There is Yahoo, Google, Live Search. And now… Bing!

Well I think this (relatively) new search engine is wonderful. It focuses on travel, shopping, health and local search. I am not going to go on saying what Bing is all about (because you can explore it here). But instead, I shall show you a few key features that I really like and think is beneficial to us!

The first thing I noticed was the background. This is probably the first and most obvious difference between Bing and the other popular search engines around. From breathtaking scenery to beautiful landscapes and to adorable animals,  you can change the background image by clicking the arrows at the bottom right-hand corner of the site!

So let us try bing-ing “Sony Vaio”.

This is what you get when you enter “Sony Vaio”. Looks like any other search engines? Bing’s unique features will prove you wrong.

After entering that, click on “Shopping”. By clicking that, each search result is accompanied by the price, which store to get it from and also the cashback function. Isn’t that ultra convenient!

Furthermore, you can narrow down your searches by filtering unwanted stuff out of the results. You can choose the category, brand (!!) and price range that you are looking for!

So if you are looking for a camera, you can choose category “Camera & Optics”, the brand of your preference and the price range you wish to look into. And there you have it, results that are quick and specific.

Another cool feature that Bing has, is the video search. Usually when you do a search for a video, the search results would be just a whole list of links. But Bing displays the videos and the best part about this is that it actually plays the video when you hover on them! I think that is really amazing and convenient, no?! I mean this saves me a lot of time opening several tabs to load videos just to see if they are the one I am looking for. Haha impressive.

So yesss, this is my view on Bing. I think it is great if you want something specific, especially something that has got to do with travel, health, shopping or local! I hope this is useful

Have a good time exploring! I think I am getting the hang of it!

p.s. the example above is the US Bing.

After the Vista debacle, Microsoft changed the way it makes software. The result – Windows 7 – is winning raves. Can a new operating system (and a new attitude) help the company take on Google?

Microsoft

The company’s web forays, such as MSN, have only highlighted the dominance of Google and Yahoo. In software for smartphones, there is Apple, RIM (RIMM), and everybody else. MP3 players? Microsoft’s Zune hardly merits a mention. And even the core franchise has suffered. In the face of slowing PC sales and the economic pall, Microsoft’s fiscal 2009 revenue actually contracted, to $58.4 billion from more than $60 billion in fiscal 2008 — and the company missed its earnings estimate by more than $1 billion.

But the biggest failure under Ballmer’s tenure was self-inflicted. Vista was meant to be a wholesale reimagining of Windows, the brand name for Microsoft’s operating systems dating back to the early 1980s. Every so often the company unveils a new OS, blandly named for the year of the release (Windows 95, Windows 98) or a geeky abbreviation (Windows XP is short for Windows Experience). Vista had a marketing-friendly moniker, a fancy user interface, new security architecture, a better file-storage system, and much more.

After a protracted six-year development process, much internal squabbling, false starts, blown deadlines, and broken promises to partners, the engineering team mopped up 50 million lines of code, wrung it all out into a shrink-wrapped box, and heaved it onto the world in early 2007.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Vista required top-end hardware to operate even while users were downgrading from desktops to notebooks. The bloated OS was incompatible with printers, web cams, and device drivers of all sorts. Early adopters scurried back to Windows XP; many corporations skipped the upgrade altogether. Worst of all, Vista energized the cloud computing chorus, led by Google (GOOG), whose vision of the future involves ubiquitous broadband, a good web browser, and everything else hosted on the Internet. No sophisticated operating system necessary. “Vista was the biggest debacle in the history of the company,” says one former senior executive. “People were ashamed to say they worked on it.”

But here’s some good news: On Oct. 22 Vista will be safely behind Microsoft (MSFT). On that day, the company will introduce a successor, Windows 7, and guess what? It doesn’t suck. In fact, it’s really pretty good. For all the pomp around each new version of the iPhone, the latest Kindle, or Google’s next beta, Wave, Windows 7 is sure to go down as the technology launch of the year. Critics love it, and IT managers are ready to buy. A recent Credit Suisse survey says that a quarter of corporate customers plan to upgrade within two years. Analysts estimate that the new OS could boost Microsoft’s revenue by more than $3 billion over that time and ignite the entire ecosystem built on Windows — from computer makers like Dell and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) to third-party software vendors, resellers, and system supporters. It could be the shot in the arm the entire tech sector has been looking for.

