Beyond Binary

One of the most visible features of Bing is the striking photo that adorns its home page and changes each day.

(Credit: CNET)

Microsoft is getting a bit of a Bing-related bump, according to some early figures from market researcher ComScore.

According to ComScore, Microsoft upped its search share to 11.1 percent last week, as compared to 9.1 percent the prior week. Some of that gain came from the fact that more people were using Microsoft.

Microsoft's engine had 15.5 percent daily penetration, as opposed to 13.8 percent in the prior week.

(Credit: ComScore)

Earlier data also showed Microsoft off to a solid start with its revamped search engine. Of course, the real issue is whether Microsoft can make the gains stick over time. The software maker has seen its market share tip up over time, only to again drop to single digits.

Microsoft has said it would like to pick up at least a couple points of market share over the next year. One might think that the company should expect more, given it has not only poured huge resources into the technology, but is also spending tens of millions of dollars in both a big advertising push and deals to nab the default search engine position on new PCs.

So far, Bing is off to a good start, said ComScore Senior Vice President Mike Hurt.

"These initial data suggest that Microsoft Bing has generated early interest, resulting in a spike in search engagement and an immediate term improvement to Microsoft's position in the search market," Hurt said in a statement. "So far it appears that the lifts in searcher penetration and engagement have held relatively steady throughout the five-day period."

But Hurt agreed that only time will tell whether it is a blip or a true gain. "The ultimate performance of Bing depends on the extent to which it generates more trial through its extensive launch campaign and whether it retains those trial users."

Bing went live last week after being shown off at D: All Things Digital by CEO Steve Ballmer.

Microsoft plans to continue its ad push, including the TV spots, with the current campaign eventually yielding to commercials that focus more specifically on the areas where Bing hopes to differentiate itself--tasks such as travel and product search.

Update 11:20 a.m.: Bing has managed to grab some attention inside Google. Speaking at a financial conference on Tuesday, Google CFO Patrick Pichette said the company is in the process of analyzing it. "I have a review tomorrow on it with the executive committee," Pichette said, according to Marketwatch.

Each day, Bing features a different background image, meaning that for many, the first public view was this hot air balloon-themed look that appeared on Monday.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After leaving Microsoft in 2001, Brian MacDonald found it tough to find his second act. He was involved with a few start-ups and arranged some real estate deals in the Seattle area. He even built a boat in China.

But none really offered the challenge he was seeking. So, when he had a meeting in February 2007 with Microsoft search boss Satya Nadella, he was inspired. That night, he went home and cranked out a 10-page paper on the challenges and opportunities he saw for Microsoft in search. It was in Nadella's in-box the next morning.

Brian MacDonald, the creator of Microsoft Project and Microsoft Outlook, came out of retirement to help redesign the user interface for Microsoft's search engine.

(Credit: Microsoft)

"I just want to work on the biggest problem in the industry," he said. By April, he was back at a desk in Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., campus.

MacDonald could hardly have found a bigger task than entering the search fray. After three years in the search business, Microsoft had yet to make any significant headway despite having spent billions of dollars.

"Search is kind of the Mount Everest of the industry right now," he said. "That's really the mountain that you want to climb."

He's been back at the company two years now, and Microsoft still finds itself at base camp, struggling to reach double digits in market share and its online business is losing hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter.

But Microsoft hasn't given up on its expedition. This week, it takes an important step. After months of testing within Microsoft's walls, the software maker is publicly detailing its plan to revamp its search engine under the name Bing.

The update consists of a new look, a new name, and new capabilities for the product. And in the process, Microsoft hopes it will also get a fresh start in what has thus far been a painful journey.

Several of the features are things championed by MacDonald. In particular, the new engine has a left-hand navigation pane for moving among different types of searches. Kumo also breaks a search query down into a number of possible categories.

When one hovers over a particular result, they get a pop-up window with more information, such as the query terms in context on the page.

In other cases, Microsoft is bringing more information into the results themselves. Type in "Amazon" and one will get not only links to that Web site, but also the company's hard-to-find customer service phone number. A search for UPS will let one track a package directly from Bing.

While potentially useful for customers, it could also be a sticking point among those whose content it is borrowing from so liberally. Product searches, for example, aggregate both user and professional reviews from various sites directly within the Bing result.

"I don't think we are trying to do something unnatural to have the person stay within the site," MacDonald said, adding that in the end the company thinks it will drive more people to the pages it is indexing.

