Today, Facebook and Microsoft deepened their existing relationship around search. At an event in Silicon Valley, both companies announced a new phase in their partnership, especially as it relates to social search. Bing will be adding more Facebook social data into its main search results.

Starting today, if you do a search on Bing, it will try to recognize your Facebook account through instant personalization, and you will automatically start to see links that your friends have “liked.” These will appear in a separate module, with related social links called out. The example Microsoft gives is if you are searching for San Francisco steak houses and one of your friends liked Alexander’s Steakhouse in San Francisco, that would appear as a result along with the name of your friend.

The same thing could happen for movie results or news articles. Not every search will show social results, and when they do show up, the Facebook module will move up and down the page depending on Bing’s ranking algorithms. In the future, these Facebook likes will appear under related links, and not just within a separate module grouping all “liked” results together.

Bing will warn searchers the first few times it starts pulling liked links from their Facebook friends with a pop-up window allowing people to opt-out. You can also disable Bing in your Facebook privacy settings.

Along with adding Facebook likes into search results, Bing is also using Facebook data to do better people search. When you start looking for a person, Bing will analyze the people you know and the people they know through Facebook and return those who are most closely linked to you socially. Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi says that 4 percent of searches are people search, but results are only satisfying 20 percent of the time. He hopes Facebook can improve on that.

Soon, Bing will also looking at social signals on Faceboom to identify experts related to various searches. So when you search for a restuarant, if someone you know has checked in there through Facebook Places or tagged a lot of photos there, or someone you don’t know who has done so publicly, they might show up as an expert.

Source: TechCrunch

Mozilla has announced its plans to update the search options in Firefox 4, the next major version of the popular open source Web browser. Google will remain Firefox’s default search engine, but Microsoft’s Bing search will be available as one of the standard options.

Firefox 4 users who want Bing as their default browser search engine instead of Google will be able to simply select it from the search box drop-down menu without having to perform any additional configuration steps. Mozilla says that the decision is a response to the increasing relevance and maturity of Microsoft’s search engine and growing demand for the service among Firefox users.

Google pays millions of dollars for Firefox search referrals, which means that Google’s privileged placement as the browser’s default search engine is Mozilla’s primary source of revenue. Mozilla has labored, however, to ensure that this relationship doesn’t have undue influence over the decisions about which services are supported in the search box.

The other websites that will be included as standard options in the Firefox 4 search box are Amazon, eBay, and Wikipedia, and Yahoo. The Creative Commons search engine and Answers.com have shipped in recent versions of Firefox but will not be included in Firefox 4. Creative Commons search was removed because it is becoming less distinctive as it increasingly relies on conventional search engines like Google.

We discussed these changes with Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s vice president of products. He says that the standard search engine choices were overhauled for Firefox 4 in order to ensure that the options are modern and consistent with user expectations. He believes that Bing has become a suitable option that should be easily available to users.

He also confirmed that Mozilla has established a referral revenue sharing agreement with Microsoft so that it can get a cut of the search profit. He declined to say, however, what percentage Microsoft offers or how the deal with Microsoft compares financially to the one that Mozilla has with Google. We will likely be able to get some idea of how much money is changing hands when Mozilla reports its finances the first year after Firefox 4 is released.

Although some open source extremists might be unhappy that Mozilla is acknowledging Bing as an acceptable search engine choice, it’s really an unsurprising development. Search engine competition is beneficial to consumers and—as Mozilla community coordinator Asa Dotzler pointed out last year when he encouraged Firefox users to switch to Microsoft’s search engine—Bing has a better privacy policy.

Source: ars technica

Facebook and Microsoft are discussing an agreement that would significantly expand the search relationship the pair have shared for many years, said several people with knowledge of the situation.

According to those sources, that includes the possibility for the software giant’s Bing search service to mine anonimized data from consumer usage of the social networking site’s recently introduced Like buttons.

The Like button, which Facebook has been trying to proliferate around the Web, allows users to indicate an interest in a page with one click that then tells their Facebook friends.