On a warm September day in Redmond, Wash., sitting in a conference room in Building 34, the economic epicenter of the Northwest, Ballmer is not ready to declare the doldrums over. A stock market turnaround means little in the face of staggering unemployment. But he remains hopeful because he thinks this version of Windows is a winner. “It’s a great product. We did our best. Is that going to cause huge increases in spending by the world’s businesses? I can’t make that promise,” he says, “although I think things are becoming slightly less cautious. There’s some hope that says, ‘Hey, look, maybe this is part of the turnaround.’”

Back from the abyss

It’s just a hint of optimism from an executive who has been bearish on the economy of late, an indication that the mood is shifting at one of the most self-loathing, hypercritical corporate cultures you’re ever likely to encounter. As bad as the Vista years have been, Microsoft seems to be getting its act together. The Wall Street collapse stunned the company, and management reacted with uncharacteristic alacrity. “There was a week or two where everything seemed to come to a stop,” says CFO Chris Liddell, “and we said, ‘We’re going to have to operate in a different way.’ “The company laid off 5,000 employees and instituted a “10-point plan” to cut wasteful spending, from vendor allotments to travel and entertainment.

Meanwhile, executives ramped up development cycles. This past summer the company kicked off, in its words, “a year of product launches unlike any other in Microsoft history.” Since then, Ballmer et al. have revamped Windows Server and unveiled the Zune HD line of MP3 players. On the way: overhauls of Windows Mobile, Office, Internet Explorer, Xbox Live, Bing (its new search engine), and the introduction of Azure, a plunge into the enemy territory of cloud computing. Microsoft is also about to venture into retailing, an area conquered by longtime nemesis Apple (AAPL).

All this, says Bob Muglia, president of the server and tools division, is part of what he calls Microsoft v.3 — a play on the old saw that it takes the company three releases to get a product right. “In the Vista era, we lost track of a bunch of things,” he says. “Now Windows 7 has shipped, and it’s the official start of [a time of] mature leadership, competitive focus, aggressive competition — and I think you see the results. You could say it’s us getting our mojo back.”

If Steve Ballmer has one attribute of a great leader, it’s an ability to inspire the troops — which is what he’s about to do standing onstage in July at a convention center in downtown New Orleans. The Big Easy is broiling in a midsummer haze. The locals have cleared out, making way for the 5,000 Microsoft partners — resellers, builders, software developers — who have gathered at a conference organized in their honor. Ballmer is, naturally, the headline act. He’s peeled off some pretty outlandish keynotes over the years, including “Steve Ballmer Going Crazy” (2 million views on You- Tube) — in which he huffs, “Come on, give it up for me!” — and the much-remixed “Developers” (1 million-plus views), where a heavier Ballmer performs a sweaty, arrhythmic stomp dance.

Today job one is to inject some optimism into the crowd. Ballmer had a tough year. He took a modest (for a man worth $11 billion) pay cut. But his small-business partners are reeling from the downturn. “This is the most phenomenal year we’ve ever had for technology releases,” he rumbles, ticking off reasons to be hopeful about 2010. Microsoft vows to keep investing $9 billion-plus in R&D, it’ll increase spending on partner support, and most of all it will keep fighting competitors — because, well, that’s what the company does best. “We don’t go home,” he says. “We just keep coming and coming and coming. We’re tenacious, tenacious, tenacious. Boom!”

That’s not entirely true. Over the years the company has cowered at least a few times. It bailed on Microsoft Money (a personal finance product designed to oust Quicken), would-be YouTube killer Soapbox, the long-forgotten BOB operating system for kids, tablet PCs, web-enabled TVs, etc. But the company has surely disrupted many markets — from web browsers to console games — by offering a fresh perspective. “Novell said, ‘The world is about single purpose operating systems,’ ” explains Ballmer, back at Building 34.”We had to say, ‘No, the world is really about multiple-purpose operating systems.’ Lotus and WordPerfect said, ‘The world is character-based,’ and we said, ‘No, let’s try some graphics.’ Apple said, ‘The world is a proprietary software-hardware combination,’ and we said, ‘No, the world needs to be open to choice.’”

