deal was finally announced: Microsoft and Yahoo! have finally Married under a Deal - strictly limited to internet search and advertising.

This move, as per the companies, is supposed to help both in their competition with Google. The deal covers a whole chunk of things, but the most important one is that Bing will become the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! web sites. OMG!

In addition, Yahoo! will be the “exclusive worldwide relationship sales force” for the companies’ premium search advertisers. Microsoft’s AdCenter will take care of self-serve advertising.

Also of note is that Microsoft will gain an exclusive 10 year license to all of Yahoo!’s search technologies, and they will be allowed to integrate said technologies into Microsoft search platforms. The deal will last for 10 years, and has been in the works for over 2 years.

Yahoo said:

“This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo!, our users, and the industry. And I believe it establishes the foundation for a new era of Internet innovation and development,” said Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, “Users will continue to experience search as a vital part of their Yahoo! experiences and will enjoy increased innovation thanks to the scale and resources this deal provides. Advertisers will also benefit from scale and enjoy greater ease of use and efficiencies working with a single platform and sales team for premium advertisers.”

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is excited:

“Through this agreement with Yahoo!, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers, and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company, Success in search requires both innovation and scale. With our new Bing search platform, we’ve created breakthrough innovation and features. This agreement with Yahoo! will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness. Microsoft and Yahoo! know there’s so much more that search could be. This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search. With the deal signed and ink drying, you may be wondering about the details behind the historic Microsoft and Yahoo search agreement, which may finally begin to put some pressure on Google’s dominance in search. We break it down for you.”

Here is the summary of what this deal really means as per betanews:

Fundamentals:

• Yahoo will use Microsoft’s Bing for it’s search.
• Yahoo will take over premium search advertising on both Yahoo! Search and Bing.
• Self-serve advertisers will use Microsoft’s AdCenter system on both sites.
• The agreement duration is 10 years
• The deal will still need regulatory approval, which Microsoft and Yahoo hope to have by early 2010.
• Even though it will use Bing under the hood, Yahoo will have full control as to how its search looks and operates. (UI is yahoo, back-end is bing)
• The agreement does not cover each company’s web properties and products, email, instant messaging, display advertising, or any other aspect of the companies’ businesses.

The Details

• Yahoo is giving Microsoft a 10 year license to its search technologies, which the Redmond company may integrate into Bing or other sites.
• The deal does not cover standard display advertising on other Microsoft and Yahoo sites, only search ads.
• The transition to Bing will start in the US and take between 3 and 6 months. Yahoo moving from its own Panama ad system to AdCenter will take 12 months.
• Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says he expects 2 years of transition costs and a few hundred million dollars in expenses.
• Some Yahoo engineers may become Microsoft employees.
• Microsoft and Yahoo expect Google to fight the deal, but feel the company has little ground to stand on since it controls so much of the market.
• Some Yahoo employees will lose their jobs, but Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz had no numbers to share.
• Advertisers buying through AdCenter will have no control whether their ad appears on Bing or Yahoo! Search. The companies will be strictly selling a combined market.
• Yahoo will have the flexibility to integrate Bing into its other properties, such as Yahoo! News.

The Money

• Microsoft is not paying anything up front for Yahoo to adopt Bing and AdCenter, something investors are not too happy about.
• Microsoft will pay Yahoo 88% traffic acquisition costs (or TAC) at an initial rate of 88% of search revenue. This rate will last for 5 years.
• Yahoo expects the deal to add up to $500 million in operating revenue annually and save the company $200 million.
• Cash flow to Yahoo is expected to go up $275 million per year when the transition is complete.
• The deal being discussed last year with the up-front payment was more invest oriented Bartz and Ballmer said.
• Yahoo will continue expanding its search affiliate partnerships.
• Microsoft will guarantee Yahoo revenue per search (RPS) in each country for the first 18 months following initial implementation in that country.

Why the deal was done

• With both Microsoft and Yahoo sites driving Bing, the algorithms will improve and the results get even better. This is much better than if each site operated independently.
• Google controls around 78% of paid search.
• Advertisers will benefit from scale and working with a single platform (AdCenter) and sales team for premium advertisers (Yahoo).
• Even with Microsoft controlling the search results, Yahoo feels it can still be innovative. For example, it can put information and links to Yahoo services above the results.
• Yahoo didn’t want a bunch of cash up front, it wanted a sustained revenue source moving forward.

