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Understand Your World with Bing

Bing Search Blog — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:59:54 GMT

At Bing we believe that search should be more than a collection of blue links pointing to pages around the web. We believe search should also be a reflection of the actual world which is why last June, we introduced a feature called Snapshot, which enables answers at a glance in the center column of the search results page. The result is a richer set of search results to help you better understand and explore the real world. We started with movies, restaurants and hotels.

The underlying technology for Snapshot is designed to develop deep understanding of the world around us not only as a collection of entities (people, places and things) but also the relationships between those entities. Inside the Bing engineering team, we call this technology Satori, which means understanding in Japanese. Over time, Satori will continue growing to encompass billions of entities and relationships, providing searchers with a more useful model of the digital and physical world.

Today, we are inviting people to check out Snapshot to experience our expansion of Satori. Since its introduction in June, we have expanded Satori to include a significantly larger number of entities from more domains with a deeper level of understanding about them. They include people, places, and things which are among the most common searches on Bing. So, whether you’re searching for answers about a celebrity, co-worker, animal, geographic location, or man-made structure, Bing helps you understand the world around you by providing at-a-glance answers about the people, places and things you care about.

People Search – Professionals, Famous People and Celebrities

Of these entities, people are the most popular, with searches for celebrities, professionals and friends representing about 10 percent of all searches on Bing. Whether you’re looking to keep tabs on your favorite celebrity or learn more about a colleague’s professional background, Bing now provides quick facts based on publicly available information from LinkedIn and Wikipedia.

Professionals: Now, when you're looking for information on a new colleague, you’ll see things such as where they went to school, where they have worked as well as related searches for people.

Famous People and Celebrities: We’re adding social information from Facebook, Twitter and Klout for celebrities – making it easier to find their official social media pages in one place. Similar to professionals, we’re also showing what else people searched for related to that celebrity. For example, when searching for John Kerry, you will see summary information, alongside photos of Hilary Clinton, President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush. When you hover over the "People also search for" photos, you'll see an explanation of how each is related to that celebrity, and for certain celebrities you can even see current and former flames.

Places Search: Landmarks, Lakes, Rivers and Mountains

Another popularly searched category is places, such as landmarks, lakes, rivers and mountains. So, when searching for Mt. Everest you’ll see things like: a short description, elevation, date of first ascent, and geographic location. Bing will also show related people and searches, climbers in this case.

Location, Location, Location:When searching for specific locations, such as Copenhagen Bing provides you with an overview of the city, including population, nearby airports, attractions and other cities people searched for. All of these different attributes reflect Bing’s understanding of peoples’ intent when conducting queries about this specific type of entity versus another.
Questions & Answers:For searches about movies, celebrities or places, Bing now lets you ask a question the way you would ask a friend and gives you the answer right away. So, by incorporating conversational understanding, Bing quickly shows the answer to your question along with additional facts. For example, “what is the highest mountain in the world,” or “the tallest building in the world", or "who played Morpheus in The Matrix", Bing will show the most pertinent information about the Mt. Everest, Burj Khalifa in Dubai and Lawrence Fishburne.

Together, these updates provide you with a greater level of understanding about the world we all live in, which we hope will make Bing more useful to your everyday life. This is a long journey, and we expect to deliver a number of additional improvements in the weeks and months ahead.

Thank you.

- Dr. Richard Qian, Bing Index Team

Photosynth for Windows Phone 8 is Here!

The Bing Team — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 17:30:00 GMT

We're pleased to announce that Photosynth, the acclaimed mobile panorama app, is now available on Windows Phone 8. Get Photosynth for free from the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Screenshot from a panorama captured via Photosynth on Windows Phone of a high camp on Mt Baker, WA. See the full pano here.

Sometimes a single photo - even a wide angle photo - doesn't do a location justice. Whether it's the view off a cliff, or inside an incredible cathedral, we've all been to places that cry out for a full 360 degree panorama. Photosynth is the only Windows Phone app that can stitch a full sphere. That's 360 degrees horizontally and vertically.

Photosynth for Windows Phone feels like magic. Start it up, move the camera around, and watch your panorama fill in. Move it in a 360 degree arc and watch the app join it up. Capture the floor and ceiling too. When you're done the shots are automatically stitched together, and the results are beautiful and immersive.

Next, you can publish your panorama to the Photosynth site and Bing Maps, or you can share it via Facebook and Twitter.

New features for Windows Phone 8 include:

Camera lens integration – Quickly capture and view panoramas by launching Photosynth directly from the built-in camera app
View shared panoramas – View panoramas shared with you via email, Facebook, or Twitter directly on your mobile device
More camera controls – Adjust for various lighting conditions by using new exposure and white balance locking options
General improvements – Enjoy an even more delightful app experience with various bug and stability fixes

Photosynth has always been a collaboration between research and engineering, and this app continues the tradition by including core stitching and blending algorithms developed by Microsoft Research, and available on the desktop in the form of the Microsoft Research Image Composite Editor.

If you have a Windows Phone, go to the Windows Phone Marketplace and install it now*.

Give it a try and let us know what you think with a comment here, in the Photosynth forums, in an email to photosynth@live.com, or tweet us @photosynth.

- Javier Delgado, Senior Program Manager, Augmented Reality Team, Microsoft

* Note: Photosynth requires significant memory for stitching, and is only available for Windows Phone devices with at least 512MB of RAM. Some features are only available on Windows Phone 8 devices.

Take the Bing It On Challenge!

Bing Search Blog — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 13:45:00 GMT

Since we launched Bing we’ve been hard at work to deliver relevant, useful search results that help you go from searching to doing. Awhile ago, we began to notice an interesting trend in our internal testing – for the first time our testing showed that Bing’s web search results were better than Google’s. We continued testing our results in several different ways as part of our regular work to improve our quality, and along the way an interesting pattern emerged – Bing was regularly beating Google in web search results quality. Click here if you’d like to learn more about how we made Bing better.

So, we asked an independent research company to do a statistically significant similar challenge test and our findings were confirmed – people preferred Bing web search results nearly 2:1 over Google in blind comparison tests.* Since relevancy of search results is the #1 driver of search engine preference, the time is right for a wake-up call for searchers - better web search results are available at Bing.com. You can find out more about this independent research here.

Today, we’re asking people to click and choose which web search results they prefer via a fun, non-scientific blind comparison test called Bing It On. Our mission is to show people it’s time to break the “Google habit” and that Bing has reached a quality level that will make it easy to switch. You can try it for yourself at BingItOn.com.

How Does It Work?

The Bing It On Challenge is an online tool that makes it easy for you to compare Bing and Google’s web search results. The challenge is simple – within the tool you search for five search queries of your choice and compare unbranded web search results from Bing and Google side-by-side. For each search result, you choose a winner, or declare it a “draw”. After you complete your five search queries and vote for each one, we show you the final score. You can then share the Bing It On Challenge with others via Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.

The Campaign

To get the word out, we’re launching a nationwide campaign to encourage searchers to give Bing a chance. You’ll see a new TV ad tomorrow during the MTV Video Music Awards. The ads will appear on TV and online over the coming months. To create the new ads, we filmed people in San Francisco taking the Bing It On Challenge. Our man-on-the-street interviews and in-person challenges reinforced the independent research yet again. No one seemed more surprised by the outcome than the people taking the Challenge – but seeing is believing. Check out how it went down here.

You’ll also see the Bing It On Challenge prominently featured in Microsoft Stores nationwide and via pop-up Bing It On Challenge stations over the coming months. You can follow along on the Bing Facebook page or at #bingiton.

Today we’re also launching the Bing It On sweepstakes, giving people a chance to win a big box of awesome Microsoft prizes, including a Surface, Windows 8, Xbox 360 with Kinect and Xbox Live, Windows Phone and more, simply by tweeting. The sweepstakes will run until October 18. Click here for more details on how to participate, as well as complete rules and regulations.

What’s Next?

After you take the Bing It On Challenge, we hope you will become a frequent searcher on Bing. It’s time to break the Google habit – you deserve more from your search engine. Not only are our web search results better than Google’s, we also offer a rich search offering that brings together great search results with friends who know about the topics you’re searching for. Our social search features allow you to search with advice and input from friends and experts, providing a new take on search. Now is the time to spend less time searching and more time doing. If you want the best web search results and a new, more useful way to search with your friends, try Bing today.