The enemy within

Such conquests, while dated, have earned the company a reputation for being obsessed with competitors — a characterization Ballmer does little to diminish. Unlike most executives of his ilk, he says what’s on his mind, which can include calling Google a “house of cards” or referring to Linux as a “cancer that … attaches itself to everything it touches.” He once laughed derisively on camera at the prospect of the iPhone ever succeeding. But in Microsoft’s core business, there is no real competition. Various versions of Windows run more than 95% of all PCs. So when it came to preventing another Vista, Ballmer had to find the enemy within.

Windows 7 is a departure from Vista in many ways. It will be unveiled on time after a three-year development cycle. It’s compatible with previous versions and has excised all the security-permissions protocols that were lampooned in Apple’s “I’m a Mac” ad campaign. It’s sharp-looking, almost as sleek as the Mac OS, and has a few cool new features, like support for multitouch monitors and Aero Shake, which allows users to clear the desktop with a jiggle of the mouse. Perhaps most impressively, it requires less computing horsepower than Vista. That just never happens with a new OS. But the biggest departure comes in scope and ambition. Ballmer claims to have learned something from Vista: It’s no longer advisable to try a “big bang” rollout — i.e., completely reimagine a product as sophisticated and interconnected as Windows.

So he hit control-alt-delete. He brought in a new taskmaster, Steven Sinofsky, to oversee the engineering. Sinofsky became known for hitting deadlines while overseeing the Office group from 2000–07. An executive close to the Windows team characterizes his changes as such: “Reset — or reboot — is something that we hear a lot about the transition,” he says. “What we did was [give] the development team a clarity that was probably missing.” With Vista, teams worked on features simultaneously without an awareness of other schedules. When separate features came together, they were often incompatible. “The goal was to produce a plan for features, but not just a plan — also the motivation, the business rationale,” the executive says.

Sinofsky oversaw the largest beta test in history — more than 8 million users — blogged tirelessly about every little tweak, and kept lines open with partners. The team scrubbed inefficiencies and ushered out a fully functional, backward-compatible OS on time, earning Sinofsky a promotion to president of the Windows division. The new openness has resonated in the marketplace. According to Credit Suisse, 58% of corporate customers were either dissatisfied or extremely dissatisfied with Vista. With Windows 7, it’s 21% dissatisfied and none extremely dissatisfied. The PC makers seem happy too. “With Vista, the expectations were very high, and the customer reaction was not so positive,” says Satjiv Chahil, senior VP of global marketing for HP’s Personal Systems Group. “This time the response has been very positive. It’s what the market has been waiting for.” In the end Windows 7 is what Vista should have been the first time.

Software fades

With its house in order, Microsoft can safely get back to its imperialistic ways. And there’s no bigger land grab than web search. Ballmer has pledged to fund his new search engine, Bing, with as much as 10% of operating income over the next five years (potentially $11 billion). Why do something so risky when he’s lost so much online already? Because the opportunity is simply too big to ignore. Microsoft considers the global search market to be worth as much as $80 billion. And Ballmer recognizes that there’s even more power than money in being the leader. Google.com is what Windows used to be: leverage. Controlling the on-ramp to the web allows a company to distribute a broad array of products, which is what Google does so effectively. “They promote YouTube, they promote Chrome,” he says, referring to Google’s web browser. “If it was us, people would call it an unfair advantage.”

As the importance of client software diminishes, so too does Microsoft as we know it. Bing represents the company’s best hope yet of maintaining its own unfair advantage. And Ballmer thinks that Google, despite its enormous market share, is vulnerable. “There are a lot of negative views right now of what’s going on — Google Books, monopolization, blah, blah, blah,” he says, simultaneously highlighting and waving away a growing anti- Google sentiment. “Put all that aside and you have to ask, ‘Has the experience really changed much? Is it easier to find what you’re looking for? Is there a chance to do a better job?’ I think there’s a real opportunity to do that, and somebody had better seize it. Who’s got the best shot?”

