Windows Live Search
Encyclopedia
Bing 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. It went fully online on June 3, 2009, with a preview version released on June 1, 2009.
Notable changes include the listing of search suggestions as queries are entered and a list of related searches (called "Explore pane") based on semantic technology from Powerset
that 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 are expected to have made the transition by early 2012.
In October 2011, Bing announced it is working on new back-end search infrastructure, with the goal of delivering faster and more relevant search results for users. Known as “Tiger,” the new index-serving technology is being incorporated into Bing globally starting in August 2011.
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.
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.
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.
and Yahoo!
announced that they had made a 10-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.
In March 2011, Bing-powered search accounts for over 30% of US searches, up 5% over February. In the same period, Google fell 3%.
Counting core searches only, i.e. those where the user has an intent to interact with the search result, Bing achieved a market share of 14.54% in the second quarter of 2011 in the US.
s, Bing also provides the following search offerings:
status of their own websites through Bing Webmaster Center. Additionally, users may also submit contents to Bing via the following methods:
, Microsoft also operates a toll-free number for directory assistance called Bing 411.
To use Bing API developers has to obtain Application ID, http://www.bing.com/developers/createapp.aspx
Bing API can be used with following protocols:
Query examples:
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 such as electronics, multimedia and gift cards.
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")
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.
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
.
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 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 major browsers. The Bing Rewards program is similar to two earlier services, SearchPerks!
and Bing Cashback, which have now been discontinued.
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."
, 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.
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 has Google 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. Though users can still access other search engines via the mobile browser.
Microsoft also has an agreement with Hewlett-Packard
to have Bing as the default search engine for all new PCs it sells for the next 3 years.
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
.
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.
, 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:
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.
, 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.
. 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. Searches in Bing are censored all over the world, not just China, when the search query is made in simplified Chinese characters.
, 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 clear: "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 came 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-in to 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.
The timing of Google's complaints has also been questioned, as they coincided with the Farsight Summit. Representatives for Google have said the company simply wants the practice to stop.
Web search engine
A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as SERPS, or "search engine results pages". The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other...
(advertised as a "decision engine
Decision engine
A decision engine is a type of web search engine that uses input from the user in order to provide more relevant results.Typical search engines provide results based on key words and site popularity meaning that all users searching for the same phrase receive identical results...
") from Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
. Bing was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
Steve Ballmer
Steven Anthony "Steve" Ballmer is an American business magnate. He is the chief executive officer of Microsoft, having held that post since January 2000. , his personal wealth is estimated at US$13.9 billion, ranking number 19 on the Forbes 400.-Early life:Ballmer was born in Detroit, Michigan to...
on May 28, 2009 at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego. It went fully online on June 3, 2009, with a preview version released on June 1, 2009.
Notable changes include the listing of search suggestions as queries are entered and a list of related searches (called "Explore pane") based on semantic technology from Powerset
Powerset (company)
Powerset is a Microsoft owned company based in San Francisco, California that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet....
that Microsoft purchased in 2008.
On July 29, 2009, Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
and Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search
Yahoo! Search
Yahoo! Search is a web search engine, owned by Yahoo! Inc. and was , the 2nd largest search engine on the web by query volume, at 6.42%, after its competitor Google at 85.35% and before Baidu at 3.67%, according to Net Applications....
. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners are expected to have made the transition by early 2012.
In October 2011, Bing announced it is working on new back-end search infrastructure, with the goal of delivering faster and more relevant search results for users. Known as “Tiger,” the new index-serving technology is being incorporated into Bing globally starting in August 2011.
MSN Search
MSN
MSN is a collection of Internet sites and services provided by Microsoft. The Microsoft Network debuted as an online service and Internet service provider on August 24, 1995, to coincide with the release of the Windows 95 operating system.The range of services offered by MSN has changed since its...
Search was a search engine
Search engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
by Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
that consisted of a search engine, index, and web crawler
Web crawler
A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters.This process is called Web...
. MSN
MSN
MSN is a collection of Internet sites and services provided by Microsoft. The Microsoft Network debuted as an online service and Internet service provider on August 24, 1995, to coincide with the release of the Windows 95 operating system.The range of services offered by MSN has changed since its...