- Mike Nichols,Corporate Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Bing

*Based on a comparison of web search results pane only; excludes ads, Bing’s Snapshot and Social Search panes and Google’s Knowledge Graph. Learn more at bingiton.com.

Search Quality Insights: Behind the Bing It On Challenge

Bing Search Blog — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 13:46:00 GMT

As I mentioned in my original post there has never been a more exciting or challenging time to be in the search space. The core to a great search engine has been and will always remain the same: delivering relevant, comprehensive and unbiased results that people can trust. We use thousands of signals from queries to documents and user feedback to determine the best search results and in turn make hundreds of improvements to our features every year, from small tweaks to core algorithm updates. In this series, you have heard from our Chief Scientist Dr. Jan Pedersen who summarized our efforts on whole page relevance, and Dr. Richard Qian who covered the techniques we employ to reduce junk links. More recently, Dr. William Ramsey described how we reduce defects in links and related searches and Dr. Kieran McDonald’s post examined answers quality utilizing specialized classifiers.

These are just a few examples of the myriad algorithm changes that we’ve developed to enhance Bing over the years. With all of these changes we’ve made some great progress in Bing search quality for our customers. You will notice we have released a fun, non-scientific tool for customers to see for themselves how far we’ve come. And while we know we still have lots of work to do, we think it’s long past time in our industry for a conversation on search quality. This conversation is what we hope to start with the Bing It On Challenge, and continue in the future to make sure we are delivering the quality experiences our customers deserve.

In this post I hope to give you a sense of what Bing’s journey has been like over the past couple of years in terms of our efforts to rapidly improve our search quality against a tough competitor.

How did we get here?

There isn’t a single answer to that question as there wasn’t just one silver bullet. We realized early on that experimentation is the key to improving relevance. We don’t know which feature ideas and techniques work until we actually try them out, and many ideas end up failing. So in order to have enough good ideas that succeed, we needed to build an experimentation funnel that enabled us to try out lots and lots of ideas to begin with. This was made more challenging by the fact that as a relatively new entrant to the search space, we had less traffic which made learning and experimentation harder.

So we invested in building a sophisticated experimentation system in the cloud which made it very easy for our engineers to try out new relevance techniques and train new machine learning models. This increased experimentation capacity allowed our engineers to submit hundreds of experiments in parallel and try out their ideas. This was a key breakthrough in scaling out relevance experimentation and enabling a large number of people on the team to effectively contribute in improving relevance and quality.

As experimentation volumes increased, we also realized that anything we could do to speed up this inner loop of experimentation would have a huge multiplier effect on how many more experiments we could run, and how quickly we could learn and implement new features to improve Bing’s quality.

Relevance experimentation at Bing involves training machine-learned models on large amount of training data using thousands of features. In the early years, our models were based on neural networks. But as the amount of training data, number of features and the complexity of our models increased, the inner loop of experimentation slowed down significantly. At one point, it took us several days to finish just one experiment end-to-end. We knew we needed to do something.

To overcome this challenge, we turned to our deep partnership with MSR to develop a technology we call Fastrank. FastRank is based on boosted decision trees which are much faster to train and thus attractive for relevance experimentation.. But there was skepticism on whether the quality of ranking produced by decision trees could match that of neural networks. Our colleagues at MSR took on this hard problem and developed new optimization algorithms that allowed us to not only match the quality of neural nets, but also train more than an order of magnitude faster.

This allowed us to once again make our inner experimentation loop fast, and really accelerate our pace of learning and improving ranking. In the end, our relevance improvements have come from trying out tens of thousands of ideas over the years, and shipping hundreds of those that have been successful.

Conventional Wisdom

When we previewed our side-by-side test results with people outside the company, I was often asked how we were able to make these gains with presumably less data than the other guys. While there are too many variables to give a fully scientific explanation, I would say our long-term commitment and investment in machine learning for relevance has enabled us to steadily scale out relevance experimentation and make rapid progress.

Of course, as we all know, relevance is subjective and queries are dynamic and always changing. But we feel confident that it’s time for customers to come give us a look, and for a conversation on searching quality to occur in our industry. This is why we’re inviting customers to try the Bing It On Challenge so that you have a fun way to compare side-by-side and come to your own conclusion. I encourage you to try it now at www.bing.com .

As always, we want to hear from you so please join the conversation.

On behalf of the Bing team

- Dr. Harry Shum, Corporate Vice President, Bing R&D

Tag Your Friends When Searching on Bing

The Bing Team — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 18:00:00 GMT

Last month, we introduced the new Bing with a social sidebar that lets you ask friends for ideas and recommendations as you search.Now you can involve even more of your Facebook friends by typing their name and tagging them when sharing a search. This allows you to effortlessly tap into the collective wisdom of your social network, and get input from your friends who are in the know.

Have a friend who’s a travel guru and can help you plan a summer vacation? A foodie who can lend some suggestions for your next backyard barbecue? Or maybe you’re searching for great hiking trails and want your friends to tag along.

When searching on Bing, simply enter a question or comment in the sidebar and type the name of a friend on Facebook to tag him or her (you can tag up to five friends at a time).

With your permission, the question will post on your Facebook timeline, and your tagged friends will be notified so that they can pitch in and help you find what you’re looking for. Remember - you are always in control of what you share through the sidebar.

Try it out at www.bing.com, and connect with Facebook to discover more through your friends while searching. To see it in action, check out Stefan's video:

- Kim Vlcek, Program Manager, Bing Social Team

Social Meets Search with the Latest Version of Bing, Available to Everyone in US Today

The Bing Team — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:01:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, we introduced you to the most significant update to Bing since our launch three years ago, combining the best of search with relevant people from your social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. After the positive response to the preview, the new version of Bing is available today in the US at www.bing.com. You can now access Bing’s new three column design , including the snapshot feature and social features.

According to a recent internal survey, nearly 75 % of people spend more time than they would like searching for information online. With Bing’s new design, you can access information from the Web including friends you do know and relevant experts that you may not know letting you spend less time searching and more time doing.

Today, we’re also unveiling a new advertising campaign to support the introduction of search plus social and announcing the Bing Summer of Doing, in celebration of the new features and designed to inspire people to do amazing things this summer.

New Bing Helps Search Go Social

Most things in life are better with people you trust; in fact, more than 90 percent of people reported they are likely to seek the advice of friends and family as part of their decision-making process around events, purchases, travel, and said they will even delay a decision to first get input from family and friends. We designed the new social features in Bing to make it easy to exchange ideas, share opinions and take action, giving searchers the same confidence they get from bouncing an idea off a friend. With Bing, it’s easier than ever to get that input and go from searching to doing.

Whether it’s making a purchase, choosing a restaurant or deciding what movie to see, our new Bing design offers unique ways to bring friends and experts right into the search experience. These social results complement the standard search results without compromising them, offering you the chance to start a conversation and get advice from your friends, experts and enthusiasts right within the search experience. We now show you which friends have liked or might know about content related to your query and will identify experts and enthusiasts that can provide recommendations on the topic of interest. You can also post a question and get help from your Facebook friends while you search, friends can easily see and reply to your questions on Facebook or Bing, and you can follow the activity feed to see your friends’ queries and posts in real time, never missing a beat.

Available for the first time today, we designed a new center column, called snapshot, which makes it easy to get things done in one place. It includes information, such as maps and reviews, and quick ways to take action, so booking a restaurant reservation or checking hotel rates are now quicker and easier. The snapshot feature offers restaurant reservations, hotel reviews, movie trailers and show times, maps, and more right within the search experience; giving you everything you need to take action in one place and eliminating the need to visit multiple sites to complete tasks.

New Bing Marketing Campaign

Today we are also excited to unveil a new advertising campaign, highlighting the new social features and showcasing how Bing helps you spend less time searching and more time doing. The new ads will appear on television, including the MTV Movie Awards and the Mad Men season finale and online on sites like Hulu and Spotify. The campaign will feature Bing’s ability to transform ordinary searches – planning a trip, making a dinner reservation, deciding on a movie and organizing a wedding by combining the best of search and social networks.