As per Betanews post:

Today, the first broader-based data analysis from ratings service comScore closely confirms what the early samples were saying: During the month of June, Microsoft-hosted searches including Bing for US customers numbered just 30 million more than for Microsoft-hosted searches including Windows Live the month before. This is during a month when just over 14 billion general searches were processed by the nation’s top five providers.

The news looks a little better for Microsoft when you consider that June was a slow month for searches overall — down by 2%. So while Google’s general search traffic declined by 2% in keeping with the general trend, its US usage share overall stayed flat at 65%. Bing gained 0.4% of usage share over Windows Live last June — better than flat, but not the “Bing Boom” that some made it out to be.

Today, the latest sampling data from NetApplications shows Bing processing an estimated 5.31% of worldwide queries, although Live Search is curiously still showing up in the statistics with an extra two thirds of one percent.

Let’s not blindly follow the stats. Consider the fact that LIVE & MSN search were having 10% Search market share and now Bing has only 5.3%. What happened to rest of it? Did Microsoft lose it?

Another fact worth considering is, IE is still the most popular browser that covers atleast 60% of interent users and IE has default search engine set to “Bing“. Why then the rest 54.7% didn’t opt for Bing and tried possibly a different search engine? Though Microsoft tried to monoplize the search by defaulting it to Bing, still we don’t see a significant number that can convince that Bing is a success. This has resulted in nothing but alot of frustrated users.

Microsoft fears this secretly that at this pace, they will never be able to catchup Google. Today, new Reportsarrive about Microsoft-Yahoo deal again being re-opened.

As per NetworkWorld:

In less than a week, Microsoft could reach an alliance with Yahoo that could compete better with Google in online search advertising, according to media reports.

The latest deal would call for Microsoft paying Yahoo several billion dollars for its search advertising business, with Yahoo also receiving ongoing payments, according to All Things Digital, a blog owned by the Wall Street Journal.

Yahoo’s  CEO Carol Bartz asserted that the company would “be better off if we had never heard the word Microsoft.”

Its matter of question that what If Microsoft took over Yahoo’s online advertising business, whether the companies could collectively save money while aggregating their market shares. Yahoo has particular expertise in mobile and display advertising. However, many analysts questioned how quickly Microsoft would be able to integrate Yahoo into its operations and if the resulting entity would be a nimble competitor against Google.

All this literally shows how Insecure is Microsoft feeling w.r.t the competition with Google. May be it’s the right time they should learn “How to Innovate” rather than fighting over ruthless competition.

Now users can use Bing to find the latest Twitter tweets. The Intial move comes as startups CrowdEye, Collecta and others are propagating the Web with real-time search.
In a surprise move. Microsoft July st1 added the ability for users to search Twitter tweets with its Bing search engine, the company’s latest attack on Google’s search stronghold. Bing has has started integrating real time Twitter search results into its results. This is definitely a first by any major search engine out there and will obviously be a feather in the cap for Microsoft.

Bing will only Index a certain subset of Twitter users as of now based on their follower count and tweet frequencies clarified a blog post on the official Bing Blog. Also, it is interesting to note is that instead of tying up with Twitter, they seem to have just used the public API of Twitter to their advantage. Brilliant move, without doubt. But again, no innovation in Bing.

This gives Bing a feature that archrival Google doesn’t seem to have as of now. Google, however, does have “almost” real time updating ability as is evident from its fast News Indexing capabilities. On the search front however, what currently happens with Google when we search for a Twitter user, what is displayed is usually a direct link to the users Twitter page. It also shows some old, random posts by that user. Bing, on the other hand, will give real time updates by the user.

The feature is being rolled out in phases and some users might not notice its arrival till it’s implemented fully. There’s more to cheer for Microsoft, although this one has nothing to do with the recent Twitter search integration.

In all, Bing seems to be in a favorable position to be one of the main contenders to snare off some market share from the undisputed leader in search – Google.

However, the original fact is, modern search engines were not programmed to account for such immediacy; high-tech reporters have been complaining for months that search engines don’t index real-time search data from Twitter and other content sources. Bing’s move changes that, as Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft’s Search Technology Center noted.

But as always, Microsoft had NO Innovation, this comes from the fact, How Microsoft Built Bing. And now, they just used Twitter API for search, any kid can do that. what is the hype then ?

