Bing

Bing (known previously as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search) is a web search engine (advertised as a "decision engine" ) from Microsoft.

Bing was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009, at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego, California, for release on June 1, 2009. Notable changes include the listing of search suggestions while queries are entered and a list of related searches (called "Explore pane") based on semantic technology from Powerset, which Microsoft purchased in 2008.

On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners were expected to have made the transition by early 2012.

In October 2011, Microsoft stated that they were working on new back-end search infrastructure with the goal of delivering faster and slightly more relevant search results for users. Known as "Tiger", the new index-serving technology has been incorporated into Bing globally since August 2011. In May 2012, Microsoft announced another redesign of its search engine that includes "Sidebar", a social feature that searches users' social networks for information relevant to the search query. In September 2013, a new-look Bing was released to tie-in with Microsoft's "Metro" design language.

MSN Search


MSN Search was a search engine by Microsoft that consisted of a search engine, index, and web crawler. MSN Search first launched in the third quarter of 1998 and used search results from Inktomi. In early 1999, MSN Search launched a version which displayed listings from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. Since then Microsoft upgraded MSN Search to provide its own self-built search engine results, the index of which was updated weekly and sometimes daily. The upgrade started as a beta program in November 2004, and came out of beta in February 2005. Image search was powered by a third party, Picsearch. The service also started providing its search results to other search engine portals in an effort to better compete in the market.

Windows Live Search
The first public beta of Windows Live Search was unveiled on March 8, 2006, with the final release on September 11, 2006 replacing MSN Search. The new search engine used search tabs that include Web, news, images, music, desktop, local, and Microsoft Encarta.

In the roll-over from MSN Search to Windows Live Search, Microsoft stopped using Picsearch as their image search provider and started performing their own image search, fueled by their own internal image search algorithms.

Live Search
On March 21, 2007, Microsoft announced that it would separate its search developments from the Windows Live services family, rebranding the service as Live Search. Live Search was integrated into the Live Search and Ad Platform headed by Satya Nadella, part of Microsoft's Platform and Systems division. As part of this change, Live Search was merged with Microsoft adCenter.

A series of reorganisations and consolidations of Microsoft's search offerings were made under the Live Search branding. On May 23, 2008, Microsoft announced the discontinuation of Live Search Books and Live Search Academic and integrated all academic and book search results into regular search, and as a result this also included the closure of Live Search Books Publisher Program. Soon after, Windows Live Expo was discontinued on July 31, 2008. Live Search Macros, a service for users to create their own custom search engines or use macros created by other users, was also discontinued shortly after. On May 15, 2009, Live Product Upload, a service which allowed merchants to upload products information onto Live Search Products, was discontinued. The final reorganisation came as Live Search QnA was rebranded as MSN QnA on February 18, 2009, however, it was subsequently discontinued on May 21, 2009.

Microsoft recognised that there would be a brand issue as long as the word "Live" remained in the name. As an effort to create a new identity for Microsoft's search services, Live Search was officially replaced by Bing on June 3, 2009.

Yahoo! search deal
On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that they had made a ten-year deal in which the Yahoo! search engine would be replaced by Bing. Yahoo! will get to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell adverts on some Microsoft sites. Yahoo! Search will still maintain its own user interface, but will eventually feature "Powered by Bing™" branding. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners are expected to be transitioned by early 2012.

Market share
Before the launch of Bing, the marketshare of Microsoft web search pages (MSN and Live search) had been small. By January 2011, Experian Hitwise show that Bing's market share had increased to 12.8% at the expense of Yahoo! and Google. Bing powered searches also continued to have a higher "success rate" compared to Google, with more users clicking on the resulting links. In the same period, comScore’s "2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review" report showed that "Bing was the big gainer in year-over-year search activity, picking up 29% more searches in 2010 than it did in 2009". The Wall Street Journal notes the 1% jump in share "appeared to come at the expense of rival Google Inc". In February 2011, Bing beat Yahoo! for the first time with 4.37% search share while Yahoo! received 3.93%.