Search first launched in the third quarter of 1998 and used search results from Inktomi
Inktomi
Inktomi Corporation was a California company that provided software for Internet service providers. It was founded in 1996 by UC Berkeley professor Eric Brewer and graduate student Paul Gauthier. The company was initially founded based on the real-world success of the search engine they developed...
. In early 1999, MSN Search launched a version which displayed listings from Looksmart
LookSmart
LookSmart is an online advertising company based in San Francisco. LookSmart provides search advertising products and services to text advertisers, as well as targeted pay-per-click search and contextual advertising via its Search Advertising Network...
blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista
AltaVista
AltaVista is a web search engine owned by Yahoo!. AltaVista was once one of the most popular search engines but its popularity declined with the rise of Google...
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
Picsearch
Picsearch is a Swedish company which develops and provides image search services for large websites. The image search services developed and provided by Picsearch power several major Internet companies, such as Lycos. Other Picsearch customers include regional search portals in Germany, Turkey and...
. 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
In the roll-over from MSN Search to Windows Live Search, Microsoft stopped using Picsearch
Picsearch
Picsearch is a Swedish company which develops and provides image search services for large websites. The image search services developed and provided by Picsearch power several major Internet companies, such as Lycos. Other Picsearch customers include regional search portals in Germany, Turkey and...
as their image search provider and started performing their own image search, fueled by their own internal image search algorithms.
Live Search
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
announced that it would separate its search developments from the Windows Live
Windows Live
Windows Live is the collective brand name for a set of services and software products from Microsoft, part of their software plus services platform. A majority of these services are Web applications, accessible from a browser, but there are also client-side binary applications that require...
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
Microsoft adCenter
Microsoft adCenter , is the division of the Microsoft Network responsible for MSN's advertising services. Microsoft adCenter provides pay per click advertisements. This is a service aimed at people who want to advertise a product...
.
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
Live Search Books
Live Search Books was a search service for books launched in December 2006, part of Microsoft's Live Search range of services. Microsoft was working with a number of libraries, including the British Library, to digitize books and make them searchable, and in the case of out-of-copyright 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
Windows Live Expo
Windows Live Expo was described by Microsoft as an "online social marketplace". The website ceased operations on July 31, 2008.The site was similar to Craigslist in that it provided online classifieds...
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
Live Product Upload
Bing Product Upload was part of Microsoft's Bing search engine. It enables online shoppers using Bing Shopping to find easily find merchant's products....
, a service which allowed merchants to upload products information onto Live Search Products
Live Search Products
Bing Shopping is a products search service and part of Microsoft's Bing search engine. It is customised for finding products available for sale on the web. The results provide information such as product pictures, pricing, and description...
, 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, MicrosoftMicrosoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
and Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
announced that they had made a 10-year deal in which the Yahoo! search engine
Yahoo! Search
Yahoo! Search is a web search engine, owned by Yahoo! Inc. and was , the 2nd largest search engine on the web by query volume, at 6.42%, after its competitor Google at 85.35% and before Baidu at 3.67%, according to Net Applications....
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
User interface
The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...
, but will eventually feature "Powered by Bing" branding.
Market share
Before the launch of Bing, the marketshare of Microsoft web search pages (MSN and Live search) had been small but steady. 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 out Yahoo! for the first time ever in terms of search marketshare. Bing received 4.37% search share while Yahoo! received 3.93% according to StatCounter.In March 2011, Bing-powered search accounts for over 30% of US searches, up 5% over February. In the same period, Google fell 3%.
Counting core searches only, i.e. those where the user has an intent to interact with the search result, Bing achieved a market share of 14.54% in the second quarter of 2011 in the US.
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 HTML-5 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.
- 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 symbolTicker symbolA stock symbol or ticker symbol is a short abbreviation used to uniquely identify publicly traded shares of a particular stock on a particular stock market. A stock symbol may consist of letters, numbers or a combination of both. "Ticker symbol" refers to the symbols that were printed on the ticker...
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. - Math calculations (e.g., 2 * pi * 24). Users can enter math expressions in the search box using a variety of math operators and trigonometric functions and Bing will provide a direct calculation of the expression.
- Advanced computations. Using the WolframAlpha computational engine, Bing can also give results to advanced math problems (e.g. lim x/2x as x->2) and other WolframAlpha related queries (e.g. calories in 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 you would simply type "translate" me llamo in english and you will be redirected to a search results page with Bing Translator with your translation from Spanish to English.