“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. This includes Tweets from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest.”

Suchter said Bing is not indexing Twitter in its entirety just yet; this is a gradual rollout. “We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search.”

Microsoft is hardly the first to crack this nut.

“What other people do with the API will be interesting to see. You’ve seen CrowdEye, Collecta, OneRiot and Topsy rushing into the real-time search space because Twitter has popularized this concept. We’ll see if it totally gets coopted by the big guys or if it emerges as a separate category that can be won by somebody smaller.”

However, in the grand scheme of things, real-time search may not mean much, It’s just a hype and should not be considered a Big thing to the Bing. It never served it’s basic purpose of search. “Decision engine” is still a fair joke, and Bing still sucks.

I occassionally use translators to translate from German, Spanish to English via google translator. Recently, I had my eye on BIng Translator. I had no hopes for Bing but to my surprise, it was awesome. It brought features that even google translator isn’t capable of:

1. Live Translation: Bing translator loads your page in the native language of the page then translates into the target language and the progress is show on the top left. I loved it, as it went thought the page line by line translating the content. Translations very accurate and looked appealing being live.

Idiotic Innovation: BUT… Why would a user want it to be live? Our purpose was to translate the page, not to watch an animation of translation. Isn’t it? A direct translation, on page load, would have served the purpose, just like Google does it.

2. Comparison of Original and translated Page: Bing translator gives you lots of layouts to choose from. The default one is compare the ORIGINAL content with TRANSLATED content. As you hover over the text in either of the window, you see the text highlighted on both sides which indicates what was converted to what. Looks like innovation. (check the screenshot below)

Idiotic innovation: But… Wait a minute. All you needed was translation not a comparison, did you? The first time i looked at it, it Reminded me of Code comparison that I do in ECLIPSE before checking it in.  Why would I be interested in the comparsion of languages? I`ll not need that unless and until I’m testing Microsoft’s translation accuracy, or learning one of the languages.

3. Translation, as you Navigate: Bing lets you translate every page you browse through, you can browse a website like you do normally and all pages will be translated as you move.

Idiotic Innovation: Come on, there’s nothing bad here now. MS does innovate sometimes. This is a good feature, hats off!

We need an alternative that can satisfy our LIVE news requirement. Google will still be our primary search engine but for live events we need something better. Were you thinking about Bing at this time? Don’t even dare to! Bing has no base, past or future, I’m talking about a 6month testing mature Realtime search engine “Collecta” launched for public yesterday June 18th.

Collecta brings us the speed of the internet. Your search result include even the results of events which happened seconds back. With Twitter as reservoir, and Collecta as the interface to us, possibilities start here.

So its already 6 months for testing, you must be wandering why didn’t any one hear about it?

Well, the answer is it was left out somewhere in cloud  beetween the overhyped Bing vs. Google dust.

How relevant searches are?

Well, I’ve been using it for a day, and its pretty good. Don’t expect relevancy upto the mark of Google but considering the speed, it does an impressive A- job. and yes, ITS NOT A GOOGLE KILLER! The purpose is different. Still my old post about future of google holds good

How does it work?

It has shortlisted microblogging sites (primarily Twitter) to fetch real-time information from. Their team comes from strong internet search providers. They bring the best of AOL, Altavista, and many more.

Go live with internet! why still search stale data?

Still, did you ever wonder what could have been the world like If Microsft ruled the world?
Come on, its all over the internet. I’ve collected them for you from multiple sources like cracked.com, techworld.com. Here it goes:

What if Microsoft invented Intelligent Cars (iCars)?

by AceJustice

What if Microsoft invented the Paintboard of Leaornardo Da vinci?

by pompi

What if Microsoft invented Industry tools?

by Blackacre

What if Microsoft invented Aliens and their Spaceship?

by SnakeEyes

What if Microsoft created interactive Kitchens?

by Rubbin Hood

What if Microsoft made Monoply? (they already do that?) No, no. I meant the Game!

by nicalobe

What if Microsoft gave birth to children?

by gm_zero

What if Microsoft designed the Greek Literature?

by AceJustice

What if Microsoft designed Marriage Albums?

by Tupper

What if Microsoft made Interative Toilet assistants?

by Heart87

What if Microsoft made Google? No bing bing-bong

by Daedalus

What if Microsoft bought WalMart?

by R.Matey

What if Microsoft created Co****?

by Orchard

What if Microsoft made Airbus?