While the deal is not closed and talks could end without result, such information might yield a treasure trove of insight for both search users and advertisers.

That’s because it represents search based on what people are actually interested in rather than just crunching massive amounts of information and muscling it into something useful.

And it would also presumably give Bing a little leg up on Google (GOOG), since data will be available on it that is not available on the search giant, made more important as Facebook’s information-generating audience grows ever larger.

But because of Facebook’s many privacy snafus, sources said that any expansion of the search relationship will never involve providing any information except that which users have agreed to make public.

Facebook and Microsoft (MSFT) already struck a nonexclusive agreement almost a year ago to integrate Facebook’s real-time feeds of public status updates into Bing.

It’s part of a longtime search–as well as investment–relationship between Microsoft and Facebook that stretches back for years.

Currently, Bing provides global Web search to Facebook, yielding branded results whenever someone searches within the service.

Microsoft also invested $240 million in Facebook in late 2007 and has since had a mostly cooperative relationship with the fast-growing Silicon Valley company.

It also has provided a hedge against Google for Facebook, as that pair’s relations has worsened over the years due to intensified competition.

Source: allthingsd

It’s been a highly successful year for Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which started off as Live search, and was almost named Kumo. The little search engine that could has grown so much in the last 14 months.

Only months after Bing launched into beta, Microsoft was in talks to acquire Yahoo!’s search technology and take over the falling search giant. In December 2009, the two giants finalized a search deal that would replace Yahoo!’s search engine with Bing for 10 years.

Today marks the beginning of that deal that will see Microsoft begin the organic (algorithmic) transition, which means that Bing will replace the English version of Yahoo!’s organic search results. As posted by Neowin last month, the partnership will see Bing capture as much as 31.6% market share in North America. Bing currently owns 7.07% market share in North America, and 3.44% worldwide.

This will be the first time in years that any search engine has gained any kind of traction on Google, which still dominates with 84.53% in North America.

The organic search take-over should see Bing jump more than 24% next month, as it acquires more than 159 million new users. The organic search change will see 15 million new users from Canada, and 144 million users from the United States.

Source: neowin

The Real Live Search – Bing API experiment

Wouldn’t it be cool if search engines were as fast as you could type and actually showed you results as-you-type? As I found out this evening with jQuery in one hand and JSON in another, not only is it possible but turns out to be just as cool as I imagined.

Inspired by the realtime-ness of Google Wave, I wanted to build a prototype search engine that did away with a search button and page loads. Instead, search queries are sent character-by-character to the lightning fast Bing AJAX APIs which returned JSON results easily processed and formatted by Javascript on the page. The UI experience is driven solely by the browser.

The result is a truly “live” search experience which I’ve cunningly dubbed “The Real Live Search” as tribute to the former Microsoft search engine. I invite everyone to give it a quick whirl, but please bear in mind it’s only a couple hour’s work and may bite if prodded the wrong way.

Source: I started Something

Google Inc.’s entry into the operating system business poses the strongest long-term threat in years to the dominance of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows software, according to analysts.

Google last week announced that it would launch its long-anticipated operating system, based on the open-source Linux kernel and built around its Chrome browser, sometime in the second half of 2010. The new Web-centric operating system will be dubbed Google Chrome OS.

Though analysts agreed that the Windows hegemony is safe in the short term, Google has the financial muscle, engineering might and industry clout to survive a long-term battle with an industry powerhouse like Microsoft.

“Google doesn’t need an operating system to support its revenue stream,” said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group Inc. “They have lots and lots of revenue from their advertising bread and butter. That means they have [the] staying power that’s critically important in this market.”

Michael Silver, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said that Microsoft is unlikely to ignore the threat to Windows. “Microsoft, after all, is one of the more paranoid companies around,” he said.

He added that Microsoft is unlikely to be adversely affected by Chrome OS in the short term.

Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment on the Google announcement.

Analysts did note that Google must stick to the long, complex grind of developing an operating system if it wants to be successful in that business.

Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst at Nucleus Research, said that in recent months, Google has shut down or stopped supporting several products, including Google Video, Google Notebook, the Jaiku microblogging service and the Dodgeball mobile social network.

“They pick something up, get excited about it and work on it until they find another shiny new object they want to play with,” Wettemann said. “My feeling is that Google needs to stop announcing things and instead execute on completing them.”

Nonetheless, the Chrome OS plan has attracted the support of several top PC vendors, including Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo Group, Acer and Asustek Computer.

Source: ComputerWorld

Data from monitoring service StatCounter suggests that Bing, Microsoft’s new search decision engine, has overtaken Yahoo Search as the number two search service in the U.S. and worldwide in large part thanks to stealing market share from leader Google.

The company’s analysis for Thursday finds that in the U.S. Bing overtook Yahoo to take second place on 16.28%, with Yahoo Search currently at 10.22%. For the sake of comparison: Google’s U.S. market share is pegged at 71.47%, and its worldwide share at a whopping 87.62% (vs. 5.62% for Bing and 5.13% for Yahoo).

Are people just test-driving Bing en masse, or does this have anything to do with the fact Bing was forced upon IE6 users (now fixed)? Or is it just because it’s that good and the advertising is already working? Either way, the jump Bing appears to have made since launching merely a couple of days ago is significant, and the drop you see in Google’s share even more so.

Are we witnessing the birth of the first true Google challenger or is this nothing but launch momentum bound to fade away?

(StatCounter claims to measure the search and browsing behavior of over two million users and says it tracks in excess of ten billion pageloads per month over its network of three million websites.)

Source: TechCrunch

Microsoft‘s Bing search engine has started to become publicly available, allowing the world to decide whether the company’s latest effort has the goods to take on Google.

The engine, which replaces Live Search, debuted Thursday at the D: All Things Digital conference and is slated to be fully available by Wednesday. (Microsoft said it would start becoming publicly available Monday, but that it wouldn’t be fully launched until Wednesday.)

Among the other naming changes that go along with the new search, Live Search Cashback is now Bing Cashback, while technology from Microsoft’s Farecast acquisition now powers Bing Travel. Virtual Earth gets a name change (though not an upgrade in my book) and is now Bing Maps for Enterprise.

With Bing, Microsoft is trying to make the case that search today is still an often unsatisfying experience. That is a unique challenge for Microsoft. Although its research shows that most people repeat searches and give up without finding exactly what they are looking for, perceived satisfaction of search is actually pretty high.

To help make the case, Microsoft plans to spend (to borrow a Carol Bartz phrase) boatloads of money on advertising. Estimates in the advertising trade mags have pegged spending at $80 million to $100 million.

That’s key, since very few people currently go out of their way to search using Microsoft’s technology. Most Microsoft searches come via MSN, from toolbars and other methods, while just 1 or 2 percent come from people actually typing Live.com into their browser’s address bar.

“Nearly 98 percent of the traffic at Live.com is passive (coming from MSN, etc.) and Bing will be an attempt by Microsoft to establish its search offering as a destination Web site with high active traffic,” Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Agarwal said in a research note on Monday. “In our view, though Microsoft’s search technologies are ready for prime time, making a call on the success of Bing now will be premature.”

One of the things I’ll be watching is how content creators react to the new ways that Microsoft pulls content into the search pages. The main results page offers the option to hover over the result for more information, while the product search site repurposes professional reviews, user reviews, and other information directly within product search results.

On the video side, Microsoft allows a live preview of videos from within its search results, also raising some questions of fair use.

Of course, other engines also borrow heavily from the sites they are searching. Don’t forget, Google hosts its own cached versions of the pages it searches.

The bigger deal, of course, is whether people take to Bing at all. Microsoft does seem to have generated a good amount of initial buzz, as well as some early positive reviews.

What’s your take on Bing? Drop me an e-mail (ina DOT fried AT cnet DOT com), along with your name and hometown, and we’ll publish some of the responses later this week.

Source: CNET News