To celebrate the new search experience and inspire people to take action in their communities, we are launching a summer-long effort within the marketing campaign, the Bing Summer of Doing. Over the summer, we will introduce an extensive social media campaign featuring daily searches designed to inspire doing while rewarding searchers with cool prizes. As part of the Bing Summer of Doing, today, we are joining forces with DoSomething.org, the largest U.S. organization for teens and social change, to inspire people to give back to their communities. The campaign kicks off today in Los Angeles at Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA), with additional community volunteer events planned throughout the summer in cities across the nation, including Atlanta, New York and Chicago.

Today at HOLA, which provides thousands of underserved and at-risk youth with exceptional free after-school programs in academics, arts and athletics, we will work alongside volunteers and celebrities to beautify and renovate the community center. The day of service will conclude with an unveiling for HOLA students and a celebratory pizza party and surprise performance by Cody Simpson in the Lafayette Park Recreation Center.

A national daily challenge called “The Hunt, 11 Days of Doing,” which is designed to drive action, will be hosted online by DoSomething.org later this summer. The Hunt will inspire teens to participate in 11 days of challenges to create positive community impact. Beginning July 10, teens will be presented with a new series of challenges each day, focused on a specific cause. Teams will work together to complete the challenges and report back to show how they were able to create measurable impact in their community, all while collecting points to win prizes.

We encourage you to Bing.com and try our new search experience today. Let us know what you think.

- The Bing Team

Introducing the New Bing: Spend Less Time Searching, More Time Doing

The Bing Team — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:00:00 GMT

In 2009, we launched Bing with a simple proposition: people should expect more from a search engine.

Our aim has always been to help you do more with search, and over the past three years we have made exciting strides to realize that vision. Today we are taking a big step forward as we begin rolling out what is the most significant update to Bing since we launched three years ago. Over the coming weeks, we will be introducing a brand new way to search designed to help you take action and interact with friends and experts without compromising the core search experience.

First a little background. The search industry was built on keywords, links and labels – static nouns pointing to pages. This approach is great for finding sites but search is about more than simply finding information, it’s also about taking action. Whether it’s booking a flight, reading an article or buying a new pair of shoes, 68% of people tell us they expect to get something done when they type into a search box.

Now it’s possible to do more than find pages with search. You are able to share nearly everything you do, including where you are and who you are, in real-time. From rich multimedia content to real-time streams to social conversations to applications that let you take action in the real world, digital connections are created that present the opportunity to do something. This presents an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how search should work. Suddenly an index of documents that does not embrace these changes is insufficient.

At the same time, research tells us that 90% of people consult with a friend or expert before making a decision –whether it’s something as simple as which train will take you uptown or who is the best dentist in Boulder, other people are often the most trusted source of information. We value input from our friends and opinions from experts but at the same time want comprehensive, relevant and unbiased results. Recent attempts at social search haven’t unlocked the full potential of tapping our social networks. And the reason is pretty simple - social in search hasn’t mirrored how people do things in real life.

The fact is, search hasn’t kept pace. People have become as important as pages and search needs to evolve to embrace these changes. The challenge has been to figure out how to integrate the information you care about with the people who can be most helpful to you in getting stuff done.

Welcome to the New Bing

The new Bing introduces a brand new information architecture with a three column design that focuses on bringing you information from the web to help you take action and interact with friends and experts without compromising the core search experience.

Let’s take a closer look:

Core Web Results: Relevant, comprehensive and trustworthy.

The bedrock of modern search remains core algorithmic relevance. With the latest updates, we are delivering the results you expect. Beautiful, relevant, results are the first thing you see. Instead of cluttering your results with social updates, we’re honoring the purity of the core web results making it easier to focus on the links you need to get things done.

From the outset, we knew that serving relevant results that were equal to or better than the other guy was table stakes. To track our progress, we conducted tests thatremoved any trace of Google and Bing branding. When we did this study in January of last year 34% people preferred Bing, while 38% preferred Google. The same unbranded study now shows that Bing Search results now have a much wider lead over Google’s. When shown unbranded search results 43% prefer Bing results while only 28% prefer Google results. What this means is that in 3 years we’ve made some real progress in core relevance and search quality, and while search is becoming so much more than just web results, having a rock solid foundation is important for the future of Bing and search more generally.

Snapshot: Get it done faster.

Snapshot is the center column on the Bing search results page, nestled between the web results on the left and the new sidebar on the right. Snapshot brings relevant information and services related to your search to you right on the main results page including maps, restaurant reservations and reviews so you can take action. We’ve run thousands of experiments to determine the types of tasks most frequently attempted in Bing, and in snapshot we help you take certain actions when we determine that the intent of your search matches these tasks. To help you do more and do it faster, we continue working with industry leading companies like OpenTable, FanSnap and others integrating them right into the middle collumn. With snapshot, Bing does the heavy lifting by organizing useful information so you can act more quickly.

Sidebar: Social search done right.

Getting things done often involves others, in fact 90% of those asked said they prefer to listen to their friends when making decisions. Whether it’s making a purchase, deciding on a vacation destination, choosing a great restaurant, or figuring out which movie to see this weekend, the new Bing focuses on bringing friends, experts and enthusiasts into your search experience through a dedicated social “sidebar.” With sidebar, Bing brings together the best of the web, with what experts and your friends know, giving you the confidence to act. This new way to search lets people share, discover, and interact with friends like they do in real life.

Always present, never intrusive. The sidebar will appear as part of every query, but it will remain off to the right, allowing searchers to decide when and how to interact with it. We’ve moved most of the social content out of the main search pane and put it in a dedicated place where people can always expect to find it.
Ask Friends: You can post a question to get help from your Facebook friends as you search. You can “tag” friends Bing suggests might know about the topic. In a few simple clicks you can share your search and your friends can reply to your question on either Facebook or Bing.

Friends Who Might Know: Once you authorize Bing, sidebar helps you post a question to get help from your Facebook friends as you search. Bing suggests friends on Facebook who might know about the topic – based on what they “like”, their Facebook profile information, or photos they have shared – so you can easily ask them about relevant experiences and opinions and go quickly from searching to doing. For example, if you’re searching for diving spots in Costa Rica, with the new Bing, you may discover that one of your Facebook friends knows a great spot, based on photos from their last trip to Costa Rica that they shared on Facebook. Or you might find a friend who lives in Costa Rica based on his or her Facebook profile. You and your friends can only see information you could already see about each other on Facebook.
People Who Know: Beyond friends, Bing can help you find people who are influential about the topic you’re searching, based on what they’ve publically blogged or tweeted about. In a glance you will see top experts and enthusiasts from leading networks like Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Blogger to quickly check out what they have to say about the topic you’re searching for. You can follow them, ask them a question or see what they have shared in the past.
Activity feed. From the activity feed in the sidebar, you can see, posts and queries you and your friends have chosen to share from Bing. You can help answer friends’ questions, “like” something interesting they have shared. Because these activities show up in both Bing (activity feed) and Facebook, you can comment on them from either place.

Check out this video to see the new Bing in action:

In the coming weeks, you will be able to experience the new Bing on mobile devices (m.bing.com.) We’ve optimized the layout and placement of the social results on the mobile device for smaller screen sizes and for touch input optimized for people on the go.

Finally, we have implemented technologies that provide relevant results while maximizing protection for your data and your privacy. When using Bing and signed into Facebook, Bing will only surface content your friends could access by viewing your Facebook profile directly.

In the coming days we will be releasing this to users in the United States. If you would like to be one of the first people to experience the new Bing, visit www.bing.com/new, to receive an email notification when it’s available. To read more about this release from the people who built it, check out this article on Microsoft Newscenter.

- Derrick Connell, Corporate Vice President, Bing and Dr. Harry Shum, Corporate Vice President, Bing R&D

Bing Search Quality Insights: Reducing Junk

The Bing Team — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 22:00:00 GMT

Everyone has experienced trying to follow a link that didn’t work. The link may have led to a page that is no longer available, or to a parked domain page. It can also be frustrating to find a search result page that has a missing or garbled description of where the link may take you. Considering the enormity of the web and the complexity of linking web documents , a key challenge for web search quality is the search engine’s ability to process, select and serve only good links with helpful descriptions. In this blog my colleague Richard Qian, Development Manager for Bing, provides an overview of our efforts to reduce junk links and junky or empty snippets.