OOOO. What if Microsoft invented the Earth?

by mmmbacon

And What if Microsoft created Parachutes?

And now My favourite. What if Microsoft invented iPhone killer? O-Phone (source: TechWorld)

“Blah Blah. Future is a mere dirty challenge, we are dirt ready!”*

Our Passion, Your depression*

*Disclaimer: Just for Fun. No hard feelings.

Previously, when I made post on “Why Bing sucks“, I was hit with large amount of traffic, which made me conclude that I wasn’t alone. I did some analytics to study the behavior of visitors that were keen in such blogs. They were somehow related with “Microsoft Hatred”. From there, I found something really interesting which made me blog this.

I observed a reckless pattern of visitors. Some were one timers, few were half readers, most were multiple , and a chain of those who were visiting blog almost everyday to check back the updates. Such cases would go for someone who “cares” about a particular topic. Who can it be, who would observe it so closely? Take the example of Real life,  who is the person most interested in knowing if a particular product is success in the market? Its the producer himself.

Before I could even trust the analytics, I wanted to capture their data to confirm that they were whom I was suspecting them to be. It was not just the IP addresses/subnets of the visitors but also the browsers, OS, other parameters which led me to the conclusion.

What is their Intent?

Bing was reported to have eaten Yahoo and google’s search share. First thing that came to my mind was, they are looking for feedback. Secondly, it could have been casual employees from the company. I wasn’t clear till I observed the later part that came as a confirmation.

I had listed certain Cons of Bing, not because I’m a MSFT hater, but for the fair reason. Eventually, as the post became mature, all of the mentioned Cons were being reconciled secretly by MSFT. I listed certain searches which were pathetically bad on Bing vs. Google. But they brought a surprise for me. Most of them were fixed and now they work as beautifully as Google does.

The proof can be digged out from the comments that followed up the post. Few comments followed up, and those actually started working better on bing. (which Binged me, oops, Pinged me)

Definitely, Bing is improving, and MSFT is damn serious about it’s success. Only time can Predict the real success. If they continue campains on ideas like Cash-Back on search, they are going to get a better share in the future.

How did Microsoft make Bing?
5 Tough steps
1. Go to www.google.com in IE7. search for “good startup search companies”, from results click on “www.powerset.com”, result will be displayed on 2nd or 3rd page.
2. Look at the company’s financials (at Yahoo finance), click “Buy”.
3. Let the search engine index the web for few months.
4. Rename it to “Bing” a year later.
5. You are all set. Open firefox and start searching internet.

There is a secret to this story. During the first step they faced lots of issues. IE8 crashed the time they opened it. They opened Firefox silently.. shhhhhh.

And what you get is, Happy Steve dancing to tunes of google and apple. BTW, wat dance is that?

bing fails awfully in retrieving good results for some of the basic search results that I mentioned earlier

Just for fun. No intentions to hurt any one.

News of Bing eating Google and Yahoo search share rules out to be a miss-calculation. Three out of four major market research firms say that Yahoo still leads significantly in traffic. (Source: DailyTech)

Microsoft’s new product seized the number two search spot says one research report, others disagree

The Yahoo Microsoft saga is an irresistible one for the tech news community, both for journalists and readers alike.  After Yahoo disregarded Microsoft’s 2008 purchase offer, Microsoft decided to go its own way, cooking up Kudo.  So when the newly renamed Kudo, now Bing, was released last week and appeared to seize second place in searches from Yahoo, some quickly reported Microsoft to be victorious over Yahoo.  Now it appears, those reports may have been misleading.

If there has been one consistent thing about Bing and its reception, it has been the lack of consistency.  Some have showered praise on the search engine, arguing that while not a leap and bound over Google, it provides a much better experience than the old Live search and better options to refine your search.

Other reviewers were less positive, including a particularly scathing review by PC World which accused Microsoft of “binging” customers.  It claimed Microsoft’s Cashback discounted “best price” items which appeared as search results were actually substantially more expensive than offerings from discount retailers like Amazon.com and Newegg.com.