With Bing, Microsoft also makes its interface more similar when one moves among different types of searches, such as photos or news. It's not unlike the way Outlook has some common interface tools that remain consistent even when a user switches from calendar to contacts.

"You get a different tailored experience but you still feel like you have stayed in Outlook," MacDonald said. "That's very much the integration model we have been going after."

Perhaps the biggest thing, though, MacDonald said, was the fact that the new design is opened up to allow more innovation down the road, as opposed to the classic search page with its single page of generic results.

"The 10 blue links alone makes it hard for an engineer to have that brainstorm in the shower," he said. "You need that extra surface area."

Screenshots: Searching with Microsoft's Bing

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In one example, Bing now allows full articles to be shown within the search engine both for Wikipedia articles indexed by Powerset as well as for health topics, using content licensed from the Mayo Clinic.

In choosing MacDonald, Nadella said he admired the way that he could see opportunity where others saw mature markets. His approach with Outlook particularly resonated with Nadella.

"E-mail existed, calendaring existed, and contacts existed," Nadella said. "He changed the way people interacted with those applications."

Tapping MacDonald meant dealing with someone very unlike himself. In contrast with Nadella's neat desk, MacDonald's office is so cluttered his assistant was once asked if it was an office or a store room.

"We're different," Nadella said. "I don't work like Brian."

But creating some difference was an important cultural shift that needed to occur, he said. "Out of that will come the creative breakthroughs," Nadella said.

One of the big debates was on another of MacDonald's ideas--putting a picture in the background of the main search page. Each day, Microsoft has a different photo on its search page. It's designed as the kind of thing to get someone to check back each day, but some inside Microsoft saw it merely as a graphical distraction that slowed page load times.

Bringing back MacDonald was just one part of Nadella's strategy. The other piece was creating a deep science background to replace a culture that had been based on marketing other people's technology. To lead the effort, he convinced Harry Shum, the head of Microsoft research Asia, to join the search effort.

"He brought about that change in our engineering." Nadella said. Early on, the company's ranks were mainly filled by folks from research or other parts of the company. "Lately, of course, the Yahoo parade has been great for us," Nadella said.

As pleased as he is with some of the changes, Nadella's goals appear to be rather modest. If Microsoft were to go from 9 percent share to 11 percent by next year, he would consider that a success.

"I would say those are great gains," he said. "It's not a share battle that is going to go from 8 or 9 (percent share) to 20 in a quarter."

For his part, MacDonald said he wasn't always sure he wanted to go back to work at Microsoft. He said that he had long had thoughts of how the company could win in search, but added "I wasn't always sure the company was...fully committed."

These days, he is more convinced--sure enough that he sold that boat he built in China.

"It was, literally, a slow boat from China," MacDonald said. "It took days to get anywhere. It wasn't really compatible with the time commitment I need in this job."

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, on stage at D: All Things Digital with Walt Mossberg, introducing the company's revamped search engine, dubbed Bing.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

CARLSBAD, Calif.--Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked off his speech Thursday talking about the economy, though he also plans to show off Microsoft's revamped search engine within minutes.

In a speech at D: All Things Digital, Ballmer was asked by moderator Walt Mossberg to discuss the economy and how long the downturn will last. Ballmer said that he didn't expect the the economic collapse to be a 50-year-thing, but it won't turn around in three months either. (Thanks for narrowing that down)

"People generally agree this is a different recession," Ballmer said. "To think that things would be back in a year seems naive to me."

Had the economy not tanked, Ballmer said the company's research and sales and marketing would have continued to improve.

"You'll do less new," he said, in today's economy.

Update 8:20 a.m. PT: The talk is turning to search. Ballmer says Microsoft is willing to "upgrade" its talent when necessary.

"We're obviously where we are in search, " he said. "We want to do better, no question." 8:22 a.m. PT: More on search.

"It takes persistence," Ballmer siad. "We certainly flailed with Windows before we got it right,"

Now showing video on the introduction of search. Jokes about their naming plans and failed Yahoo bid.

And it's... BING.

"We wanted something that unambiguously said search," Ballmer said, explaining why Microsoft decided to rebrand Live Search.

8:30 a.m. PT: Ballmer now talking about why Bing. He said the company wanted something that was short, could be used as a verb and didn't have "negative or unusual" connotations.

He put the renaming in context.

"This is a very important step," Ballmer said. "It doesn't substitute for innovation."

Yusuf Mehdi comes on stage to demo Bing.

Ballmer interrupts to position how far Microsoft has come.

"There's no way to just change the whole game in one step," he said. "There's a lot of unmet needs in this category."

