MSN revamp to include stronger Bing ties
Microsoft has been testing different search bars to see which ones drive the most traffic to Bing. Shown here is the one that appeared on the MSN site on Friday.
(Credit: CNET)The planned fall revamp of MSN isn't just about giving the butterfly a fresh coat of paint. Microsoft also hopes to drive more people to its search engine.
The company has been toying with different search box designs to see which ones lead to the most queries. As it stands, the MSN portal already accounts for half of Microsoft's search engine traffic. Comparatively few people typed in queries straight from Microsoft's Live.com address (now Bing.com)
"A big part of my job is figuring out how I pull the Bing experience into MSN in a way that makes sense," Microsoft vice president Erik Jorgensen said in an interview this week.
One way of banking on MSN, he said, is by posting features on the site that tie in to the company's search engine. The company has talked about ways it can write features that push folks to Microsoft's local, shopping, and travel search engines--each among the most profitable parts of the search business and the areas in which Microsoft has focused.
The software maker is also looking at ways it can tie MSN features to the strongest areas of Bing--local, shopping, and travel search.
(Credit: Microsoft)To make that work, Microsoft needs to ensure that it is less visually jarring when one moves back and forth between MSN and Bing.
"Frankly, that's one I think we haven't done well," Jorgensen said. "I think in the fall that's something we've got to tackle."
In its first two weeks, Bing has managed to pick up some market share, but the key will be sustaining those gains in the coming weeks and months.
Beyond driving traffic from MSN, Microsoft is also counting on deals with PC makers Hewlett-Packard and Dell to get more people to give Bing a try.
The company has said it wants to pick up at least a couple points of market share in the first year, although it will need well more than that to truly compete economically with Google. Hence the company's never-ending talks with Yahoo, which is No. 2 in the search market with about 20 percent of the business.
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina. 
NO THANKS MS, I have KIDS!
Safe Search, which blocks porn and other "inappropriate" sites, is the default setting on Bing. The only thing that happens to be different is, if you do search for porn, it'll prompt you to turn off Safe Search. I believe that they're in the process of changing that anyway.
If you're so concerned, maybe you should actually teach your kids not to search for porn on the internet. It's not like they can't get it anyway if they aren't determined. It's not hard.
The fact that Bing was launched with this seriously nasty issue ? "in the process" of fixing it is a moot point ? causes me great concern about how much MS cares about the safety of our kids online.
As an example, i could easily paste ASCII porn in this comment, then if your kids were next to you and you refreshed, BHAM, they saw it.
Yes, it would lead to me getting the boot, but it won't change the fact that your kids saw it.
Teach them to be mature about it and stop being over-protective.
Also, safe search is the default.
Unless YOU personally want to take up the job of going through billions of images to make sure that they are filtered correctly, then go give Microsoft a call, they'd love to hear it, and i'm sure you'd probably get a Nobel prize too.
No? Then how about you block search engines, and maybe CNet too.
I log in here for a few minutes, once or twice a day. Some of you are CAMPED OUT HERE, waiting for the next opportunity to troll. Is this your job?
Those few minutes once or twice a day you login, what do you do except most often blather about the Apple gods and kick MS in the teeth? Yeah, you're nowhere near as prolific as other trolls here in the forums, but your loyalty is well known because you take just about every opportunity to take a shot at MS, often times completely off-topic and/or without any relevance.
Worry about your own kids and leave the worrying over mine to me. A responsible parent (which I am) will not have any more issues with Bing than they would with any other search engine.
If anyone were to fact-check that they'd see you just really have no defense, so instead you chose a weak offense. Nice work. I'm typing this on my Mac right now. I like Mac's, I like PC's, I don't really care for uninformed trolling though and I will defend MS or Apple where I see fit.
My 12 year old daughter has search for the most innocent things and got porn. People need to stop thinking someone else is looking after their kids. They are smarter then most of you parents and can get around filters if they want too.
1) a general dislike for Microsft, or
2) the difficulty of using/navigating with the site. For instance, every time I visit msn.spaces (where friends of mine have blogs), it asks for a sign in. It doesn't matter what browser I use, or how many cookies I enable, it won't remember the password/username combo. Also, the menus change as you move through MSN, making it harder to find your way around.
MSN team changed things for THEM rather than US, then the whole Live thing came along.
Worse is that they completely killed the "Members" site and changed it into one hell of a monster of a replacement that was just awkward to use.
I loved the Members site. I especially loved the Anonymous Contact link, which i used in my MSN space so people could always contact me without revealing personal info. Then they axed the feature. Sad days...
For instance, NASDAQ allows users to sign in with a Live ID, or the Library of Congress, etc. It's kinda like Facebook Connect, if you want to think about it. It allows a way for users to create an account, and websites can use it as a way of authenticating a person's identity. Microsoft also separates their divisions, so it's not like you're automatically signed in if you move from a Windows Live page to an MSN page (though it does often in IE8 for me).
Turning them loose unsupervised on the internet is exactly the same as dropping them off in the sleazy part of down. You know full well they will take advantage of the opportunity. Experimentation with forbidden fruit is normal. Restraint in children is not.
If you aren't ready to control your children . . . don't have children.
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=huge+breast&go=&form=QBVN&filt=custom
Follow that link and place it on any of the most strict security settings Bing has to offer and tell me what you find. This is not some off the wall search term here people. This is a very, very common search term among kids and it will not only show full frontal but will allow any child to PLAY the videos without even having to click on them. And there in lay the true issue here.
This is not a matter of making sure that the safety settings are secure or even teaching kids how to steer away from browsing explicit material. This is a simple issue of Bing making it astoundingly simple to bypass every know security method of blocking those sites from my child. The only method I have left is to block Bing.com, seeing as how Bing now plays the movies on there domain, which completely circumvents my black list of bad domains.
I am not here to bash Microsoft or Bing for that matter. I am here to point out the fact that this is a very real issue that needs to be understood and addressed.
I understand your concerns, but tell your son he'll face consequences if he dares attempts to search for naughty content. Say that you have software of some sort that will monitor his usage to ensure he does not attempt looking for anything naughty.
Do you block sites like YouTube too? Or Flickr or various photo-sharing and video-sharing sites? It's just as easy to find some naughty bits there too. Your son could just do a search on any search engine to look for those sites only.
- by shycelticwitch June 23, 2009 8:51 AM PDT
- @EntrepreNerd
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(33 Comments)Thank you for making my point clearer. We have to be able to trust our kids to some degree, but we need to monitor their activites. How can we do that when MS makes it so easy for them to circumvent our efforts? Unless we are standing over them every minute they are online, we run the risk of them getting onto something like Bing where they can bust through every security measure in place.