Counting core searches only, i.e., those where the user has an intent to interact with the search result, Bing had a market share of 14.54% in the second quarter of 2011 in the United States.

The combined "Bing Powered" U.S. searches have declined from 26.5% in 2011 to 25.9% in April 2012.

Three-column display
On May 10, 2012, Bing announced a future format change to a three-column display. The first column shows the traditional search results. The middle column, called "Snapshot", shows Bing's structured data and allows performing actions such as making purchases or getting directions. The third column, or "Sidebar", provides data from Facebook and Twitter.

Interface features

 * Daily changing of background image. The images are mostly of noteworthy places in the world, though it sometimes displays animals, people, and sports. The background image also contains information about the element(s) shown in the image
 * Video homepage for HTML5 enabled browsers on occasional events, similar to the daily background images
 * Images page shows the main picture from that day and four searches that refers to that image with three preview pictures per search term
 * Left side navigation pane. Includes navigation and, on results pages, related searches and prior searches
 * Right side extended preview which shows a bigger view of the page and gives URLs to links inside of the page
 * Sublinks – On certain search results, the search result page also shows section links within the article (this is also done on other search engines, including Google)
 * Enhanced view where third party site information can be viewed inside Bing
 * On certain sites, search from within the website on the results page
 * On certain sites, Bing will display the Customer Service number on the results page

Media features

 * Video thumbnail Preview – where, by hovering over a video thumbnail, the video automatically starts playing
 * Image search with continuous scrolling images results page that has adjustable settings for size, layout, color, style, and people
 * Advanced filters or advanced (query) operators – allow users to refine search results based on properties such as image size, aspect ratio, color or black and white, photo or illustration, and facial features recognition
 * Video search with adjustable setting for length, screen size, resolution, and source

Instant answers

 * Sports – Bing can directly display scores from a specific day, recent scores from a league or scores and statistics on teams or players.
 * Finance – When entering a company name or stock symbol and either stock or quote in the search box Bing will show direct stock information like a stockchart, price, volume, and p/e ratio in a webslice that users can subscribe to.
 * Conversion of units (e.g., 1 oz in tbs, 1 cup in oz)
 * Mathematical calculations – (e.g., 2 * pi * 24). Users can enter mathematical expressions in the search box using a variety of operators and trigonometric functions and Bing will provide a direct calculation of the expression.
 * Advanced computations – Using the Wolfram Alpha computational engine, Bing can also give results to advanced mathemathical problems (e.g. "lim x/2x as x->2") and other Wolfram Alpha-related queries (e.g., asking the number of calories in a typical pizza).
 * Package tracking and tracing – When a user types the name of the shipping company and the tracking number, Bing will provide direct tracking information
 * Dictionary – When "define", "definition", or "what is" followed by a word is entered in the searchbox Bing will show a direct answer from the Encarta dictionary
 * Spell check – Will change frequently misspelled search terms to the more commonly spelled alternative.
 * Best match (plus similar sites)
 * Product shopping and "Bing cashback"
 * Health information
 * Flight tracking
 * Translate – Auto translation of certain search phrases, often with phrases including "translate" or "in English". For example, to translate me llamo from Spanish to English the user would simply type "translate me llamo in English" and he or she would be redirected to a search results page with Bing Translator with the translation from Spanish to English

Local info

 * Current traffic information
 * Business listing
 * People listing
 * Collections
 * Localized searching for restaurants and services
 * Localized searching for coupons and deals
 * Restaurant reviews
 * Movies played in an area – When a current movie title is entered in the search box Bing will provide listings of local theaters showing the movie. When a city is added to the search box, Bing provides the movie listings localized for that city.
 * City hotel listings – When "hotels" and a city name is entered in the search box Bing can provide hotel listings with a map. The listing leads to a detail search page with the hotels listed that holds extended information on the hotels and contains links to reviews, directions reservations and bird-eye view of the hotel. On the page with the listings the list can be refined by settings on ratings, pricing, amenities, payment, and parking

Integration with Hotmail

 * With Hotmail’s "Quick Add" feature, users can insert derivatives of Bing search results such as restaurant reviews, movie times, images, videos, and maps directly into their e-mail messages