8:35 a.m. PT: Demo showing some of the key features. For example, search identifies best match, sometimes hiding other results when there is one clear match that someone is looking for.

Also includes customer service phone numbers when you search for a company like Amazon.com or Microsoft itself.

8:40 a.m. PT: Now showing the main interface of Bing--it's left hand navigation and breaking down of searches by categories. It's a mix of human and computer categorization, Microsoft said.

On the video search site, when you hover over a thumbnail result it starts playing right from the thumbnail.

8:45 a.m. PT:On to product search. Mehdi howing how it includes user and professional reviews gathered from a variety of sites.

Travel search gets integration with the Farecast site Microsoft bought. Farecast helps predict whether current rates and fares will go up or down.

Mossberg hits on one of the questions I raised about all the integration of content from other sites directly into Bing.

"How about all these people that expect to make money off their Web sites," Mossberg asks.

"Were not trying to get in the way of copyright holders," Ballmer said. "We're not trying to live off other people's work. We are just trying to make a good product."

Ballmer notes some of different ways content gets there. Some is licensed he said, other is what can be crawled "under copyright law."

"We license content to be in here," Ballmer said. "That's a way to do it."

8:45 a.m. PT: Mossberg asks Ballmer what makes him think this will do the trick. Ballmer says that phrasing implies things will change overnight, which they won't.

"My timeframe is 'lots of years'" Ballmer said.

Mossberg noted that Ask had an improved engine at one time that gained share after a relaunch, but the gains faded.

"Ask was not consistent," Ballmer said. "They didn't keep pounding and pounding."

8:55 a.m. PT: So how much is Microsoft spending on ads?

"We'll have a big budget," Ballmer said. "It was big enough that I had to gulp when I approved it," he said, adding that a gulp in a $60 billion company is a big thing

8:57 a.m. PT: The talk is shifting to smartphones.

Ballmer, not surprisingly, tries to paint the PC as the more important mobile devices.

"Most wireless data goes over PCs," he said. "It doesn't go over phones."

That said, Ballmer agreed that "smartphones are going to increase like crazy."

He said that 500 million smartphones a year are going to be sold over time. "I want to sell a very significant percentage of all of those through our partners," he said. "That is very important financially to us, strategically to us."

8:59 a.m. PT: The talk turns to Netbooks.

Walt Mossberg notes that the research the conference organizers did shows most people don't plan to buy a Netbook even when the economy improves. Ballmer says that has more to do with "fuzziness" around the Netbook brand. He said the figure would be a lot higher if the question asked how many people plan to by a notebook computer.

9:01 a.m. PT: Windows 7 is "on track" for holiday season.

Mossberg asked about enterprise adoption. Would Windows 7 be faster than Vista?

"Vista was faster than XP, ironically," Ballmer said. "Windows 7 has the potential to be faster still than Vista (in the enterprise)"

9:04 a.m. PT: On to questions. The first one comes from a venture capitalist that sees the new Office "ribbon" user interface as a productivity drain.

Ballmer said that "any time you make any change in the user experience of any thing you are going to have people" that don't like it.

"When they change the (Wall Street) Journal, I always hate it for a while," Ballmer said. "Software has that same characteristic."

9:05 a.m. PT: Next question is on search. User asks whether if he is searching for a "Hilton" in "Paris" he gets the result he wants or, perhaps some other result would come up.

(I'll do that search and let you know what happens).

9:07 a.m. PT:Esther Dyson asks about Microsoft's healthcare business.

Ballmer said that the company is investing in several areas, including business intelligence that can merge together several different electronic health records.

That's important, Ballmer said, because it is unlikely that even as records go digital that people will have just one place where all their health data is stored. "You are going to have several records," Ballmer said.

9:04 a.m. PT:A question on Netbooks and Windows 7. Ballmer says computer makers will be able to use Windows XP as well as many versions of Windows 7.

Have you met with Yahoo recently?

"I think there's a lot that can make sense in terms of a search partnership, not an acquisition," Ballmer said. "Whether such a thing will happen I don't know."

As for a meeting, Ballmer noted that Carol Bartz left a message for Ballmer in a book that the D makeup artist had people sign.

"The makeup couldn't fix me if it tried," Bartz wrote, according to Ballmer.

9:14 a.m. PT: Ballmer's done.

Once again, Microsoft is finding itself beaten to the punch in the search game.

While it has been readying Kumo for its first public airing--probably at next week's D: All Things Digital event--Yahoo and Google have already shown off their latest search enhancements. Worse still, their demos show that Redmond's rivals are heading in some of the same directions as Microsoft itself.