Local info
- Current traffic information
- Business listing
- People listing
- Collections
- Localized searching for restaurants and services
- 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 HotmailHotmailWindows Live Hotmail, formerly known as MSN Hotmail and commonly referred to simply as Hotmail, is a free web-based email service operated by Microsoft as part of its Windows Live group. It was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith and launched in July 1996 as "HoTMaiL". It was one of the first...
’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 FacebookFacebookFacebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
account is linked with Bing via Facebook Connect. - Users have the option to send messages to their friends in the search results.
Languages in which Bing can find results
- AlbanianAlbanian languageAlbanian is an Indo-European language spoken by approximately 7.6 million people, primarily in Albania and Kosovo but also in other areas of the Balkans in which there is an Albanian population, including western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, southern Serbia and northwestern Greece...
- ArabicArabic languageArabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
- BulgarianBulgarian languageBulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
- CatalanCatalan languageCatalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
- ChineseChinese languageThe Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
(Simplified and Traditional scripts) - CroatianCroatian languageCroatian is the collective name for the standard language and dialects spoken by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other neighbouring countries...
- CzechCzech languageCzech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian in English until the late 19th century...
- DanishDanish languageDanish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
- DutchDutch languageDutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
- EnglishEnglish languageEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
(AmericanAmerican EnglishAmerican English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....
and BritishBritish EnglishBritish English, or English , is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere...
) - EstonianEstonian languageEstonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities...
- FinnishFinnish languageFinnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
- FrenchFrench languageFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
- GermanGerman languageGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
- GreekGreek languageGreek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
- Hebrew
- HungarianHungarian languageHungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
- IcelandicIcelandic languageIcelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...
- IndonesianIndonesian languageIndonesian is the official language of Indonesia. Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau Islands dialect of Malay, an Austronesian language which has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries....
- ItalianItalian languageItalian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
- JapaneseJapanese languageis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
- KoreanKorean languageKorean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
- LatvianLatvian languageLatvian is the official state language of Latvia. It is also sometimes referred to as Lettish. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad. The Latvian language has a relatively large number of non-native speakers, atypical for a small language...
- LithuanianLithuanian languageLithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognized as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad. Lithuanian is a Baltic language, closely related to Latvian, although they...
- MalayMalay languageMalay is a major language of the Austronesian family. It is the official language of Malaysia , Indonesia , Brunei and Singapore...
- NorwegianNorwegian languageNorwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
- PersianPersian languagePersian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
- PolishPolish languagePolish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
- PortugueseBrazilian PortugueseBrazilian Portuguese is a group of Portuguese dialects written and spoken by most of the 190 million inhabitants of Brazil and by a few million Brazilian emigrants, mainly in the United States, United Kingdom, Portugal, Canada, Japan and Paraguay....
(Brazil) - PortuguesePortuguese languagePortuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
(Portugal) - RomanianRomanian languageRomanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
- RussianRussian languageRussian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
- SerbianSerbian languageSerbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....
(Cyrillic) - SlovakSlovak languageSlovak , is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages .Slovak is the official language of Slovakia, where it is spoken by 5 million people...
- SlovenianSlovenian languageSlovene or Slovenian is a South Slavic language spoken by approximately 2.5 million speakers worldwide, the majority of whom live in Slovenia. It is the first language of about 1.85 million people and is one of the 23 official and working languages of the European Union...
- SpanishSpanish languageSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
- SwedishSwedish languageSwedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
- TamilTamil languageTamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...
- ThaiThai languageThai , also known as Central Thai and Siamese, is the national and official language of Thailand and the native language of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai–Kadai language family. Historical linguists have been unable to definitively...
- TurkishTurkish languageTurkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
- UkrainianUkrainian languageUkrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....
- VietnameseVietnamese languageVietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
Languages in which Bing can be displayed
- BasqueBasque languageBasque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...
- BulgarianBulgarian languageBulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
- CatalanCatalan languageCatalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
- ChineseChinese languageThe Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
(Simplified and Traditional scripts) - CroatianCroatian languageCroatian is the collective name for the standard language and dialects spoken by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other neighbouring countries...