Integration with Facebook

 * Bing's search results can display one's Facebook friends when a Facebook account is linked with Bing via Facebook Connect
 * Users have the option to send messages to their friends in the search results
 * As part of the changes announced May 10, 2012, the "sidebar" column of the new three-column search results display will include recommendations from Facebook and the ability to interact with others from the same page. For the previous year, search results had included Facebook recommendations using the "like" button, but most users did not want this; the new display makes this feature separate from search results in general

Integration with Apple

 * Apple's search results have now been integrated with Bing's web search engine.
 * On June 10, 2013, Apple announced that it will be dropping Google as its web search engine and include Microsoft's Bing.
 * This feature is only integrated with iOS 7 and higher and for users with an iPhone 4S or higher as the feature is only integrated with Siri, Apple's breakthrough personal assistant.

Integration with Windows 8

 * Microsoft announced a free upgrade to Windows 8.1 for all Windows 8 users. One of the biggest updates with this change is the Bing smart search integration.
 * Microsoft advertises this feature as "Smart Search" processes all queries through the Windows Start Screen
 * The Bing integration captures a variety of features, one of the most prominent and advertised: Hero Search. This feature allows users to browse for popular and well-known places, objects or people. Searching France, for example, will show popular search items, such as population, calling code and date founded. The current weather and location are also directly accessible using Bing Weather and Bing maps. The "Hero" result will go further to provide attractions using Bing Images and popular websites relating to France, such as France Wikipedia and France's official website. Searching an artist will display similar results with the option to play music using the Windows 8 integrated Xbox Music application.
 * While this may be a more convenient way to search, critics have argued that the Smart Search have slowed down basic search queries within one's own computer that do not require Bing's integration.

International
Bing is available in many languages and has been localized for many countries.

Languages in which Bing can find results

 * Albanian
 * Arabic
 * Bulgarian
 * Catalan
 * Chinese (Simplified and Traditional scripts)
 * Croatian
 * Czech
 * Danish
 * Dutch
 * English (American and British)
 * Estonian
 * Finnish
 * French
 * German


 * Greek
 * Hebrew
 * Hungarian
 * Icelandic
 * Indonesian
 * Italian
 * Japanese
 * Korean
 * Latvian
 * Lithuanian
 * Malay
 * Norwegian
 * Portuguese (Brazil)
 * Portuguese (Portugal)


 * Romanian
 * Russian
 * Serbian (Cyrillic)
 * Slovak
 * Slovenian
 * Spanish
 * Swedish
 * Tamil
 * Thai
 * Turkish
 * Ukrainian
 * Vietnamese

Languages in which Bing can be displayed

 * Basque
 * Bulgarian
 * Catalan
 * Chinese (Simplified and Traditional scripts)
 * Croatian
 * Czech
 * Danish
 * Dutch
 * English (American and British)
 * Estonian
 * Finnish
 * French
 * Galician


 * German
 * Greek
 * Hindi
 * Hungarian
 * Icelandic
 * Italian
 * Japanese
 * Korean
 * Latin
 * Latvian
 * Lithuanian
 * Malay
 * Norwegian
 * Portuguese (Brazil)


 * Portuguese (Portugal)
 * Romanian
 * Russian
 * Serbian (Cyrillic)
 * Slovak
 * Slovenian
 * Spanish
 * Swedish
 * Tamil
 * Thai
 * Turkish
 * Ukrainian
 * Vietnamese

Search products
In addition to its tool for searching web pages, Bing also provides the following search offerings:

Webmaster services
Bing allows webmasters to manage the web crawling status of their own websites through Bing Webmaster Center. Additionally, users may also submit contents to Bing via the following methods:


 * Bing Local Listing Center allow businesses to add business listings onto Bing Maps and Bing Local
 * Soapbox on MSN Video allow users to upload videos for searching via Bing Videos

Mobile services
Bing Mobile allow users to conduct search queries on their mobile devices, either via the mobile browser or a downloadable mobile application. In the United States, Microsoft also operates a toll-free number for directory assistance called Bing 411.