Then came a StatCounter report at the end of last week, which claimed Bing scored 16.28 percent of U.S. search traffic last week compared to 10.22 percent by Yahoo and 71.47 by Google.  The report put Bing’s worldwide total at 5.62 percent, compared to 5.13 by Yahoo and 87.62 by Google.  Some blog sites like TechCrunch began to hail Bing as having stolen marketshare from Google and using to bing Yahoo, sprinting into second.

However, the weekend brought still other reports contradicting these figures.  Search Engine Land checked with leading market research firms Comscore, Nielsen, and Hitwise, which reported that Yahoo was consistently doing three times the traffic as Bing.  CNET, which owns a large network of sites also disputed not pass Yahoo. the claims of a Bing victory, saying its own internal data indicated Bing did

The dramatic reversal brings to question the accuracy of the original StatCounter report.  StatCounter’s materials state that its numbers are “based on aggregate data collected by Statcounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion page views per month collected from across the Statcounter network of more than 3 million Web sites. Stats are updated and made available every 4 hours, however are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 7 days from publication.”

So perhaps poor quality testing let some bad numbers slip through.  What does this mean for Bing?  Likely not much; the search engine is unlikely to post any dramatic gains or losses so soon.  It may get a boost these first few weeks and then see a drop off, much like Google-descendant Cuil.  However, don’t expect it to nosedive like Cuil, either — after all, it has the backing of one of the tech industry’s strongest players.  Ultimately, whether Bing will beat Yahoo likely won’t be decided for months, while a challenge to Google would take years.

source: DailyTech

As I see it, following are the positives and negatives of Bing.

UPDATE: Some basic searches on BING just don’t work
“Was Einstein married?”
“What did Benjamin Franklin invent?”
“What is the top selling album of all time?”

Try them in Bing vs. Google. then you will know How bad is the “Decision engine”.

Pros

1. There are good addons like travel and local results.
2. The fact that Bing starts playing video thumbnails when you mouse over them in search results is super slick. This really helps in finding the video content that you are most interested in.
3. I really love image search on Bing. More specifically, I think the results are generally good and I love that I don’t have to page — that Bing incorporated live.com’s endless scrolling of search results.

Cons

1. The technical search results like “binomial theorem” will never endup in what you were actually looking for. It might end up in the history, stories ont hat topic which you as end-user will never bother about, that sucks!
2. (UPDATE: Bing fixes this.) The biggest negative to me so far is the fact that Bing buries news search off the main page. I do many news queries every single day. Frequently I’ll be searching for something via Google and click on Google News. The fact that Bing makes you click on “more” to get to news search frankly flabbergasts me. This seems so basic that I honestly can’t believe someone at MSFT could not figure this one out. Instead of getting “news” search on the main page you get Shopping, MSN and Windows Live. How is it that MSFT has room for those search items but not “news?”
3. I’m not entirely happy with the search results. A case in point. Earlier today I was trying to find Microsoft’s Bing Blog so that I could leave some of these comments there. So I did a search on Bing for “Bing Blog” Microsoft. What comes up? Lots of less than relevant stuff, but anything but the actual Microsoft Bing Blog. What I was looking for. By contrast, I do a search for “Bing Blog” Microsoft on Google, I actually can find the Bing Blog in the first page search results.
   It also feels to me like Google consistently has Wikipedia entries higher up the search results list than Bing. I might be wrong on that, it’s just the impression that I got after doing several searches. Frequently Wikipedia contains the most relevant info on a search subject and I like seeing them displayed more prominently.
4. The Bing stuff feels sluggish to me. Several times when I tried to load the Bing Blog (and most frustrating after I typed a lengthy comment) the page wouldn’t load as fast as google does. It seems to be hanging on “transferring data from analytics.r.msn.com” and so the community experience has not been good.
5. Microsoft only lets you set your settings preferences to allow 50 results per page during searches. (Google by contrast allows you 100 items per search on a page.) Paging sucks and the less that I have to do of it, the better.
6. Microsoft Maps need a ton of work. I use Google Maps a lot, mostly to set up maps of things that I want to photograph in various cities. MSFT seems to have a similar way to build your own maps using Bing Maps. They call them collections. I started making a “collection” of neon signs in San Francisco that I still need to shoot, but was really put off that my “collections” list is a huge box that blocks about 40% of my map view (you can’t drag this menu any place but directly over your map). With Google your saved locations sit in a column on the left side of the page and doesn’t block your map view.
7. Result relevance was never as good as Google. First 2-3 results were tolerable, following were very vague.