- CzechCzech languageCzech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian in English until the late 19th century...
- DanishDanish languageDanish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
- DutchDutch languageDutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
- EnglishEnglish languageEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
(AmericanAmerican EnglishAmerican English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....
and BritishBritish EnglishBritish English, or English , is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere...
) - EstonianEstonian languageEstonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities...
- FinnishFinnish languageFinnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
- FrenchFrench languageFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
- GalicianGalician languageGalician is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, where it is co-official with Castilian Spanish, as well as in border zones of the neighbouring territories of Asturias and Castile and León.Modern Galician and...
- GermanGerman languageGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
- Latin
- GreekGreek languageGreek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
- HindiHindiStandard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...
- HungarianHungarian languageHungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
- IcelandicIcelandic languageIcelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...
- ItalianItalian languageItalian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
- JapaneseJapanese languageis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
- KoreanKorean languageKorean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
- LatvianLatvian languageLatvian is the official state language of Latvia. It is also sometimes referred to as Lettish. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad. The Latvian language has a relatively large number of non-native speakers, atypical for a small language...
- LithuanianLithuanian languageLithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognized as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad. Lithuanian is a Baltic language, closely related to Latvian, although they...
- MalayMalay languageMalay is a major language of the Austronesian family. It is the official language of Malaysia , Indonesia , Brunei and Singapore...
- NorwegianNorwegian languageNorwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
- PolishPolish languagePolish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
- PortugueseBrazilian PortugueseBrazilian Portuguese is a group of Portuguese dialects written and spoken by most of the 190 million inhabitants of Brazil and by a few million Brazilian emigrants, mainly in the United States, United Kingdom, Portugal, Canada, Japan and Paraguay....
(Brazil) - PortuguesePortuguese languagePortuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
(Portugal) - RomanianRomanian languageRomanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
- RussianRussian languageRussian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
- SerbianSerbian languageSerbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....
(Cyrillic) - SlovakSlovak languageSlovak , is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages .Slovak is the official language of Slovakia, where it is spoken by 5 million people...
- SlovenianSlovenian languageSlovene or Slovenian is a South Slavic language spoken by approximately 2.5 million speakers worldwide, the majority of whom live in Slovenia. It is the first language of about 1.85 million people and is one of the 23 official and working languages of the European Union...
- SpanishSpanish languageSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
- SwedishSwedish languageSwedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
- TamilTamil languageTamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...
- ThaiThai languageThai , also known as Central Thai and Siamese, is the national and official language of Thailand and the native language of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai–Kadai language family. Historical linguists have been unable to definitively...
- TurkishTurkish languageTurkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
- UkrainianUkrainian languageUkrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....
- VietnameseVietnamese languageVietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
Search products
In addition to its tool for searching web pageWeb page
A web page or webpage is a document or information resource that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser and displayed on a monitor or mobile device. This information is usually in HTML or XHTML format, and may provide navigation to other web pages via hypertext...
s, Bing also provides the following search offerings:
| Service | Description |
|---|---|
| Dictionary | Bing Dictionary enables users to quickly search for definitions of English words. Bing Dictionary results are based on Microsoft Encarta Encarta Microsoft Encarta was a digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft Corporation from 1993 to 2009. , the complete English version, Encarta Premium, consisted of more than 62,000 articles, numerous photos and illustrations, music clips, videos, interactive contents, timelines, maps and... World English Dictionary. In addition, Bing Dictionary also provides an audio player for users to hear the pronunciation of the dictionary words. |
| Entertainment Bing Entertainment Bing Entertainment is an entertainment search service and part of Microsoft's Bing search engine. The service enables users to search through music, movies, TV, games and video games... |
Bing Entertainment allow users to view and search for detailed information and reviews for music, movies, television shows, and video games. Bing Entertainment partners with Microsoft Games to allow users to directly play online games within Bing Online Games. |
| Events | Bing Events allow users to search for upcoming events from Zvents, and displays the date and time, venue details, brief description, as well as method to purchase tickets for the events listed. Users can also filter the search results by date and categories. |