Developer services
Bing Application Programming Interface enables developers to programmatically submit queries and retrieve results from the Bing Engine. http://www.bing.com/developers

To use the Bing API developers have to obtain an Application ID, http://www.bing.com/developers/createapp.aspx

Bing API can be used with following protocols:


 * XML
 * JSON
 * SOAP

Query examples:


 * http://api.bing.net/xml.aspx?AppId=YOUR_APPID&Version=2.2&Market=en-US&Query=YOUR_QUERY&Sources=web+spell&Web.Count=1
 * http://api.bing.net/json.aspx?AppId=YOUR_APPID&Version=2.2&Market=en-US&Query=YOUR_QUERY&Sources=web+spell&Web.Count=1
 * http://api.bing.net/search.wsdl?AppID=YourAppId&Version=2.2

Other services
BingTweets is a service that combines Twitter trends with Bing search results, enabling users to see real-time information about the hottest topics on Twitter. The BingTweets service was initiated on July 14, 2009 in a partnership between Microsoft, Twitter and Federated Media.

Bing Rewards is a service that allows users to earn points for searching with Bing. These points can be redeemed for various products and services.

Toolbars
Both Windows Live Toolbar and MSN Toolbar will be powered by Bing and aim to offer users a way to access Bing search results. Together with the launch of Bing, MSN Toolbar 4.0 will be released with inclusion of new Bing-related features such as Bing cashback offer alerts. (See "Bing Rewards")

Gadgets


The Bing Search gadget is a Windows Sidebar Gadget that uses Bing Search to fetch the user's search results and render them directly in the gadget. Another gadget, the Bing Maps gadget, displays real-time traffic conditions using Bing Maps. The gadget provides shortcuts to driving directions, local search and full-screen traffic view of major US and Canadian cities, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Montreal, New York City, Oklahoma City, Ottawa, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Providence, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa, Toronto, Vancouver, and Washington, D.C.

Bing Desktop is also a gadget-like Windows program for Windows 7 that adds a search bar to Windows Desktop and changes the desktop background to that of Bing's image of the day.

Prior to October 30, 2007, the gadgets were known as Live Search gadget and Live Search Maps gadget; both gadgets were removed from Windows Live Gallery due to possible security concerns. The Live Search Maps gadget was made available for download again on January 24, 2008 with the security concern addressed. However around the introduction of Bing in June 2009 both gadgets have been removed again for download from Windows Live Gallery.

Accelerators
Accelerators allow users to access Bing features directly from selected text in a webpage. Accelerators provided by the Bing team include:


 * Bing Translator
 * Bing Maps
 * Bing Shopping

Web Slices
Web Slices can be used to monitor information gathered by Bing. Web Slices provided by the Bing team include:


 * Weather from Bing
 * Finance from Bing
 * Traffic from Bing

Add-ons
The Bing team provides an official Bing Firefox add-on, which adds search suggestions to the Firefox search box from Bing.

Live Search
Since 2006, Microsoft had conducted a number of tie-ins and promotions for promoting Microsoft's search offerings. These include:


 * Amazon's A9 search service and the experimental Ms. Dewey interactive search site syndicated all search results from Microsoft's then search engine, Live Search. This tie-in started on May 1, 2006.
 * Search and Give - a promotional website launched on 17 January 2007 where all searches done from a special portal site would lead to a donation to the UNHCR's organization for refugee children, ninemillion.org. Reuters AlertNet reported in 2007 that the amount to be donated would be $0.01 per search, with a minimum of $100,000 and a maximum of $250,000 (equivalent to 25 million searches). According to the website the service was decommissioned on June 1, 2009, having donated over $500,000 to charity and schools.
 * Club Bing - a promotional website where users can win prizes by playing word games that generate search queries on Microsoft's then search service Live Search. This website began in April 2007 as Live Search Club.
 * Big Snap Search - a promotional website similar to Live Search Club. This website began in February 2008, but was discontinued shortly after.
 * Live Search SearchPerks! - a promotional website which allowed users to redeem tickets for prizes while using Microsoft's search engine. This website began on October 1, 2008 and was decommissioned on April 15, 2009.