- Dr. Harry Shum, Corporate Vice President, Bing R&D

To help clarify a few terms which we use in this blog, the following screenshot shows a typical search result with three common components: 1) title with a hyperlink. When we say links, we refer to this; 2) snippet is the description of the search result and 3) URL shows the address of the result page.

Removing Junk Links

In search there’s perhaps nothing worse than clicking a search result only to get an error message in return. Or being taken to a page that tells you the page you were trying to open can no longer be found. Equally annoying is when you end up on a page for a domain that was just registered and is plastered with ads without any useful content. These are different types of junk links that we refer to as dead links, soft 404s, and parked domains. Let's explore how Bing detects and removes these sites from the search results.

Dead Links

A dead link is when a 4xx or 5xx error code is returned from an HTTP request for a page. E.g., 404 for a page that could not be found on the site it is hosted on; 500 indicating an internal server error, etc. A user following a link that returns such a code will see an error message instead of useful content. Until we crawl these pages again and discover they are missing, we may still serve them in our search results. In general we want to remove all dead links from our search results as quickly as possible. However we observed many such issues were only transient and some pages came back alive after a short while. The classifiers that solve this problem help us decide whether a page is just temporarily experiencing an issue or if it has truly been deleted. If we think there is some suspicion about the page in question we may boost its re-crawl priority and frequency to help us make a determination as quickly as possible. There is an important tradeoff we make here between aggressively removing dead links and the relevance of our search results. We aim to minimize the number of dead links in our search results without removing content that may experience temporary issues but may be useful to our users.

Soft 404

A soft 404 is like a hard 404 where the page was deleted from the site it is hosted on. But in this case the server still returns a normal HTTP 200 code with a webpage reporting that the original page you were trying to reach no longer exists. Here we must rely on our ability to understand the page content to know whether it is a soft 404 or not. Our high precision classifiers in this area use page content such as key phrases in the page’s title, body and URL to determine if the page is a soft 404 and whether to remove it from the search results. E.g., for the query {Five Guys Burgers and Fries history}, here are Bing’s top results before and after we applied our soft 404 classifiers:

Before
After

Parked Domains

Parked domains refer to web sites that have placeholder content after a new domain registration. Usually these pages show ads to try to monetize traffic to the domain before it has been properly setup by the new site owner. Here is an example:

Parked domains usually share similar page content, page layout, or other identifiable patterns. Like the techniques used to identify soft 404s, we look at the patterns in page content to determine if a page is a parked domain. By collaboratively mining many different types of pages against our large index of web data we are able to create signatures that allow us to identify parked domains when we see them and to remove them from our search results.

Reducing Junky and Empty Snippets

The user experience would be poor when the snippet of a search result contains a garbled description or when the description is missing altogether. There are various reasons that may cause junky snippets including incorrectly encoded meta description, incorrect encoding handling, HTML parsing errors, and failed document conversion. There are multiple causes for empty snippets as well, e.g., the web page contains only dynamic content and the search engine’s crawler failed to get it; the web page is just a picture; the target document is in a non-HTML format and the document convertor failed to extract text from it, and the existence of a ‘noindex’ meta tag, just to name a few.

Junky Snippets

Bing uses the standard UTF-8 encoding in our internal document processing stack and recommends that site owners use UTF-8 to minimize any potential conversion issues that result in junky snippets. We do support other encoding formats and do so by employing a learnt classifier to detect the encoding of an input page and then convert it to UTF-8. We also trained a classifier to catch unreadable or garbage text. In addition Bing identifies HTML, XML, JavaScript and other markups using a comprehensive parser and we continue to improve its robustness in handling various types of pages and corner cases.

The improved coverage and precision of our encoding classifier, document convertor, garbage detector, and HTML parser have reduced the occurrence of junky snippets in Bing’s search results. Here is an example showing the improvement on a junky snippet for the query {Yimin Xiao}:

Before
After

Empty Snippets

Many websites today make heavy use of client-side technologies like AJAX and Flash to provide rich and dynamic user experiences. Using traditional crawling and indexing techniques in these situations could leave us without useful content for ranking and snippet generation. Bing embraces the richness of the web with our dynamic crawlers and document processors that render and index dynamically generated pages. We also utilize a number of classifiers to determine whether a page is a plain static page or needs to be dynamically rendered. The majority of the web is made up of HTML but there are also valuable documents existing in other formats such as PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc. Bing developed an in-house document convertor to translate these documents into HTML which can then be used for ranking and snippet generation. We also have trained classifiers to identify titles and other text fragment types from the converted documents.

Here are a couple of examples showing before and after we applied our various techniques to reduce empty snippets:

Before
After

Before
After

Thank you for reading this blog. We’d love to hear your feedback and your experience of using Bing especially in the areas which we discussed here. At Bing we are committed to continue improving our search quality and earn your satisfaction. We will cover other feature areas in future blogs.

- Dr. Richard Qian, Partner Development Manager, Core Search, Bing R&D

Bing Search Quality Insights: Whole Page Relevance

The Bing Team — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Dr. Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist for Core Search at Bing

If you compared the results you see with Bing today with those of our search product five years ago, at first glance they might seem similar - ten blue links presented with text summaries. However, if you look closer you would see some important differences. The first thing you would notice is that many of the queries you perform today produce excellent results that would have simply not been possible five years ago. This is a tribute to the continued growth and evolution of the Web coupled with our unceasing focus on core search quality. Second, you would notice that the overall experience is much richer. Bing’s search results today are no longer just web pages; we include videos, images, maps, news items and other media objects, which we call answers.

Moreover, some results take up more screen real estate than others, making it easier for you to see the content that will help you get things done quickly. For example, the query [bing] returns a first result of Bing.com that is larger than usual with vertically arrayed deep links and other quick access links beneath it. This is what we call an Answer and makes sense because for a navigational query like this the vast majority of people are trying to find Bing the search engine and are only interested in the first result. Since we recently made an announcement there is also a news answer inserted after the first web page (bing.com) but before the second web page (wikipedia.org).

The richness of the results page leads to a number of interesting, and novel, search quality questions. Under what conditions are you better served by an answer versus a traditional link to a web page? How do we rationalize making a result more prominent if it makes other results harder to find? At Bing we refer to these optimization problems as Whole Page Relevance and we have developed a number of interesting methodologies to address some of the larger issues. To illustrate the point let me describe a bit about the Bing technology for blending together blocks of content, Web pages and answers, into a single result set, which we call Answer Ranking.

As with any relevance problem we start with the question of how to measure if Bing has done a good job. We could do this by simply asking human judges to compare the output of competing blending algorithms and assess which is better. This turns out to be a difficult judgment task that produces quite noisy and unreliable results. Instead we look at how people behave on Bing in the real world. Based on how they respond to changes we make an assumption that a better blending algorithm will move people’s clicks towards the top of the page. This turns out to be the same as saying that a block of content, or answer, is well placed if it receives at least as many clicks as the equivalently sized block of content below it --- or, as we say internally, if its win rate is greater than 0.5. So a good blending algorithm will promote an answer on the page upward as long as its win rate is greater than 0.5. Armed with this metric, we can run online experiments and compare the results of competing blending algorithms giving us a realistic data set.

Next we investigate the available inputs into an online blending function that improves this metric. We can, and do, use historical anonymous click data, but this is not sufficient because it does not generalize to rare queries, or to new content with no history. So, we add in three kinds of additional inputs: confidence scores from the answer provider, query characterizations, and features extracted from other answers and web pages that will be shown on the page. For example, to learn where to place an image answer in the search results for a given query, we consider the confidence score returned from the image search provider, the ranking scores of nearby Web pages, and whether the query is marked as referring to the sort of entities that are well described by images (people, places, etc.). Currently we use over one thousand signals in our production blending functions.

