Tag: Bing

Posted on

Microsoft Updates Name to Bing

This was announced recently: “…Our small and medium business brand is changing from “Microsoft Advertising” to “Bing.”” Although it appears that the advertising product will still be called adCenter, it appears that Microsoft is working to brand itself more consistently with the Bing brand. There may be additional strategies at play such as differentiating Microsoft’s online presence from its software presence. As to that, only time will tell.

In the meantime understand that Bing is much more than advertising on the Bing.com search engine. Bing results and Bing advertising is shown on the Yahoo, Bing, and even the Facebook platform. Of additional importance just this past week was Bing’s announcement that throughout the summer they will be rolling out a very tight search integration with Facebook.

From the images released, it appears that when you will search on Bing in the future, Facebook friends faces and comments about a product or place will appear on the left sidebar of your Bing search results page.

All in all, both statements are big news and let us know that in the bigger schemes of search there is some serious consolidation happening behind the scenes between the key social players like Facebook and Microsoft now known as Bing.

Posted on

Bing Announces Adaptive Search – Getting to Know You!

Bing announced this past week that they are implementing a new search results formula called adaptive search. In layman’s terms this means personalized search results. We’ve been seeing these type of results on Google.com for a while, but now Bing has publicly announced that it is going via the way of personalized results as well.

This is great news for searchers as it means that Bing watches what you search for over time and works to provide the most relevant results when you use Bing.com.

“The more you search, the more Bing can learn,” said the Bing team in a blog. “And (Bing can) use that information to adapt the experience so you can spend less time searching and accomplish what you set out to do.”

For website owners this means more difficulty in placing organically and pushes more businesses into paid search advertising for placement on Bing.com. With Bing.com results now being delivered with a tight integration with Facebook, it is important to keep an eye on what Bing.com is doing.

You may want to consider paid search advertising on Bing at this point or at a point in the future as it becomes more difficult for searchers to find you or to get top placement. As a Microsoft adCenter Accredited Professional, we can help you get started on Bing when you are ready.

Posted on

Bing and Facebook Grow Closer

If you haven’t noticed, let me bring your attention to this point, Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, and Facebook are growing closer together every day. First, Bing powered the web searches on Facebook. Now Bing has a social component that is accessing activity on yours and your friends Facebook accounts.

The most recent integration is found at this link on Bing. When you activate the service you will allow Bing to show friends’ interests and links as a social component on Bing.com right in the search results. Watch the video here and you’ll get the low down on what Bing is pulling from Facebook. In essence, once you allow the sharing of information, you will see your Facebook friends’ faces in Bing search results. You will see local reviews and pages that your friends have liked all at Bing.com. One of the best parts on sharing is that you are in control and can turn this feature on and off.

With Facebook hating on Google right now, this is a very important alliance both for Bing and for Facebook. I expect more integration further down the road. Who knows, Bing and Facebook may end up sharing advertising and tracking as well in the future, but for now, they are both working to actively lock Google out of the potentially lucrative social component of search and sharing.

Posted on

Google Should Look to the Microsoft Model

Remember when Microsoft owned the Web and for that matter computers as well as the Internet? Remember when there was only Internet Explorer and no Firefox? Remember when the only computing platform was Microsoft Office? Not so long ago was it, but now things are very different. Firefox has a distinct growing percentage of the browsing market, Macs are more common place, Open Office and Cloud computing are starting to become mainstream.

Now take a look at Google. Google used to, and for that matter is for right now, the dominant search engine and pay per click platform, but that will change. You have to look no farther than the model of Microsoft’s dominance and what is happening now in the news to know that Google is losing it’s grip on owning the world of search.

Some of Google’s thorns are Facebook, Bing, and the lack of true innovation within its own kingdom. When was the last time you saw one of Google’s new products hit the market make a big splash and be widely embraced? It’s been a while! Remember the flops: Friend Connect, Orkut, Google Wave, Google Buzz? Their last big hit was GMail and they drove traffic there by requiring everyone to set up a GMail account to use any Google products including AdWords when it first came out thereby pushing up initial membership.

Now let’s look at Microsoft. As this giant has aged, it has mellowed. It has grudgingly embraced, but embraced never the less, change. It has adapted and ended up creating better products with greater inclusion and transparency. Google is in a stat of flux, right now it is trying to grasp on to its glory days but may want to look at the Microsoft model to see how it may be able to stay vital yet play more as a partner and not as a desperate bully.