| Finance | Bing Finance enables users to search for exchange listed stocks and displays the relevant stock information, company profile and statistics, financial statements, stock ratings, analyst recommendations, as well as news related to the particular stock or company. Bing Finance also allow users to view the historical data of the particular stock, and allows comparison of the stock to major indices. In addition, Bing Finance also features a javascript-based Stock screener, allowing investors to quickly filter for value, contrarian, high-yield, and bargain investment strategies. |
| Health | Bing Health refines health searches using related medical concepts to get relevant health information and to allow users to navigate complex medical topics with inline article results from experts. This feature is based on the Medstory acquisition. |
| Images Bing Images Bing Images is an image search service and part of Microsoft's Bing search engine. It allows users to search the web for image content and enables the user to quickly search and display most relevant photos and images of interest.-Features:Bing Images provides the following features:*Infinite... |
Bing Images enables the user to quickly search and display most relevant photos and images of interest. The infinite scroll feature allows browsing a large number of images quickly. The advance filters allows refining search results in terms of properties such as image size, aspect ratio, color or black and white, photo or illustration, and facial features recognition. |
| Local | Bing Local searches local business listings with business details and reviews, allowing users to make more informed decisions. |
| Maps | Bing Maps enables the user to search for businesses, addresses, landmarks and street names worldwide, and can select from a road-map style view, a satellite view or a hybrid of the two. Also available are "bird's-eye" images for many cities worldwide, and 3D maps which include virtual 3D navigation and to-scale terrain and 3D buildings. For business users it will be available as "Bing Maps For Enterprise". |
| News | Bing News is a news aggregator and provides news results relevant to the search query from a wide range of online news and information services. |
| Recipe | Bing Recipe allow users to search for cooking recipes sourced from Delish.com, MyRecipes.com, and Epicurious.com, and allow users to filter recipe results based on their ratings, cuisine, convenience, occasion, ingredient, course, cooking method, and recipe provider. |
| Reference | Bing Reference semantically indexes Wikipedia content and displays them in an enhanced view within Bing. It also allow users to input search queries that resembles full questions and highlights the answer within search results. This feature is based on the Powerset Powerset (company) Powerset is a Microsoft owned company based in San Francisco, California that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet.... acquisition. |
| Social | Bing Social allow users to search for and retrieve real-time information from Twitter Twitter Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July... and Facebook Facebook Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as... services. Bing Social search also provides "best match" and "social captions" functionalities that prioritises results based on relevance and contexts. Only public feeds from the past 7 days will be displayed in Bing Social search results. |
| Shopping Bing Shopping Bing Shopping is a products search service and part of Microsoft's Bing search engine. It is customised for finding products available for sale on the web. The results provide information such as product pictures, pricing, and description... |
Bing Shopping lets users search from a wide range of online suppliers and marketer's merchandise for all types of products and goods. This service also integrates with Bing cashback offering money back for certain purchases made through the site. This feature is based on the Jellyfish.com Jellyfish.com Jellyfish.com was a reverse auction online shopping site website. The Middleton, Wisconsin-based company was acquired by Microsoft in 2007. On May 22, 2008, Microsoft officially announced the cash back service as part of their Live Search group of tools... acquisition, but will be discontinued July 30, 2010. |
| Translator | Bing Translator lets users translate texts or entire web pages into different languages. |
| Travel | Bing Travel searches for airfare and hotel reservations online and predicts the best time to purchase them. This feature is based on the Farecast acquisition. |
| University | Bing University allow users to search for and view detailed information about United States universities, including information such as admissions, cost, financial aid, student body, and graduation rate. |
| Videos | Bing Videos enables the user to quickly search and view videos online from various websites. The Smart Preview feature allows the user to instantly watch a short preview of an original video. Bing Videos also allow users to access editorial video contents from MSN Video MSN Video MSN Video is an Australian video streaming service from ninemsn as well as a United Kingdom internet television service from MSN. It was rebranded on March 11, 2010.... . |
| Visual Search | Bing Visual Search allow users to refine their search queries for structured results through data-grouping image galleries that resembles "large online catalogues", powered by Silverlight. |
| Weather | Bing Weather allow users to search for the local weather for cities around the world, displaying the current weather information and also extended weather forecasts for the next 10 days. Weather information are provided by Intellicast and Foreca Foreca Foreca is a Finnish weather forecasting company, the largest private weather forecasting company in the Nordic countries. Foreca was first established in 1996 under the name Weather Service Finland. In January 2001 its name was changed to Foreca.... . |
| Wolfram Alpha | Bing Wolfram Alpha allow users to directly enter factual queries within Bing and provides answers and relevant visualizations from a core knowledge base of curated, structured data provided by Wolfram Alpha Wolfram Alpha Wolfram Alpha is an answer-engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might... . Bing Wolfram Alpha can also answer mathematical and algebraic questions. |
| xRank | Bing xRank allowed users to search for celebrities, musicians, politicians and bloggers, read short biographies and news about them, and track their trends or popularity rankings. As of October 2010, this feature was shut down. |
Webmaster services
Bing allows webmasters to manage the web crawlingWeb crawler
A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters.This process is called Web...