Finally, we consider the offline and online infrastructure that will be used to create and run a blending function. We use a very robust, but high-performance learning method, called boosted regression trees, to automatically produce a ranking function given training data. This allows us to use many signals with the confidence that each additional signal will incrementally improve our blending function. Our training sets are fairly large, since they are mined from our billions of anonymous query session logs, so we use our large-scale data mining infrastructure, called Cosmos, to prepare the data and run offline experiments. Once a new blending function has been generated by our offline learning method, it is deployed to a serving component internally called APlus that puts all that data into action and runs after all candidate content blocks that have been generated, where it can be tested via online experimentation and finally placed into production.

The net effect of all this is that from training data we can generate a blending function that can look at all the available content in response to a user query making a final placement decision that attempts to move clicks as high up on the page as possible. In other words, we can deliver a rich set of results that are statistically more likely to get you what you’re looking for- whether it’s a link, a video, a news item, a map or snippet of information.

This methodology has been very successful at improving overall whole page relevance while still being adaptable to new sorts of answers. Over the last two years we have significantly improved the aggregate win rate and currently we deploy and maintain dozens of machine learned blending functions specialized to different answer types.

Most recently we have focused on new inputs that can improve our ability to place temporally relevant answers. For example, the news answer is designed for speed and timeliness. Our aim is for the answer to update as quickly as possible when a news story breaks then decline in prominence as the news cycle for the story winds down. We achieve this by taking in more inputs from news providers and focusing our training data to capture temporal relevance events. For example, a few months ago, our production blending function at the time (on the left below) placed news at the bottom of the page for the query [angelina jolie], while our temporally tuned blending function (on the right below) placed such news at the top of the page, which was appropriate at that time.

As the Web continues to evolve with new forms of rich media and data our approach to whole page relevance will evolve along with it. It’s interesting to imagine what Bing will look like in five years from now.

With that, we’ll just ask you to stay tuned and join us in this dialog about search quality at Bing.

- Jan Pedersen

Introducing Bing Search Quality Insights

The Bing Team — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Dr. Harry Shum, Corporate Vice President, Bing R&D

I’ve been working in search at Microsoft for the last seven years and there has never been a more fascinating or challenging time to be in the search space. Today, search spans the entire spectrum of computer science from distributed systems and machine learning to natural language understanding and user experience design. The graph theory we learned in graduate school 20 years ago with a few dozen nodes and edges needs to be extended to cope with the web graph of billions of documents. There’s more web data created in a single day than in the entirety of 1999. Moreover, the types of data crawled by search engines are evolving in astonishing ways. What started as indexing simple web documents has blossomed into a dizzying array of data types – from rich multimedia content to real-time streams to social conversations, just to name a few.

In June 2009, we launched Bing (www.bing.com) with the aspiration of building a search engine that better understands what people have in their mind while searching so that we can help them get their tasks accomplished faster and more easily. The core to a great search engine has been and will always remain the same: delivering comprehensive, relevant and unbiased results that people can trust. We use thousands of signals from queries to documents and user feedback to determine the best search results and in turn make hundreds of improvements to our features every year, from small tweaks to core algorithm updates. As the web grows, we continue to take advantage of the collective wisdom from social, real-time, geospatial and contextual signals to further improve the search quality of Bing.

Over the last two and half years we have made tremendous progress in Bing search quality, measured scientifically by offline human judges and online user engagement. We have employed human judges to rate and compare search results from different algorithms. We also flight new approaches to a selected number of users to get online user feedback before rolling out new improvements. Search quality goes beyond scientific numbers such as DCG, nDCG, side-by-side, pSkip, however. The users often perceive the search quality by how fast the search results show up in a search engine, or how helpful it is to formulate the query e.g. auto-suggestion or type-ahead, or how easy it is to inform the clicks e.g. better snippets for the web documents. There is always so much more that users expect from search quality than what we understand and present.

With that in mind, today we are launching a new blog series we’re calling “Bing Search Quality Insights” aimed at giving you deeper insight into the algorithms, trends and people behind Bing. This blog is the first in a series that will take you behind the search box for an up close view into the core of the Bing search engine. Quality improvements in Bing are often subtle but often those little changes are the result of years of research. In the coming weeks and months, you will hear from members of my team on a range of topics, from the complexities of social search and disambiguating spelling errors to whole page relevance and making search more personal. We will also highlight the ideas and projects we have collaborated with colleagues from Microsoft Research and academia to advance the state of the art for our industry. We hope this will not only be useful information for our blog readers, but that they will spark conversations that help us all move the search industry forward.

Today, my colleague Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist for Core Search at Bing kicks off the discussion with an overview of how we’re tackling the topic of whole page relevance at Bing. Jan delves into how we go beyond the traditional concept of page rank to deliver rich “answers” like video, images and maps that are relevant and help you get more done.

We would love to hear from you about what you would like to see covered so please join the conversation.

On behalf of the Bing team,

Harry Shum

Bing at Sundance: See What’s Happening at Sundance 2012

The Bing Team — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:20:00 GMT

Sundance 2012 is in full tilt at the Bing Bar. From amazing live performances from the likes of Drake, Jason Mraz, Grouplove and Cobra Starship to candid interviews with stars like Aziz Ansari, Kristen Bell, Paul Simon, Neil Young and Quincy Jones, we have captured all the action.

Check out a few videos below, visit www.bingsundance.com for all of the interviews and check out www.facebook.com/bing for livestreams of events as they happen.

- The Bing Team

Out with the Old, In with the New: Bing Takes Stock of 2011 and The Year Ahead

The Bing Team — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, we shared the top Bing searches for 2011 which captured a snapshot of the year’s most important people, places and moments in time.

With 2011 wrapping up and the New Year around the bend, we fielded a survey of over 1,000 U.S. adults on how they felt about 2011 and how they plan to ring in 2012. From resolutions to New Year’s Eve celebration plans, here’s what they had to say:

2011

This was a year of ups and downs. According to our survey, 65 percent of 18-24 year olds were positive about 2011 and are hoping for much of the same in the New Year.
However, 45-54 year olds were slightly less optimistic – 76 percent said that it was a hard year and they’re hoping 2012 will be better. Regardless of your attitude, make 2012 the year for you. Whether you’re job-hunting, planning a move or making room for another family member, Bing.com will help you navigate the year ahead.

RESOLUTION

Losing weight is the top New Year’s resolution for both men and women (35 and 47 percent, respectively), while 32 percent of respondents noted that they don’t plan to make a New Year’s resolution at all! From mapping out a new jogging route to finding the latest exercise equipment or healthy recipes, easily find inspiration for all your weight-loss needs on Bing.

NEW YEARS EVE CELEBRATION

· While city lights and urban glamor are synonymous with New Year’s Eve, 44 percent of respondents indicated that they would most like to spend the holiday at the beach, in the mountains, or somewhere away from the crowds this year. If you want to get away, use Bing Travel to find the hottest New Year’s Eve deals.

2012 WISHLIST

Be prepared to see quite a few tablet computers floating around in the New Year – 34 percent of respondents indicated it’s the number one piece of technology they would like to buy in 2012, followed by a 3-D Television (24 percent). For all your technology shopping needs, check out Bing.com/shopping for deals, reviews and the latest in must have gadgets.

CELEBRITIES

·When asked which celebrity they would like to spend New Year’s Eve with 35 percent of people said Sandra Bullock, while Katy Perry ranked second with 14 percent, and Prince Harry came in third (12 percent).
George Clooney’s classic style will be guiding New Year’s Eve fashion choices for 46 percent of men this year, while the ladies will be modeling their choices after Pippa Middleton (33 percent).
Three of Hollywood’s leading ladies are the epitome of health and fitness, inspiring many to strive for the same. According to the survey, respondents plan to mirror their New Year’s resolution diet plans after Jennifer Lopez (26 percent), Gwyneth Paltrow (23 percent) and Jennifer Hudson (20 percent). And it’s no surprise that Jennifer Hudson made the list, as Weight Watchers – Hudson’s current role as celebrity spokesperson – took the crown for most searched diet plan on Bing in 2011.
Watching your favorite artist perform on December 31st is a great way to celebrate the New Year. When asked who they would most like to see, 20 percent of people said Carrie Underwood. Others top acts included Adele and Tony Bennett who tied for second place with 16 percent.
The eponymous holiday movie “New Year’s Eve” features an exhaustive list of stars celebrating the year-end holiday, but Katherine Heigl stands out as the one people would most like to party with this year (26 percent), followed closely by Sarah Jessica Parker (25 percent) and Ashton Kutcher (20 percent).