Microsoft launched Bing in May, and it confirms Muglia’s assertion that the company has become more focused on customers. Rather than Google’s minimalist homepage, Bing rotates stunning photos embedded with interesting snippets about various parts of the globe. Like Google, the site acts as a jumping-off point, but has just enough flair to make you want to linger. Visitors see more information than they do in Google results and can even play videos without clicking away. Bing is organized more intuitively, and it outperforms in real-time search — a big plus for the Twitter set.

Early returns have been promising. Before Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, Live Search, had 8% of the market, according to ComScore. After three months Bing stands at 9.3%; meanwhile, Google’s share has dropped 0.4%. Over the summer Microsoft struck a deal for Bing to power the search function across many Yahoo (YHOO) properties. Once the arrangement kicks in, Bing’s share could jump to around 30%. “It’s a pretty good start,” says Yusuf Mehdi, SVP of Microsoft’s online audience group. “Best of all, it’s really hot with certain demographics, like elementary school children and women, because of the aesthetic design and feel.”

Of course the hope is that greater traffic will lure advertisers. Craig Macdonald is the chief marketing officer at media-buying firm Covario. He spends $250 million a year on search ads for clients like McAfee, Intel (INTC), and Procter & Gamble. Impressed with Bing’s aesthetic and buzz, he initially increased spending, but has been disappointed. “We saw a 15% to 20% increase in impressions but a 39% spike in the cost of acquisition,” he says. Compared with Live Search traffic, driven primarily from the MSN homepage, Bing users are younger, more web-savvy, and frugal. “They did a nice job creating buzz, but we said, ‘We’re pulling back.’ “

Microsoft may yet benefit from the anti-Google sentiment that Ballmer calls out. No one likes a monopoly, and everyone’s favorite web brand has become a freeloader in the eyes of the telecom, book, and media industries. Some of Google’s partners have grown disenchanted as well. “With Google, everything’s a black box, completely opaque. You have no idea why things go up or down. They’re impossible to deal with,” says the president of a website that each year generates more than $10 million hosting Google AdSense ads. “Everyone who’s not Google is rooting for someone to be a counterweight.”

It’s not obvious from walking around the company’s sprawling campus that Microsoft is locked in combat with some of the business world’s most ferocious competitors. There’s little resemblance here to the 24/7 sleep-under-the-desk startup culture that permeates Silicon Valley. Many executives are tanned and fit from weekend sails on Puget Sound, hiking up Mount Rainier, golfing, or exploring Machu Picchu. People arrive promptly to meetings, smile broadly, and are exceedingly polite. If quality of life were the most important metric for a recent grad deciding between Redmond and Redwood City, there really would be no choice.

Eğer bazı sebeplerle(!) DNS adresinizi değiştirdiyseniz ve opendns kullanıyorsanız ve de Firefox’ta arama çubuğunun(awesome bar) Google’in kendimi şanslı hissediyorum özelliğini kullanmasını seviyorsanız, muhtemelen opendns’e geçince bu sistem artık çalışmayacaktır. Direk siteye girmek yerine opendns guide diye bir arama sayfası açılmaktadır. Ayrıca sonuçları da Google’dan çok daha kalitesizdir. Bunu engelleyip tekrar eski haline döndürmek için şöyle bir şey yapabilirsiniz:

Mozilla Firefox için:

- Firefox adres çubuğuna about:config yazılır

- “Söz veriyorum dikkatli olacağım” butonuna basılır

- Açılan sayfadaki arama kutusuna “keyword” yazılır

- Muhtemelen listede iki sonuç çıkacaktır. Şöyle bir görüntü olmalı:

- keywor.URL olana sağ tıklayıp “Değerini değiştir”e basılır ve yeni değer olarak şunları yazabilirsiniz:

1) Eğer direk awesome bara yazılanın Google’da aranmasını isterseniz şunu yazın:

http://www.google.com/search?q=

2) Ya da benim gibi “Kendimi şanslı hissediyorum”u kullanmak isteyenlerdenseniz:

http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q=

Internet Explorer için:

- Başlat -> Çalıştır yolu izlenerek çıkan pencereye “regedit” yazılır. Böylece kayıt defteri açılır

- Şu kayda ulaşılır:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchScopes

- Oradan şu değer açılır:

{0633EE93-D776-472f-A0FF-E1416B8B2E3A}

- Yukarıdaki girdinin değeri aşağıdaki ile değiştirilir(Tabi Windows Live Search için):

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q={searchTerms}

- Eğer Google isterseniz o zaman girdi değerine şunu yazın:

http://www.google.com/search?q={searchTerms}

Κυριαρχία Google | Τεχνολογία | Ελευθεροτυπία

Οπως προκύπτει από τα στατιστικά στοιχεία που συγκεντρώνει η εταιρεία Statcounter, η κυριαρχία της Google στις αναζητήσεις (και) των Ελλήνων χρηστών είναι σχεδόν απόλυτη. Τον τελευταίο μήνα μόλις 3 στις 100 αναζητήσεις πραγματοποιήθηκαν με τη χρήση ανταγωνιστικών υπηρεσιών, ενώ και σε διεθνές επίπεδο διαπιστώνεται πως οι προσπάθειες κολοσσών του κλάδου, όπως η Microsoft και η Yahoo, δεν έχουν αποδώσει τα αναμενόμενα.

Στην Ελλάδα μόλις το 1% των αναζητήσεων έγιναν μέσω των εργαλείων της Microsoft (bing.com και Live search), ενώ η αντίστοιχη υπηρεσία της Yahoo χρησιμοποιείται μόλις στο 2% του συνόλου των ερωτημάτων που διατυπώνουν οι χρήστες.[next]

We all know till windows xp the search option sucks big time….Looks like Microsoft don’t care about it much. Personally I don’t like vista so i didn’t upgrade to it, still booting from the 8 year old OS windows xp. But i loved the live search option that came with the new OS. So, i found a replacement for it. its called “Everything“. Its small (334Kb), got portable version (love that) and best of all its free.

It may take a small amount of time at start but after that its lightning fast. Live searching at its best . The one thing must for using it is that the drivers should be formatted in NTFS.Only files/folders that are on NTFS volumes will be indexed by “Everything”.

Main Website

Download

I have been working on Microsoft technologies (including latest products) for last two years, but my experience with Bing (Microsoft’s revamped search engine; formerly known as Live Search or MSN search) has not been good. The number of search results is poor, it takes more time to return and display search results, among other things. Microsoft has great expectations (more than expectations it is their quest to outdo Google in online search space) from Bing.

As New York Times reported:

And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”

The Inquisitr author Steven Hodson reports why Bing is a stupid ass name for a search engine.

To quote James Devlin:

One of the oft-cited reasons for Google’s success, other than the fact that it offered a decent ground floor product at a time when the world was full of search engine suckery, is that it had a name which was susceptible to being immortalized as a household verb. To Google is to search the web and to search the web is to Google.

Microsoft desperately wants this for Bing.

And goes on to explain the reasons for why Bing is the wrong name.

One interesting point is that, Bing is a recursive acronym – “Bing Is Not Google” same as GNU (GNU’s not Unix).

Only time will tell, if Bing can stand up to be compared with Google. Let’s wait and watch!

Before Bing, most Microsoft employees used Google to preform internal searches in the company’s internal network. With Bing, almost all Microsoft employees use Bing, almost every TV channel have ads for Bing like “Experiencing search overload, see the cure at Bing.com,” and exising users of Google, Yahoo, and others will also use Bing.

More recently, Microsoft and Yahoo tied up with a free deal to compete with Google which is similar to the “Microsoft will buy Yahoo” news last year.

Microsoft’s last search engine was Windows Live Search what many people did not remember the name of. Bing made it more consumer-friendly and it is more relevant. If you type in my name “Neel Chauhan” in Bing, it comes at the top (Even before Bing it came #1 on the Windows Live Search ranking because my Website is six months older). Meanwhile on Google, it came fourth place the time I wrote this article.

If you download a copy of IE8 or Windows 7 RC after Bing was released, you may see Windows Live Search, but after updates, you will see Bing as default (Unless you chose a different search engine before you installed IE8 or Win7. I did both).

Also, Microsoft Coporation’s stock NASDAQ: MSFT will go up. That’s good news for Microsoft Stock Holders.