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 StatesUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, 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/developersTo use Bing API developers has to obtain 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 TwitterTwitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
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 such as electronics, multimedia and gift cards.
Toolbars
Both Windows Live ToolbarWindows Live Toolbar
Windows Live Toolbar was an browser extension toolbar for Internet Explorer. It superseded MSN Search Toolbar. Windows Live Toolbar provided a simple search interface that starts to list results as the user types in a search query, and uses Bing as its search engine...
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
Microsoft Gadgets
Microsoft Gadgets are lightweight single-purpose applications, or software widgets, that can sit on a Microsoft Windows user's computer desktop, or are hosted on a web page...
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
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
, Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
, Milwaukee, Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
, New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, Oklahoma City
Oklahoma city
Oklahoma City is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Oklahoma.Oklahoma City may also refer to:*Oklahoma City metropolitan area*Downtown Oklahoma City*Uptown Oklahoma City*Oklahoma City bombing*Oklahoma City National Memorial...
, Ottawa
Ottawa
Ottawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...
, Philadelphia, Phoenix
Phoenix, Arizona
Phoenix is the capital, and largest city, of the U.S. state of Arizona, as well as the sixth most populated city in the United States. Phoenix is home to 1,445,632 people according to the official 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data...
, Pittsburgh, Portland
Portland, Oregon
Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
, Providence
Providence, Rhode Island
Providence is the capital and most populous city of Rhode Island and was one of the first cities established in the United States. Located in Providence County, it is the third largest city in the New England region...
, Sacramento
Sacramento
Sacramento is the capital of the state of California, in the United States of America.Sacramento may also refer to:- United States :*Sacramento County, California*Sacramento, Kentucky*Sacramento – San Joaquin River Delta...
, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa
Tâmpa
Tâmpa may refer to several villages in Romania:* Tâmpa, a village in Băcia Commune, Hunedoara County* Tâmpa, a village in Miercurea Nirajului, Mureş County* Tâmpa, a mountain in Braşov city...
, Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
, Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
, and Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
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
Windows Live Gallery
Windows Live Gallery was a part of Windows Live range of services. It was a center for gadgets, extensions and add-ons for Windows and Windows Live services.Windows Live Gallery was officially retired on October 1, 2011.-History:...
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
Windows Live Gallery
Windows Live Gallery was a part of Windows Live range of services. It was a center for gadgets, extensions and add-ons for Windows and Windows Live services.Windows Live Gallery was officially retired on October 1, 2011.-History:...
.
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
Plug-ins
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:- AmazonAmazon.comAmazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
's A9A9.comA9.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com based in Palo Alto, California that develops search engine technology. A9 currently has over 100 employees in its Palo Alto, Bangalore, and Dublin offices.A9 has worked in 3 areas over the years....
search service and the experimental Ms. DeweyMs. DeweyMs. Dewey was a viral marketing campaign started by Microsoft in October 2006. It also refers to the character of the same name, who is the campaign's main subject. The Ms. Dewey website was an Adobe Flash-based experimental interface for Live Search...
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 BingClub BingClub Bing is a group of online word games launched by Microsoft in April 2007. Players who complete or partially complete a game earn "tickets" that may be exchanged for Microsoft products...
- 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!Live Search SearchPerks!Live Search SearchPerks! was a service that allowed users to search and gain tickets which can be redeemed for items such as frequent flyer miles, video games, and video game controllers. It was part of Microsoft's Live Search group of services...
- 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 MicrosoftMicrosoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
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 and charitable donations. Initially, participants in the program were required to download and use the Bing Bar for Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
in order to earn credits; however, this is no longer the case, and the service now works with all major browsers. The Bing Rewards program is similar to two earlier services, SearchPerks!