Happy New Year!

- Kari Dilloo, Bing

Bing on Xbox: The Future of Entertainment Search

The Bing Team — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 05:01:00 GMT

Imagine a world where hunting for the lost remote control or endlessly scrolling through a scheduling guide becomes a thing of the past.

Instead, what if the entertainment you wanted to have was simple, discoverable and exactly what you wanted at that particular moment? With the release of the new Xbox 360 experience the future of entertainment search is here. With Bing on Xbox you can sort through all of your entertainment content – including movies, games, TV shows, apps and music – with just the sound of your voice. Beginning December 6th and in the coming months, voice search with Bing on Xbox will start to roll out, enabling you to easily find the entertainment you’re looking for, across: Netflix, Hulu Plus, Comcast Xfinity on Demand, HBO Go, Zune and more across Xbox LIVE.

Bing on Xbox opens up living room entertainment the same way search engines opened up the web. When you think about the state of entertainment, there isn’t a lack of selection, the challenge is finding what you want in a timely manner. Now when you say “Xbox, Bing, Star Trek,” Bing will show you all the available options for the movies, music, games, on-demand TV and apps that match that title.

Watch as WMV

Our goal with features like Bing on Xbox is to make Bing available in convenient and intuitive ways that take advantage of the capabilities of your device. You can see this today with features like: voice search on Bing for Mobile, implicit search such as Local Scout on Windows Phone, the ability to search using your phone’s camera with Bing Vision, and touch/contextual search through the Lasso feature on the Bing for iPad. With Bing on Xbox, we are introducing a more natural way to search on the TV. And as a result, you can spend more time enjoying your entertainment, and far less time hunting for it.

Bing on Xbox voice search will initially be available in English in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. for select Zune video, Xbox LIVE Marketplace and select content partners. For those who do not have a Kinect for Xbox 360, text search, via the Xbox 360 controller, is available in Xbox LIVE markets.

For more specifics on the Xbox 360 announcement, including updates to the Xbox 360 dashboard, please check out the press release here.

You say it, Bing on Xbox finds it.

- Mike Nichols, General Manger, Bing

The Top 2011 Searches from Bing: A Year of Breakthroughs and Heartbreaks

The Bing Team — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:00:00 GMT

According to Bing searches, 2011 was the year of musical superstars, continued celebrity fascination, saving money, concern for human tragedy and new royalty. From rising stars and weddings to intense trials and natural disasters, Bing has captured history through the searches that mark the year’s most important people, places and moments in time.

Based on the aggregation of billions of search queries, the following post highlights the "most searched" of 2011:

People
News Stories
Sports Stars
Musicians
Consumer Electronics
TV Shows
Movies
Celebrity Events
Destinations
Other Interesting Searches

Most Searched Person of The Year:

Bieber fever turned out to be contagious this year, making Justin Bieber the most searched person on Bing in 2011.

Top Ten Most Searched Person In 2011 vs 2010:

Rank	2011	2010
1	Justin Bieber	Kim Kardashian
2	Kim Kardashian	Sandra Bullock
3	Jennifer Aniston	Lady Gaga
4	Lindsay Lohan	Tiger Woods
5	Jennifer Lopez	Barack Obama
6	Britney Spears	Justin Bieber
7	Katy Perry	Kate Gosselin
8	Megan Fox	Jesse James
9	Lady Gaga	Jennifer Aniston
10	Miley Cyrus	Michael Jackson

Most Notable Changes in Bing’s Most Searched Celebrity in 2011 versus 2010:

Bieber fever just got hotter: Justin Bieber moved from #6 in 2010 to #1 in 2011.
The fascination in Kim Kardashian remains strong in 2011, with her moving slightly from #1 in 2010 to #2 in 2011.
Six out of the top ten most searched people on Bing in 2010 fell out of the top ten in 2011, including Sandra Bullock, Jesse James, Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods, Barack Obama and Kate Gosselin.
New to the top ten most searched people on Bing in 2011 include Katy Perry, Jennifer Lopez, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Megan Fox, and Miley Cyrus.
Unfortunate news for Barack Obama heading into an election year, the President fell from #5 in 2010 to #49 in 2011.
Team Aniston is on an upswing, with Jennifer Aniston moving from #9 in 2010 to #3 in 2011, while Angelina Jolie fell from #17 in 2010 to #26 in 2011.
Dating the Biebs has its benefits…Selena Gomez went from #50 in 2010 to #11 in 2011.
Fueled by eight #1 hits for Teenage Dream, Katy Perry went from #26 in 2010 to #7 in 2011.
After not even cracking the top 50 in 2010, Jennifer Lopez rocketed to the 5^th most searched person in Bing this year.
American fell in love with the Middleton sisters in 2011, with Kate coming in at #12 and Pippa at #21.

Most Searched News Stories:

The high profile trials of Casey Anthony (#1) and Conrad Murray (#7) were followed closely by Americans this year.
Of the natural disasters in the top ten list, Hurricane Irene (#1) captured the most attention, followed by Japan’s earthquake and tsunami (#4) and the Joplin tornado (#6).
Remembrances were top-of-mind this year, including the 9/11 Ten Year Anniversary and the one-year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake.

1	Casey Anthony Trial
2	Osama Bin Laden Death
3	Hurricane Irene
4	Japan Earthquake/Tsunami
5	Amy Winehouse Death
6	Joplin Tornado
7	Michael Jackson trial/Conrad Murray
8	9/11 10 Year Anniversary
9	Republican Candidates - Herman Cain, Rick Perry
10	Haiti anniversary

Most Searched Sports Stars:

Girl power! The boys got served by Maria Sharapova in sports-related queries, beating Tiger Woods by 4 percent and Brett Favre by 117 percent.
Women’s Tennis also dominated the field with Maria Sharapova, Serena Williams and Caroline Wozniacki all finishing among the top 5 most searched sports stars.
When it comes to major sports, Derek Jeter ruled the diamond, Kobe Bryant outdueled King James (Lebron) on the hardwood and a retired Brett Favre won top honors on the gridiron.

Top 5 Most searched sports stars were:

1	Maria Sharapova
2	Tiger Woods
3	Serena Williams
4	Brett Favre
5	Caroline Wozniacki
6	Kobe Bryant
7	Lebron James
8	Lamar Odom
9	Hope Solo
10	Carmelo Anthony

Most Searched Musician:

While Justin Bieber was the most searched musician on Bing in 2011, Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears are showing that old school beats new school, bringing in more searches than Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.

The Top 10 most searched musicians were:

1	Justin Bieber
2	Katy Perry
3	Jennifer Lopez
4	Britney Spears
5	Lady Gaga
6	Selena Gomez
7	Nicki Minaj
8	Rihanna
9	Beyonce
10	Taylor Swift

Most Searched Consumer Electronics:

Gadgets also captured interest this year. Xbox was the most searched consumer electronics product of the year on Bing, beating out Playstation and Wii as the favorite games console of the year.
Interestingly enough, one of the most searched consumer electronics of the year doesn't even exist yet! Speculations about the iPhone 5 came in as the fourth most searched consumer electronic device.

The Top Ten Most Searched Consumer Electronics are:

1	Xbox
2	Kindle
3	Playstation
4	iPhone 5
5	iPad
6	Wii
7	iPad 2
8	Nook
9	Windows Phone 7
10	Macbook Pro

Most Searched TV Shows:

Not only is American Idol the most searched TV show, but it ranks as the most searched reality show in 2011 as well. Heading into its 11^th season, American Idol had a strong hold on searches in 2011, beating second place winner, Dancing with the Stars(DWTS) by 43 percent.

The Top Ten Most Searched TV Shows in 2011 were:

1	American Idol
2	Dancing with the Stars
3	Glee
4	Jersey Shore
5	Family Guy
6	Chelsea Handler
7	The Young and the Restless
8	True Blood
9	Audrina
10	Big Brother

Most Searched Reality TV Shows

American Idol of course takes top honors as it is the most searched TV show overall for 2011 followed by DWTS, which also finished second overall.
Moving abroad and filming in Italy kept Jersey Shore on its strong run as the show finished third overall.