According to screenshots that leaked out in March, Kumo's look focuses on a new left-hand navigation menu that breaks searches down into a number of related queries. The results themselves also feature information organized into categories. For example, a search on "Audi" breaks things down into an initial result with facts such as price and fuel economy pulled out in bold, followed by general Web results, then results by category, such as Audi parts, used Audis, and Audi accessories.

But in the time since those screenshots leaked and Microsoft began internal testing of Kumo, Yahoo and Google have also continued to advance their efforts. Last week, Google showed off new ways of filtering results at its Searchology event.

Click here to see a larger version of the Kumo screenshot. Once you're there, click on the magnifying lens icon to boost the image size.

(Credit: Microsoft)

On Tuesday, Yahoo talked about trying to return more instant results, as opposed to just linking to sites that might have what a user is looking for. Yahoo even used Microsoft's favorite catch phrase.

"It's time to kill the 10 blue links," said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo's search strategy, referring to the top 10 search results listed when you enter most queries into a search engine. "We want to move away from document retrieval as center of search to divining the user's intent."

The Kumo revamp includes more than just a new user interface and is also expected to include enhancements in video and image search as well as technology from Powerset, a natural-language search company Microsoft bought last year.

The need for Microsoft to make headway is critical. After four years in the business, Microsoft continues to tread water as a distant third in the search market. Even within its own walls it hasn't been able to command a majority of searches.

In the broader market, the company has struggled to achieve a double-digit market share. In April, the company had 9.9 percent of the U.S. search market, according to Nielsen Online. That compares to 16.3 percent for Yahoo and 64 percent for Google.

The effort has also been a drag on the company's overall earnings as it has continued to pour billions of dollars in profits from its Windows and Office businesses into the money-losing online push. Last quarter alone, Microsoft's online services business had a $575 million operating loss on revenue of $721 million.

Search is key for Microsoft--and everyone else in the business--because it is where much of the online money is made today, as opposed to services such as e-mail or instant messaging, which generate relatively paltry amounts of revenue.

Microsoft is counting on Kumo to help the company improve its fortunes and prove that the years-long investment in search will finally bear fruit. However, some are less than optimistic that Microsoft can make headway.

"The battle for general Web search is all but over--or at least the formation of the landscape for that," said Ned May, the lead analyst for Outsell, an analysis firm that focuses on the information and publishing industries. "It's Google, Yahoo, Microsoft--in that order."

The launch of Wolfram Alpha shows that the public is still hungry for additional alternatives, May said, but added that at this point new advances are quickly copied, limiting broad-scale changes in the market.

May noted that Microsoft is rumored to be planning a $100 million ad campaign to promote its search improvements.

"That speaks to what it's about today," May said. "They need to spend $100 million to move the needle in their direction. That speaks volumes."

Microsoft won't say when Kumo will be available publicly, or in fact whether it will keep the Kumo name or go with one of the reported alternatives, such as Bing.

Although Microsoft may well show Kumo at D, the public launch is still a bit further off. A clock at Microsoft, said to be counting down the days until Kumo's launch, won't be done ticking in time for the News Corp.-owned conference.

By my rough calculations, that should have the clock standing at somewhere around a dozen days from today. As others have also noted, that coincides with June 3, the start of SMX Advanced, where Microsoft's Qi Lu is speaking.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been testing some Kumo-like navigation features in recent days.

May said that the changes being talked about make sense, but may not be enough to help Microsoft stand out.

"That's good stuff," he said, but added that Yahoo already does a good job of things like suggesting additional searches. "It's already being done pretty well by the others."

This search result for Zune, seen on Live Search by enthusiast Ryan Rea, bears a significant resemblance to the Kumo prototype that Microsoft has been testing internally. (Click for larger version)

(Credit: Ryan Rea (aka volvoshine))

Microsoft has begun to broaden the testing of its next-generation search technology.

For the past two months, Microsoft has been running an internal test of the technology, which is code-named Kumo. However, some of the design changes that are part of that update are now in limited public testing.

Enthusiast Ryan Rea said on Friday that he got a Live Search result that looked a lot more like screenshots of Kumo than it does to Microsoft's standard search results (see screenshot above). Of particular note is the left-hand navigation pane, a key feature of Kumo.

Rea said he started getting the new results using Live Search in Internet Explorer 8 using the release candidate build of Windows 7.

Using the same set-up, I still get the standard result, shown in the screenshot below. Microsoft told CNET News that Rea's result page is part of the company's testing efforts.

