“The greatest trick Microsoft ever pulled was convincing Apple that Google didn’t exist.”
If Microsoft plays its cards right, that may be a statement we’re saying years from now.
What does that mean? Aside from being a riff on one of the best lines in movie history, what I mean by that is: imagine if Microsoft was able to convince Apple to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone, rather than Google. Leading up to Apple’s press event last month, rumors were swirling about this possibility. As is always the case with Apple, it’s hard to know how legitimate those talks were or if they were just some ploy to get something else it wanted. But from Microsoft’s perspective, it should be more than wishful thinking.
During today’s AOL earnings call, which just finished, CEO Tim Armstrong dropped the strongest hint yet that Google is the front-runner in negotiations for who will power search across AOL properties. Google is AOL’s current partner, as it has been for nearly a decade, but the partnership is up for renewal. Needless to say, snatching the search partnership away would be a coup for Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Bing wants the search deal, which would help it increase its total volume of searches by a couple percentage points since AOL on its own has the fifth largest search share in the U.S.
But during the call, Armstrong emphasized that “distribution is almost as important to us as money, we will look for distribution as much as money in the deal.” AOL is a content company and it gets a lot of its traffic from Google. The sheer volume of referral traffic Google sends to AOL sites is something Bing cannot yet compete against, and to the extent that Google can find ways to send more traffic to AOL as part of its search deal, that makes it a more attractive partner than Bing even if Microsoft is willing to throw more money at AOL on the search side. Here is Armstrong’s relevant reply to an analyst’s question on the topic from my notes:
Bing just launched a nifty new feature for any cooks out there. When you search for a food item, Bing will now show recipe results that involve the item. So if I search for macaroni, I’ll see a tab to the left of results that will show me “Macaroni Recipes.”
Recipe results are pulled from a variety of recipe websites including MyRecipes.com and Epicurious.com. Each recipe will result will show the source or name of the site, user ratings, and a measure fat and of calories. You can filter recipes by convenience, type of cuisine, occasion, ratings, course and main ingredient. Unfortunately, the recipe feature doesn’t show up for every query. I typed in macaroni and cheese as well as spaghetti and meatballs, I didn’t get the recipe results for either search term.
If you go to the Silverlight version of Bing Maps, at the bottom is an application gallery which adds different features and layers to the maps. Two new Silverlight apps added today are for Events and Destination Maps.
The Events app brings up nearby events and places them as pins on the map. The name of the events appear in the left-hand column, where you can scroll through them and sort by popularity or date. You can also filter by specific times (today, tomorrow, this weekend, this week, next week, or a specific date range). The app also lets you narrow the search down by categories such as music, sports, performing arts, food & dining, and fairs & festivals.
Everyone is getting into the URL shortening game these days. Google, YouTube, and Facebook are just a few joining the likes of the established players such as Bit.ly. And now Microsoft is jumping in. But there’s something weird about their URL.
As the UK blog My Microsoft Life noticed, some of Microsoft’s Bing employees have begun publicly tweeting with the binged.it URL. Seattle PI confirmed with Microsoft that it has been used internally and is likely to be made public soon. But the odd thing about binged.it is that it’s actually one character longer than Bing’s own domain, complete with the .com part. Sure, many Bing search query URLs are going to be much longer, but then why not just shorten them using the Bing.com domain or something smaller? I don’t know how much Microsoft paid for the Bing domain, but I’m sure it wasn’t cheap. And wasn’t part of the point to be shorter than Google? Why not spring for bin.gd or something?
Bing just keeps on gaining market share, and is now growing faster than ever before. In December, Microsoft’s search engine gained another 0.4 percent to capture 10.7 percent of U.S. search queries, according to the latest comScore qSearch numbers. That makes five straight months of steady share gains for Bing since it launched—Bing’s share is up 2.7 percent in total since May, 2009. Google gained only 0.2 percent to end the month with 65.7 percent market share. Meanwhile, Yahoo lost as much as Google gained (0.2 percent) to end the year at 17.3 percent (see table above, courtesy of Barclays Capital).
What is even more interesting is if you look at year-over-year query growth rates for each search engine. Bing’s growth is actually accelerating. Its growth rate in query volume was 49.4 percent in December, compared to 20.6 percent growth for Google (which was also above the average), and a 1.9 percent decline for Yahoo. Here are the year-over-year query growth rates for Bing for the past few months:
Times Square was evacuated earlier today when the bomb squad was called in to inspect a suspicious parked van. It turned out to be nothing, but as people were scrambling for information they would have been better off doing a search on Bing than on Google. A search for “Times Square” on Google about 15 minutes after I saw my first Tweet about it turned up two-day old news results up top about New Year’s Eve preperations and generic photos of Times Square, whereas a search on Bing at least had relevant headlines from ABC News (“NYPD: No Bomb Inside Van Abandoned in Times Square”) and CNN (“Police investigate van parked in Times Square”).
Of course, Google was perfectly capable of showing the best realtime results. The problem is that the best results were hidden on Google’s realtime updates page (click “Show options” and then “Updates” on any search), and Bing’s Twitter search page, which combines Tweets with headlines. I learned about the bomb scare and subsequent reopening of Times Square on Twitter before it even hit most news sites. But the next thing I did was search on Google. If you look now, Google is finally showing the right news results, but the screenshot above is what I saw when I searched, along with what I saw immediately after on Bing.
The following guest post was written by Edo Segal (@edosegal).
It was 1993 and I had just decided to drop out of college. I was a graphic design major in a great art school but decided I want to start my second company. Knowing this would mark the conclusion of my studies there I set out to create my final project. I would write a short story, design and produce it in print. I put out an edition of 300 and gave it to my friends and people who inspired me like author William Gibson.
Cut to November, 2009, when I returned from sitting on a panel at the second Realtime CrunchUp. I had urged the audience and participants that when thinking about the realtime web we should not consider the challenge through the lens of how consumers behave today.
Yesterday, we wrote about the arrival of Microsoft’s Bing app in Apple’s App Store. While Microsoft has now made a few apps for the iPhone, it’s still significant when the two bitter rivals play nice with one another. But from Bing’s perspective it makes sense. They’re trying to grow the service, and search on mobile is red hot, as is the iPhone, obviously. But perhaps more interesting is just how much Bing is promoting the App Store within its own search engine.
Doing a search for a number of popular mobile apps on Bing yields a prominent first result that pulls data from the App Store. These results include a big app icon, a description of the app, its price, its genre, and when it was released. Clicking on any of these elements will load up iTunes and take you to the App Store to get the app — again, all from Bing.
Since the dawn of Bing, it’s been exceptionally good at one thing: Finding porn. Its new iPhone app, which launched tonight in the App Store, is no different.
By default, the app has a Safe Search setting of “Moderate.” Searching for “porn” this way yields several promising results. However, with just two clicks, any kids can turn off safe search and off they go! The porn results are nothing, if not impressive.