Bing

A Chinese search engine giant Baidu entered into an agreement with Microsoft to offer English-language search results to Baidu’s users.

As a part of the partnership users will be able to enter English-language queries into Baidu’s search box to automatically activate Bing and Bing’s search results will be delivered to Baidu's Web pages, Baidu said in an emailed statement on Monday.

Analysts said the tie-up would help Bing to gain greater access to China's more than 450 million Internet users and further dent Google's business in the country.

Search engines Bing, Google and Yahoo have partnered over a search optimization initiative in a project to support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages, reports WebProNews.

“Over the past two years, Bing has worked to improve the search experience to better reflect both the evolving Web and changing consumer habits,” said Bing representative.

”While this effort has a major ‘geek factor,’ it serves as quite a significant advancement for both the search industry and consumers,” he added.

At RIM's BlackBerry World conference this week Steve Ballmer, a CEO of Microsoft, announced the partnership with Research in Motion. Now Microsoft’s Bing becomes default search engine and maps provider for RIM’s smartphones as well as Playbook tablet.

"We're going to invest uniquely into the BlackBerry platform," Ballmer said according to bloggers covering the event. "Bing will become the default search provider in the browser and maps" on BlackBerry devices.

Microsoft has revamped the Shopping section of its Bing search engine having added among other things the ability to link to Facebook accounts. Now with the pairing to Facebook users can stay reminded of friends' birthdays, as well as share their shopping lists with them.

Besides, Microsoft also redesigned Shopping home page and now it gives more prominent placement to top search queries, popular products and relevant articles.

Search engine Bing has launched a new service called “Bing deals” to allow consumers to find the best local deals. The service is available for both desktop and mobile users.

The project is powered by The Dealmap, a service provider that allows people to find and share the best local deals.

The new feature will provide access to 200,000 offers in 14,000 cities.

Bing deals compiles leading offers from Groupon, LivingSocial and Restaurant.com, Bing's director of product management said in a company blog post.
 

A new feature was added by Bing to allow people to use natural language search queries for shopping. Now users can type words like "under $100" or "under $50" along with their keywords to get relevant results for products that match such descriptions. "With help from Microsoft Research, we've improved how we handle price queries to deliver results that automatically reflect your budget," the Bing Shopping team writes in a blog post. "This is especially handy when you're on the go, and don’t have time to browse around and click the right refinements.

Search on Bing is getting more personalized. Now users will be able to search for the things they need based on their individual needs, that are memorized by the search engine system, and also on their current location.

Bing continues gaining market share with a significant increase recorded between December and January, as reported by Experian Hitwise.

Experian Hitwise reports that market share of Microsoft’s search engine rose from 10.60% in December to 12.81% in January. It means a 20.85% month-over-month growth.

It should be noted that the industry leader Google saw a slight decline from 69.67% to 67.95% on a month-over-month basis.
 

Now Microsoft accuses Google of using a criminal tool to conduct its Bing Sting operation that the search engine giant revealed earlier this week. Google used click fraud usually practiced by cyber crooks.

On Tuesday this week Google started roaring over the Internet and tech press that in the course of its sting investigation they found evidence that Bing is intentially and systematically copying Google search results.

eBay has skimmed the cream and gain over some employees from Bing and Facebook with impressive background and experience.

Dennis DeCoste from Facebook, where he held the title "research scientist,” will help eBay by acting as its director of research. Before Facebook he served as principal scientist at Bing and director of research at Yahoo Research. Besides, DeCoste once worked as principal scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Media is buzzing over histrionic accusations put forward by the search engine giant Google who alleges that Microsoft is its search results. The Mountain View claims it has run a "sting operation" that indicates Redmond's Internet Explorer software is tracking what searchers find on Google and using this data to tweak results on Bing.

Microsoft Senior Vice President of Research and Development Satya Nadella touted the success of their search engine brainchild over this year. Speaking at the Bing Summit in San Francisco Nadella pointed to a recent comScore report concluding that Bing now commands 11.8% explicit market share (90 million users), up 48% since its launch in June 2009. Specifically, Bing claims it has seen 72% growth in "heavy and medium users."

Ask.com is abandoning further quests to develop search technology and will buy its Web search results from one of its rivals, but it declined to say which one, citing a clause in the contract. Besides, 130 engineers who were engaged with building the search engine will be laid off and thousands of computer servers that stored billions of pages of data will be removed.

Availing of the stir created by the launch of the new Microsoft’s OS for mobile phones Google decided to be among the first to release its app for Windows Phone 7. Meantime, Windows Phone 7 devices come with Bing as a default search engine.

Many observers believe that Google is unlikely to make great success with Windows Phone 7 as users often tend to apply the default. Even on PCs people use Google more out of their habit than out of preference over Bing.

Bing search engine will become more social under the new partnership between Microsoft and Facebook. The announcement made by Mark Zuckerberg is expected to have a great impact on the future of search including Bing’s position against Google.

Zuckerberg stated, "What makes this a great partnership is that in this case Microsoft is the underdog in search. In fact, I couldn't think of anyone better to be working with to build the next generation of search!"