bing

Microsoft gets Bing bump, ComScore says

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.

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 … Read more

New Bing ads fall short of Appleness

I want to Bing. I want to be Binged.

I want to hear the Binging bells from a million laptops ringing the news that there might be an alternative to Google's dominant bong.

So I was only too delighted to hear that two TV ads have already emerged to do the Binging ringing.

The first so-called anthem spot (ad agencies love to tell clients they need an anthem spot, in the same way that England really, really needs "God Save the Queen"), disappeared almost before it appeared.

The ad seemed, to my timid heart and mind, to … Read more

Bing off to solid start, but not that good

Ah, statistics.

Microsoft's new Bing search engine has received positive reviews in its first week on the planet, but did that early buzz translate into traffic? A report from Statcounter picked up by TechCrunch suggested that Bing's debut was successful enough to eclipse Yahoo Search during its first week, but subsequent analysis from Search Engine Land as well as data from CNET's network of sites suggests otherwise.

Statcounter, a Web traffic tracking company, reported that as of Thursday, June 4, Bing accounted for 16.28 percent of the U.S. search market, surpassing Yahoo's 10.22 … Read more

Microsoft offers unworkable solution to Bing porn

As I pointed out in an earlier post, searching for certain terms on Microsoft's new Bing.com search engine brings up videos that display hardcore porn within the Web site and because the porn is playing within Bing instead of the site where it's hosted, the videos are not necessarily blocked by parental control filters. And monitoring programs designed to tell parents where their kids have been are likely to simply report Bing.com instead of the site that actually hosts the video.

As Tom Krazit pointed out, Microsoft has responded to the issue in a blog post Thursday. … Read more

Week in review: Gaming's front in motion

The battle between video game console makers is in motion--literally. The three big console makers announced separate efforts this week at the E3 conference that focus on how gamers control their games.

For those of you who have been waiting for some really big news to come out of the video game industry, Microsoft answered your call with its innovative "Project Natal," a hands-free motion-sensitive controller system. Announced during Microsoft's annual E3 press conference, Project Natal seems almost certainly to be the culmination of several years of work by an Israeli start-up called 3DV Systems, which Microsoft … Read more

Microsoft gives Bing stronger search filter option

Microsoft has tweaked the search filters on its new Bing search engine following criticism that its smart motion video feature allowed Web surfers to watch porn without visiting adult Web sites.

The company announced the change in a blog post Thursday, as it also defended its approach to adult content in search results as a "more conservative approach than others in the industry." Bing does not show any video results for queries such as "porn" until the searcher disables a safe search filter, but following that click searchers can watch a small clip of adult content … Read more

Microsoft Bing: The first real Google alternative

Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, is the first real competitor to Google.

I rarely use Google. Or rather, I rarely use Google.com. Because Google is embedded into Safari, I just use the search box there, which creates huge stickiness that's hard to displace. Of course, Microsoft has the same option now for embedding Bing into Internet Explorer, assuming it's allowed to by the courts. But the very short amount of time I've spent with Bing has me rethinking my search engine options seriously for the first time.

I know a lot of people gush about … Read more

Norton can't block Bing porn

As a followup to my post from Tuesday about the ability for someone to view porn from within Bing, I just heard from a Symantec spokesperson that the company's Internet monitoring and filtering service, OnlineFamily.Norton (review), can't yet prevent Bing users from searching sexually explicit terms for Web sites or videos. The company plans to add Bing to its protected search engines in the next release. Other major search engines, including Google, are covered by the software's SafeSearch feature.

In the meantime, Symantec recommends that parents use OnlineFamily.Norton to block access to all of Bing--which … Read more

Microsoft kicks off huge Bing ad push

Microsoft faces several tough problems in trying to market Bing, its revamped search engine.

The first issue, is of course, that Google has become essentially synonymous with search.

"Google is so much a part of everyday culture," said Danielle Tiedt, general manager for marketing in Microsoft's online unit. "It is the verb. If you talk about search you talk about Google."

The second issue, also a thorny one, is that people tend to think they are pretty happy with search. When they have problems, they tend not to blame their search engine or look for … Read more

IE6 forcing Bing as default search engine

Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday that it is looking into an issue in which users of Internet Explorer 6 are forced into having Bing as their default search engine.

"We are aware of the issue with Bing on machines running IE6 and are investigating a solution," Microsoft said in a statement. "This issue is not impacting IE7 and IE8 users."

Although it is only affecting its older browser, many people still use IE6 and Microsoft has faced a lot of regulatory scrutiny over how default search preferences are set and changed within Internet Explorer.

The issue crops … Read more