Given that I use Map Search so much and that Map Search feels so clunky with Microsoft, this is probably one more reason why I’d want to go back to Google.

I’m going to keep trying Bing for the next few days to see if things improve. But most likely I’ll be going back to Google as I doubt that they can improve any of the above negatives very quickly. And In case, I’m satisfied with some results out of Bing, I might use it occasionally e.g. for image search.

Bing vs. Google.

If we Talk about Bing in particular taking over Google, that would be a fair joke from Microsoft. They dont have the skill and innovation to catch upto google. Even if they do, their capacity, processing & speed will never mach that of Google.

Bing in chinese language means “Disease”, truly a Brand Infection! Choice is yours.

For more Microsoft, Google, Bing, Search Engine, Open Source, Tech Guides and Tech News catch us on Twitter @taranfx

To assert its presence in the internet search space, Microsoft has come up with ‘Bing’- a new search service that promises to help customers make better decisions. The software giant’s latest foray into internet search arena comes after many attempts to challenge the dominance of Google.

Bing would go live on June 3, Microsoft said in a statement.

Terming it as a ‘Decision Engine‘, the firm noted the new search service would help customers to make better decisions.

Bing would initially focus on four key areas: “making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business”.

The software major is yet to make a mark in the internet search space and has lost ground to main competitors Google and Yahoo!.

Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer feels that today’s search do a decent job of finding information but don’t do a “very good job” of enabling people to make use the information they find.

“Bing is an important first step forward in our long term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information… (to) make smart decisions”.

What is bing capable of?

Bing features  intelligence embedded based of your keyword inputs. It can give you alot more than what other search engines will just dream about. Every search you make will popup smarter results corresponding to Business, Travel, Maps and locations, directories etc.

Bing’s other features include:

-Best Match: All the relevant results are showed up with the most relevant link on the top and called out
-Instant Answers: One-click access to the information listed in the search results.
-Deep Links: Talks more about the resources of the particular site
-Bing Maps: These maps for Enterprise are actually Virtual Earth, Microsoft’s mapping platform
-Bing Travel Rate Key: comparison of the Hotel’s the location, price and amenities will be represented in color coded manner

But all this doesn’t mean that Bing is flawless. A niche search like “binomial theorem” will definitely yield wrong/unwanted results in the categories mentioned. Google will do much better over this.

What could it mean to Google?

Google had been the god of the web, and will continue to be for the years to come. A company like Microsoft has long come up with promises to beat the best in the industry. The result, success rate of 5%.

They have long fought to attain search share from the search giant google. In there earlier attempts, they introduced LIVE search. In following years of parody, they spent some $$$ and gave offers to search users. when nothing worked, they tried buying innovation at Yahoo!. Unfortunately, nothing worked, atleast till now.

Time has changed, so has microsoft learned to improve in “innovation”. I put them in quotes to highlight the difference between what they had quoted and what had been anticipated by the industry. One such was from the “innovative” ideas of Microsoft’s last year’s acquisition, Microsoft can finally plan to gain bigger share in the search industry. Bing will provide the long awaited “intelligence” in the search engines which was provided at low quality by google. Google’s backbone had been based on content and PageRanks which has obvious Pros and cons. e.g. with the Algorithms of Google, a new site with unique content and HOT topic will never appear on the first page unless its referred in another page on the web. Sounds wiered isnt it?

I love google so does 90% of its users. Till no,w the kind of expectations out of search engine had been more wide. All search users used one source to digg-out of the internet. The new Era of search engines is bringing things to much more granular level. The future will see multiple search engines that will serve perfection in different aspects of interest. Consider the example of Wolfram|Alpha. This search engine excels in search results when your search interest is limited to Technical subjects of study. Even google falls years backwards when it comes to comparing such results.

Bing vs. Google.

If we Talk about Bing in particular taking over Google, that would be a fair joke from Microsoft. They dont have the skill and innovation to catch upto google. Even if they do, their capacity, processing & speed will never mach that of Google.

The future of Search Engines: Google and the rest of them

In future, we would see lots of niche search engines that will drive different kinds of interest of different users. Google will find place as the Generic backone to all. Its like a Centralized government which will hold the directory for all citizens, no matter where citizen works. After 10 years from now, you will still google the things you need.