Debut
Bing's debut featured an $80 to $100 million online, TV, print, and radio advertising campaign in the US. The advertisements do not mention other search engine competitors, such as Google and Yahoo!, directly by name; rather, they attempt to convince users to switch to Bing by focusing on Bing's search features and functionality. The ads claim that Bing does a better job countering "search overload".

Bing Rewards
Launched by Microsoft in September 2010, Bing Rewards provides credits to users through regular Bing searches and special promotions. These credits are then redeemed for various products including electronics, gift cards, sweepstakes, and charitable donations. Initially, participants in the program were required to download and use the Bing Bar for Internet Explorer in order to earn credits; however, this is no longer the case, and the service now works with all desktop browsers. The Bing Rewards program is similar to two earlier services, SearchPerks! and Bing Cashback, which have now been discontinued.

The Colbert Report
During the episode of The Colbert Report that aired on June 8, 2010, Stephen Colbert stated that Microsoft would donate $2,500 to help clean up the Gulf oil spill each time he mentioned the word "Bing" on air. Colbert mostly mentioned Bing in out-of-context situations, such as Bing Crosby and Bing cherries. By the end of the show, Colbert had said the word 40 times, for a total donation of $100,000. Colbert poked fun at their rivalry with Google, stating "Bing is a great website for doing Internet searches. I know that, because I Googled it."

Los Links Son Malos
An advertising campaign during 2010, Los Links Son Malos (The Links are Bad), took the form of a Mexican telenovela, with people conversing in Spanish, subtitled in English. In it, somebody rides in on a horse and takes a woman away when he shows her how easy Bing is to use in order to get movie tickets or travel.

Search deals
As of Opera 10.6, Bing has been incorporated into the Opera browser, but Google is still the default search engine. Bing will also be incorporated into all future versions of Opera. Mozilla Firefox has made a deal with Microsoft to jointly release "Firefox with Bing", an edition of Firefox where Bing has replaced Google as the default search engine. However, the default edition of Firefox still has Google as its default search engine, but has included Bing in its default list of search providers since Firefox version 4.0.

In addition, Microsoft also paid Verizon Wireless $550 million USD to use Bing as the default search provider on Verizon's BlackBerry, and in turn, have Verizon "turn off" (via BlackBerry service books) the other search providers available. Users could still access other search engines via the mobile browser.

Bing It On
In 2012, a Bing marketing campaign asked the public which search engine they believed was better when its results were presented without branding, similar to the Pepsi Challenge in the 1970s. This poll was nicknamed "Bing It On". Microsoft presented a study of almost 1,000 people which showed that 57% of participants in such a test preferred Bing's results, with only 30% preferring Google.

TV to Bing About
In September 2011, Bing partnered with The CW Network. Promotional messages for Bing were inserted in commercials featuring cast and crew members from programs of the network. Their slogan "TV to Talk About" was changed to "TV to Bing About". Lisa Gurry, a director-marketing explained they made this move to attract a younger audience.

Name origin
Through focus groups, Microsoft decided that the name Bing was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that it would function well as a URL around the world. The word would remind people of the sound made during "the moment of discovery and decision making." Microsoft was assisted by branding consultancy Interbrand in their search for the best name for the new search engine. The name also has strong similarity to the word 'bingo', which is used to mean that something sought has been found or realized, as is interjected when winning the game Bingo. Microsoft advertising strategist David Webster originally proposed the name "Bang" for the same reasons the name Bing was ultimately chosen (easy to spell, one syllable, and easy to remember). He noted, "It's there, it's an exclamation point [...] It's the opposite of a question mark." This name was ultimately not chosen because it could not be properly used as a verb in the context of an internet search.

According to the Guardian "[Microsoft] hasn't confirmed that it stands recursively for Bing Is Not Google, but that's the sort of joke software engineers enjoy."

Qi Lu, president of Microsoft Online Services, also announced that Bing's official Chinese name is bì yìng, which literally means "very certain to respond" or "very certain to answer" in Chinese.