Live Search SearchPerks!
Live Search SearchPerks! was a service that allowed users to search and gain tickets which can be redeemed for items such as frequent flyer miles, video games, and video game controllers. It was part of Microsoft's Live Search group of services...
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 ColbertStephen Colbert
Stephen Tyrone Colbert is an American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor. He is the host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, a satirical news show in which Colbert portrays a caricatured version of conservative political pundits.Colbert originally studied to be an...
stated that Microsoft would donate $2,500 to help clean up the Gulf oil spill
Deepwater Horizon oil spill
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico which flowed unabated for three months in 2010, and continues to leak fresh oil. It is the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry...
each time he mentioned the word "Bing" on air. Colbert mostly mentioned Bing in out-of-context situations, such as Bing Crosby
Bing Crosby
Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby was an American singer and actor. Crosby's trademark bass-baritone voice made him one of the best-selling recording artists of the 20th century, with over half a billion records in circulation....
and Bing cherries
Bing cherry
Bing is a cultivar of the wild or sweet cherry that originated in the Pacific Northwest, in Milwaukie, Oregon, United States. The Bing remains a major cultivar in Oregon, Washington, California, Wisconsin and British Columbia...
. 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 soap operaSoap opera
A soap opera, sometimes called "soap" for short, is an ongoing, episodic work of dramatic fiction presented in serial format on radio or as television programming. The name soap opera stems from the original dramatic serials broadcast on radio that had soap manufacturers, such as Procter & Gamble,...
, 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 GoogleGoogle
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
is still the default search engine. Bing will also be incorporated into all future versions of Opera. Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
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 has Google 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
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
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. Though users can still access other search engines via the mobile browser.
Microsoft also has an agreement with Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
to have Bing as the default search engine for all new PCs it sells for the next 3 years.
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 InterbrandInterbrand
Interbrand, a division of Omnicom, is a global branding consultancy, specializing in vast brand services, including brand analytics, brand strategy, brand valuation, corporate design, digital brand management, and naming...
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
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
word for spider
Spider
Spiders are air-breathing arthropods that have eight legs, and chelicerae with fangs that inject venom. They are the largest order of arachnids and rank seventh in total species diversity among all other groups of organisms...
(蜘蛛; くも, kumo) as well as cloud
Cloud
A cloud is a visible mass of liquid droplets or frozen crystals made of water and/or various chemicals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of a planetary body. They are also known as aerosols. Clouds in Earth's atmosphere are studied in the cloud physics branch of meteorology...
(雲; くも, kumo), referring to the manner in which search engines "spider
Web crawler
A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters.This process is called Web...
" Internet resources to add them to their database, as well as cloud computing
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....
.
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 thumbnailThumbnail
Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words...
, since the video and audio, in some cases, are cached on Microsoft's Server
Server (computing)
In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...
.
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:
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=adulttermgoeshere&adlt=strict (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 IndiaIndia
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, People's Republic of China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
, 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 ChinaMainland China
Mainland China, the Chinese mainland or simply the mainland, is a geopolitical term that refers to the area under the jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China . According to the Taipei-based Mainland Affairs Council, the term excludes the PRC Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and...
. 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. Searches in Bing are censored all over the world, not just China, when the search query is made in simplified Chinese characters.
Performance issues
Bing has been criticized for being slower to index websites than Google search or Yahoo! search. It has also been criticized for not indexing some websites at all.Ranking practices
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 honeypotHoneypot (computing)
In computer terminology, a honeypot is a trap set to detect, deflect, or in some manner counteract attempts at unauthorized use of information systems...
, 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 clear: "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 came 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-in to 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.
The timing of Google's complaints has also been questioned, as they coincided with the Farsight Summit. Representatives for Google have said the company simply wants the practice to stop.
See also
- Windows LiveWindows LiveWindows Live is the collective brand name for a set of services and software products from Microsoft, part of their software plus services platform. A majority of these services are Web applications, accessible from a browser, but there are also client-side binary applications that require...
- List of search engines
External links
- Discover Bing
- Decision Engine
- Bing Community
- Bing Newsroom
- Bing Toolbox - for developers and webmasters
- Bing Visual Search
- Bing API - for developers