Top Ten Most Searched Reality TV Shows in 2011 were:

1	American Idol
2	Dancing with the Stars
3	Jersey Shore
4	Audrina
5	Big Brother
6	The Bachelorette
7	The Bachelor
8	The Biggest Loser
9	Survivor
10	Deadliest Catch

Most Searched Reality Stars:

The Top Ten Most Searched Reality Stars in 2011 were:

1	Kim Kardashian
2	Kate Gosselin
3	Khloe Kardashian
4	Heidi Montag
5	Kourtney Kardashian
6	Kendra Wilkinson
7	Snooki (Nicole Polizzi)
8	Kristin Cavallari
9	Audrina Patridge
10	Tori Spelling

The Kardashians can’t be stopped – Kim, Khloe and Kourtney all placed in the top 5 list for the most searched reality stars of the year on Bing!
The Hills continues to be a reality star making machine, as three cast members made the top 10: Heidi Montag at #4, Kristin Cavallari at #8 and Audrina Patridge at #9. Lauren Conrad came in at #14.
The reality star ladies rule, with 24 out of the top 25 most searched reality stars being female. The most searched male reality star was Ryan Seacrest.
Bethanny Frankel is the queen of Bravo, representing the most searched Bravo reality star of the year and the most searched present or past member of the Housewives franchise.
Camille Grammer, followed by Sonja Morgan and Jill Zarin, was the most searched member of the current Housewives cast.
Snookie was by far the most searched cast member of the Jersey Shore receiving twice as many searches as the runner-up, J-Woww and six times as many as Pauly-D.
Jennifer Lopez was far and away the most searched American Idol personality with over 13 times more searches than Ryan and Randy combined.

Most Searched Late Night TV Shows:

When it comes to late night television, Chelsea Handler is too hot to handle-, beating out all the male hosts. . Specifically, she beat second place winner David Letterman by 318 percent and third place winner Conan by over 369 percent.

In addition, David Letterman was the most searched network late night star and Team Coco beat out Jay Leno in Bing searches.

The Top Nine Most Searched Late Night Shows in 2011 were:

1	Chelsea Handler
2	David Letterman
3	Conan O’Brien
4	Jon Stewart
5	Jay Leno
6	Jimmy Fallon
7	Jimmy Kimmel
8	Stephen Colbert
9	Craig Ferguson

Most Searched Daytime Talk Shows

Aided by her role on the popular Dancing with the Stars, Wendy Williams came in as the most searched daytime talk show, beating out heavyweight Ellen DeGeneres.
The newbies were piquing people’s interest, with Anderson Cooper coming in at #3 and Rosie O’Donnell coming in at #5.

The Top Ten Most Searched Daytime Talk Shows in 2011 were:

1	Wendy Williams
2	Ellen Degeneres
3	Anderson Cooper
4	Rachael Ray
5	Rosie O’Donnell
6	Regis and Kelly
7	The View
8	Nate Berkus
9	The Talk
10	Gayle King

Most Searched Morning Shows

·The Today Show continues to reign supreme in the morning show circuit, garnering twice as many searches as Good Morning America.

The Top Searched Morning Shows in 2011 were:

1	Today Show
2	Good Morning America
3	The Early Show
4	Fox & Friends
5	Morning Joe
6	CNN American Morning

Most Searched Movies:

Tom Cruise and the Mission Impossible franchise are poised to make a comeback as the upcoming Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol edged Twilight: Breaking Dawn for the most searched movie in 2011.
Sequels reigned supreme this year, as the top 5 searched movies were all follow-ups to original stories.

The Top Ten most searched movies were:

1	Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
2	Twilight: Breaking Dawn
3	The Hangover 2
4	Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
5	Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows: Part 2
6	The Help
7	The Smurfs
8	X Men: First Class
9	Just Go With It
10	The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Most Searched Celebrity Event:

When people say a wedding is all about the bride, the rule extends to royal weddings as well! While the royal wedding was by far the most searched celebrity event of 2011, Prince William didn’t even make the top 100 list, while his beaming bride, Kate Middleton, came in as the number 12 most searched person. And the female focus extended through the Middleton family, as Kate’s sister and maid of honor, Pippa, ranked at number 21.

Real royalty outranked Hollywood royalty with searches for the royal wedding outpacing searches for Kim Kardashian’s wedding four to one.

Top Ten Most Searched Celebrity Events in 2011 were:

1	Royal Wedding
2	Final Harry Potter
3	Kim Kardashian Wedding
4	Beyonce’s Baby Bump
5	Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson Dating
6	Demi Moore/Ashton Kutcher Scandal
7	Kate Hudson Baby Bump
8	Lady Gaga Coming Out in the Egg
9	Lindsey Lohan Arrested
10	Russell Armstrong Suicide

Most Searched Destinations:

It looks like a lot of people relate to the ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ catchphrase, as Las Vegas won the top spot as the most searched destination in the world in 2011.

The top searched destination in other regions of the world include:

Asia = Singapore
Africa = Alexandria, South Africa
Australia/New Zealand = Sydney, Australia
Caribbean = Cancun, Mexico
Europe = Paris, France
Middle East = Dubai, UAE
South America = Lima, Peru

Other Interesting Search Data For the Year:

Most Searched Viral Video: 2011 was all about Friday -- Rebecca Black’s Friday that is. As the most searched viral video on Bing, Rebecca Black’s video even beat MTV video music award winner Adele by 34 percent.
Most Searched Celebrity Couple: When it comes to the most searched celebrity couple on Bing, there’s a tie between Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith and Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber tied. The royal couplecame in third.
Most Searched Economic Terms: With the economic difficulties we’re facing, it’s no wonder that bankruptcy and selling a home were among the top financial terms searched in 2011. Topping the list were searches for real estate agents, perhaps showing the difficulty and need in selling a home.
Most Searched Charities: Despite the economic issues plaguing the country, charitable giving was still on the mind of many Americans. The YMCA took home honors as the most searched charitible organization, with the American Red Cross, Lance Armstrong Foundation, SPCA and Habitat for Humanity rounding out the top 5.
Most Searched Celebrity Children: When it comes to celebrity children, Suri Cruise is by far the most popular kid on the block. The runner ups, Malia and Sasha Obama were far behind with only a third of the searches conducted for Suri Cruise.
Most Searched Diet Plan: Diets are always a popular topic and Weight Watchers took the crown for 2011 beating out Calorie Counting, Atkins, HCG and the Cholesterol Diet.

For more background, check out the article on Microsoft News Center.

- Kari Dilloo, Lisa Gurry and Lise Brende, Bing

Bing Australia Bounces Out of Beta

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:16:00 GMT

Today, following more than two years of localisation and product development since its Australian launch, the Beta tag has been removed from Bing Australia.

Bing positions itself as a new-generation search engine that helps you get things done, quickly and easily, making searching the web more instinctive.

Key features of Bing are:

Bing is task oriented - designed to help you get things done more quickly, with less queries
Bing is visually organised - displays search results with more than just blue links

Nearly 3 million Australians use Bing search engine each month and local Bing users are increasing. Traffic increased by more than 65% between June 2009 and Sept 2011.

The removal of the Beta tag is today marked with an Australian home page image featuring two Urambi roos.

Did you know that kangaroos can't move backwards? Much like Bing Australia you could say. We've come this far so it's now full-steam ahead. Thanks to each and every one of you for your ongoing support and we look forward to sharing with you what lies ahead for the future of Search.

- Bing AU Product team

Bing Webmaster Tools Fall Updates

The Bing Team — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:14:00 GMT

We’ve spent the better part of a year now hitting the shows, running surveys and holding focus groups. Along with the information we captured direct from the webmaster community through those sources, there is the daily flow of inbound suggestions and, yes, items needing to be fixed, that we can draw insights from. Now, just in time for the holidays, we’re rolling out the latest features and updates, most of which come directly from user feedback. You spoke, we listened, worked and are now delivering.

Continuing our commitment to help publishers do more on Bing, today we’re announcing our biggest updates since Honey Badger, by focusing on three areas: To share more data, to increase transparency and to bring you more useful tools.