While being tested internally by Microsoft employees, Bing's codename was Kumo (くも), which came from the Japanese word for spider (蜘蛛; くも, kumo) as well as cloud (雲; くも, kumo), referring to the manner in which search engines "spider" Internet resources to add them to their database, as well as cloud computing.

"Decision engine"
Bing has been heavily advertised as a "decision engine", though thought by columnist David Berkowitz to be more closely related to a web portal.

Legal challenges
On July 31, 2009, The Laptop Company, Inc. released a press release stating that it is challenging Bing's trademark application, alleging that Bing may cause confusion in the marketplace as Bing and their product BongoBing both do online product search. Software company TeraByte Unlimited, which has a product called BootIt Next Generation (abbreviated to BING), also contended the trademark application on similar grounds, as did a Missouri-based design company called Bing! Information Design.

Microsoft contends that claims challenging its trademark are without merit because these companies filed for U.S. federal trademark applications only after Microsoft filed for the Bing trademark in March 2009.

Video content
Bing's video search tool has a preview mode that could potentially be used to preview pornographic videos. By simply turning off safe search, users can search for and view pornographic videos by hovering the cursor over a thumbnail, since the video and audio, in some cases, are cached on Microsoft's server.

Since the videos are playing within Bing instead of the site where they are hosted, the videos are not necessarily blocked by parental control filters. Monitoring programs designed to tell parents what sites their children have visited are likely to simply report "Bing.com" instead of the site that actually hosts the video. The same situation can be said about corporate filters, many of which have been fooled by this feature. Users do not need to leave Bing's site to view these videos.

Microsoft responded in a blog post on June 4, 2009, with a short term work-around. By adding "&adlt=strict" to the end of a query, no matter what the settings are for that session it will return results as if safe search were set to strict. The query would look like this:  (case sensitive).

On June 12, 2009, Microsoft announced two changes regarding Bing's Smart Motion Preview and SafeSearch features. All potentially explicit content will be coming from a separate single domain, explicit.bing.net. Additionally, Bing will also return source URL information in the query string for image and video contents. Both changes allow both home users and corporate users to filter content by domain regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be.

Regional censorship
Bing censors results for adult search terms for some of the regions including India, People's Republic of China, Germany and Arab countries. This censoring is done based on the local laws of those countries. However, Bing allows users to simply change their country/region preference to somewhere without restrictions – such as the United States, United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland – to sidestep this censorship.

Censorship
Microsoft has been criticized for censoring Bing search results to queries made in simplified Chinese characters, used in mainland China. This is done to comply with the censorship requirements of the government in China. Microsoft has not indicated a willingness to stop censoring search results in simplified Chinese characters in the wake of Google's decision to do so. All simplified Chinese searches in Bing are censored regardless of the user's country.

Performance issues
Bing has been criticized for being slower to index websites than Google. It has also been criticized for not indexing some websites at all.

Copying Google's results
Bing has been criticized by competitor Google, for utilizing user input via Internet Explorer, the Bing Toolbar, or Suggested Sites, to add results to Bing. After discovering in October 2010 that Bing appeared to be imitating Google's auto-correct results for a misspelling, despite not actually fixing the spelling of the term, Google set up a honeypot, configuring the Google search engine to return specific unrelated results for 100 nonsensical queries such as hiybbprqag. Over the next couple of weeks, Google engineers entered the search term into Google, while using Microsoft Internet Explorer, with the Bing Toolbar installed and the optional Suggested Sites enabled. In 9 out of the 100 queries, Bing later started returning the same results as Google, despite the only apparent connection between the result and search term being that Google's results connected the two.

Microsoft's response to this issue, coming from a company's spokesperson, was: "We do not copy Google's results." Bing's Vice President, Harry Shum, later reiterated that the search result data Google claimed that Bing copied had in fact come from Bing's very own users. Shum further wrote that "we use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt into sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users." Microsoft commented that clickstream data from customers who had opted in was collected, but said that it was just a small piece of over 1000 signals used in their ranking algorithm, and that their intention was to learn from their collective customers. They stated that Bing was not intended to be a duplicate of any existing search engines.