"We are continuously looking for ways to improve Live Search for both advertisers and consumers," the software maker said in a statement. "As part of that effort, we regularly conduct public tests of certain feature sets. This is an example of one such test with a very limited audience."

Microsoft is preparing for a launch of the Kumo technology as well as a rebranding of its search engine, though sources have said that name is not final and several other names have also been floating about.

Kumo, however, is expected to include more than just changes to the look of Microsoft's search engine. Among the enhancements is expected to be the inclusion of semantic search technology Microsoft got as part of last year's purchase of Powerset.

The software has a considerable game of catch-up to play as it has continued to trail Yahoo and Google despite years of investment. According to March numbers from Nielsen Online, Microsoft had 10.3 percent of the U.S. search market, as compared to 15.8 percent for Yahoo and 64.2 percent for Google.

The standard result for the query "Zune" using Live Search. (Click for larger version)

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

Microsoft has reportedly put up a clock in one of its buildings with a 40-day countdown to the launch of its next-generation search engine, code-named Kumo.

Enthusiast site LiveSide noted on Sunday that a reader on Neowin, another enthusiast site, said that Microsoft had a TV in one of its search buildings with the countdown clock.

The software maker has been testing its search engine internally since last month, but has not said exactly when the service would launch. The countdown appears to roughly coincide with a speech from newly minted online boss Qi Lu, who is slated to speak at the SMX Advanced event on June 3. The timing also seems to coincide with reports that Microsoft plans a big ad campaign for its search engine starting this summer.

Microsoft declined to comment on the clock or its plans for Kumo.

Although Microsoft is testing the search engine under the Kumo name, executives have said that is just one of several names the company is considering.

The stakes for Microsoft are high. The software maker has remained a distant third in the search market behind Google and Yahoo, a position that makes it tough for the company to get the scale it needs to make money in the business. Even inside its own walls, Microsoft has struggled to get the use of its search engine where it would like.

Early screenshots of Kumo, seen by CNET News, show that the revamped search engine focuses on a couple of areas, including an attempt to break down a search query into a couple more detailed options. When searching, say, for the term "Audi," Kumo breaks things down into an initial result with facts such as price and fuel economy pulled out in bold, followed by general Web results, then results by category, such as Audi parts, used Audis, and Audi accessories.

Microsoft has made the decision to ax Live Search Product Upload, a tool retailers could use to get their products into Microsoft's search database.

"Thank you for your interest in the product upload beta. Regrettably, we are discontinuing this program," Microsoft said in a message posted on the product's Web site. "Merchants located in the United States should consider participating in Live Search Cashback--an advertising program which combines the power of Live Search with a comparison shopping engine to bring consumers some of the best deals on the web."

Microsoft confirmed it is ending the product, which had been in beta testing.

"Results from the beta proved that the service was redundant with our other shopping assets," Microsoft said in a statement. "To improve the performance for merchants, we've combined product search and Cashback and we are decommissioning product upload in favor of the new integrated Cashback shopping experience."

The software maker said that retailers don't have to enroll in the Cashback program to make its product search engine, given that it also crawls the Web. However, it said "we encourage merchants to join Cashback as it enables them to provide a structured feed for their product search listings."

Microsoft announced the move to combine product search and Live Search Cashback last week.

Microsoft said on Wednesday that it has combined its product search engine with its Live Search Cashback, a product that gives users a rebate on certain purchases made directly after using Live Search.

"The new site unifies Live Search Products (the shopping vertical within Live Search) and Cashback to make it easier for you to research, compare products, and save money," Microsoft said in a blog posting.

The move also reflects the fact that on the back end, Microsoft has shifted the underlying engine for Cashback over from technology from its Jellyfish acquisition and onto the primary Live Search platform. The company launched the Cashback effort nearly a year ago in an effort to try and boost its overall slice of the search market as well as within the lucrative commerce segment.

Microsoft's changes to the product search feature come ahead of a broader revamp of Live Search due later this year. Microsoft is currently testing the new search, code-named Kumo, with its own employees. However, as we noted earlier this week, Microsoft still has work to do to grow its search share, even inside its own walls.

Live Search still badly trails both Google and Yahoo in the search market. For March, Microsoft had 10.3 percent of the U.S. search market, according to Nielsen Online, compared with 64.2 percent for Google and 15.8 percent for Yahoo. Also of note, Microsoft's year-over-year search growth was less than 1 percent compared with 16 percent growth for the market as a whole.