To start with, we’re expanding Crawl Details information. This means we will be showing you all inbound links to a given URL regardless of the heading. So anything listed under the 300, 400 & 500 codes will, by URL, display inbound links to the URL. As well, any URLs listed under the Robots.txt and Malware headings will also share data the same way. You are now no longer limited to just seeing inbound links which point only to pages returning a 400 header response code.

Active email alerts will be expanding. If we place an alert in your account for Malware, you’ll get an email. If we would liketo access more of your content, more deeply, we may send you an email asking you to review your crawl settings. If you’ve got them turned down, slowing us down, this is a chance to increase the crawl rate and for us to get more of your content, faster. The setting will remain under your control, but we’ll email the suggestions.

We’re going to be placing URL Normalization suggestions inside your Webmaster account now, too. They will all be disabled by default, allowing you to choose which, if any, elements you want to incorporate into the controls. We realize that with this increase in information, some sites may hit limits and be forced to choose which elements to include for normalization while leaving others out, so we’re also increasing the number of query string parameters that can be normalized per site from 25 items to 50 items. This doubling means you can place many more items in the system for normalization. As always, though, we encourage websites to find ways to fix any canonicalization issues at the source.

Our Index Explorer tool is now being populated with deeper data about your website. As we continue to expand our depth and share, we will continue to update data for domains. Your most visual clue to this change will be in the Traffic Data appearing within the Index Explorer tool.

With this round of updates, we’re also enabling DNS verification for domains in your account. Past choices included adding a snippet to your <head> code or uploading a dedicated XML file to the root of your site, and both options remain as valid ways to verify your domains. This third option will now allow you to place a discrete CNAME record to your DNS to validate a domain as well.

For the final enhancement, we’re integrating data from adCenter inside your webmaster tools accounts. Specifically, when viewing Traffic data and looking at the keywords which drove traffic to your site, you’ll notice an Avg CPC column on the left now, with more details in a floating pane to the left of that.

The normal traffic data remains as usual to the right, across the page, and you can sort as before. This new feature allows you to quickly see keywords, and associated CPCs, helping you plan your marketing efforts more effectively. Clicking on “Buy this keyword” takes you towards your adCenter account, where you can login and complete the process.

These features are available now in your Bing Webmaster tools.

- Duane Forrester

Windows Phone 7.5: Bing(o) on Mango

The Bing Team — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:00:00 GMT

As the Windows Phone 7.5 update, code name “Mango,” rolls out to customers, we are excited to get our hands on what is an elegant, intuitive experience that places the user at the center of the experience. Not surprisingly, what excites us the most is what the team has done with Bing on the new Windows Phone experience. With that in mind, we wanted to highlight some of our favorite features:

Beyond the Search Box

Bing on Windows Phone now transcends the search box. No longer limited by text, you can now search with voice, audio and vision.

Voice: Search without typing using the voice search functionality.
Music Search: Find what song is playing by letting you phone "listen" to the music. It not only shows you the name, artist, and album, but even shows you where you can hear or buy it.
Bing Vision: You can now use your phone’s camera to look up product information by bringing an object into view. Bing will recognize text and present the option to select words for a search, and instantly return product results if the object has a barcode. Bing Vision can also detect product information from UPC codes, QR Codes and MS Tag as well as cover art for books, CD’s, DVD’s and video games.

Bing Local Scout Goes Hyper Local

Bing Local Scout provides local search results and recommends nearby restaurants, shopping and other activities in an easy to use guide powered by Bing. Whether you’re looking for the best brunch or live music in your area, it's all a tap away. Simply pick a result and you’ll see everything you need to know —where it's located, how to get there, who to call, when it's open, the website, and even ratings and reviews.

The results are arranged by:

Highlights: Top rated and highly reviewed listings
Eat+Drink: Nearby restaurants
See+Do: Nearby attractions and activities
Shop: Nearby stores

App Connect

Ever wonder which app does what – Bing has you covered. Bing search results now return Windows Phone Marketplace apps that are relevant to what you’re searching for. So the next time you search for movie times, Bing will show you the best movie apps.

For an in depth look at how this works, check out Ben and Stefan’s video covering Bing on Windows Phone 7.5:

- Ted Roduner, Bing

Deciding on a Movie? Real Steel Packs a Punch

The Bing Team — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 16:00:00 GMT

Today Real Steel hits theaters, a classic story pitting the innovative challenger with heart, against an entrenched incumbent. A movie we can get behind.

Starring Hugh Jackman, Real Steel follows a boxer who is forced to retire as people are replaced in the ring by robots. When he has difficulty making a living, he reluctantly teams up with his son Max to build a robot that can fight his way to the championship.

In anticipation of the release, we sat down with Sean Levy the director of the film, to explore the critical decisions behind the film.

Now check out how you can use Bing to plan your night out to Real Steel:

- The Bing Team

Something New on the Homepage!

The Bing Team — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 07:01:00 GMT

Here at the Bing homepage team, we’re always looking for ways to bring you a little something special. Today we’re really excited to announce the first ever video homepage.

If you have an HTML-5 enabled browser, you now get all the beauty and intrigue of the Bing homepage with a little breath of life added. Users without a modern browser will continue to see the gorgeous still photography that we’re known for. Not getting the video and want to see what the fuss is about? Try downloading IE9 and going to www.bing.com.

We won’t be programming a video every day, just when the mood strikes us.

While this first video is US-only, we’ll begin rolling the video homepage out to international markets in the next few months – so stay tuned.

If you’re interested in learning more about the evolution of the homepage and how the team chooses content, check out the following video.

Happy first day of fall!

Stephanie Horstmanshof

Bing Homepage team

Deluged by Daily Deals? Browse Over 200k Offers with Bing Deals

The Bing Team — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 13:00:00 GMT

Despite lots of recent news coverage about the death of daily deal sites, people still love a great deal. The number of daily deal sites may be narrowing, but there are still over 300 sites to choose from and consumer interest shows no signs of slowing down. Comscore data reveals the deals audience grew by 24 percent in the past year, and according to a recent Bing/Impulse survey, 61% of people have increased their use of daily deals in the last six months.

However, people are overloaded with deals that aren’t relevant to them and nearly a quarter of the people surveyed said they are “fatigued” by the overabundance of deals. For some, the pain in finding an attractive deal is outweighing the reward.

But, people are telling us if they can end the unwelcome egg hunt, they would welcome the savings. When asked, 87% of people said they would increase their use of daily deals if they could find only deals that interest them all in one place.

Today, with the launch of Bing Deals, we’re doing just that.

Instead of building another program, we’re harnessing deals from major providers and retailers to help you cut through the clutter and find the best deals in one central location. Now you have a place to browse, find and purchase. Because we’ve done the work, all you have to do is go to bing.com/deals.

And this is just the beginning. More money-saving features will roll out over the coming weeks.

Key Features:

One-Stop Shop: The new Bing Deals experience aggregates more than 200,000 deals across the US, including local deals, helping you easily match multiple deals to ensure you’re getting the best one. There is no need to browse hundreds of websites or sign-up for multiple emails. You can find the best deals on the web at Bing.com/deals.
Browse for the Best Deals: Bing Deals cuts through the clutter by cleansing and organizing deals, so irrelevant deals are filtered out of your experience. You can browse by retailer, location, keywords or by category such as restaurants, spa services, arts & entertainment, and even nightlife to find exactly what you want quickly. If you’re not sure what you’re looking for, simply browse the top deals of the day to see if something sparks your interest!
Visual Search Results: Because shopping is a visual experience and so is searching on Bing, your deal search results are visually organized on the screen to help you easily sort through your options and find the best deal based on what you’re looking for.
Daily Deals: With one click, you’ll see the top daily deals featuring the very best offers in your metro area, with savings generally from 30%-50% off.
More Deals on the Go. If you’ve been enjoying Bing Mobile Deals at m.bing.com, you’ll benefit from the same deals available on the PC.

Simply put – Bing is the one-stop shop for the best deals, discounts and coupons and this is just the beginning. You’ll see more deals and more features rolling out soon so stay tuned. For now, check out the following video to see it in action and visit www.bing.com/deals to experience it yourself.

- Lisa Gurry, Bing