Bing Community

Start Doing More Now: Try the New Bing Today

The Bing Team — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:00:00 GMT

Last week at the Search Summit in San Francisco, we showcased a brand new way to search that is designed to help you interact with friends and take action without compromising the core search experience. Starting today, people in the United States can give it a try at www.bing.com/new.

Since most of you weren’t able to attend the summit, Qi Lu, Harry Shum and I shot a short video where we discuss the design decisions and technical underpinnings behind this release.

Watch as WMV

As we discussed last week, Bing now integrates search and people in our social networks 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 you share, discover, and interact with friends like you do in real life. If you’re on the go, you’ll notice we’ve optimized the layout and placement of the social results on the mobile device for smaller screen sizes and for touch input, so the user experience will be different than what people see on a PC.

As you search, Bing suggests friends on Facebook who might know about the topic you're searching for based on what they “like”, their Facebook profile information, and photos they've shared.

For example, if you’re searching for diving spots in Hawaii, you might see a friend who lived in Hawaii, your sister who shared photos from her honeymoon in Hawaii, and a buddy who “likes” a restaurant in Hawaii. You can then ask them for recommendations right from Bing.

You may not always see friends you expect to show up for a number of reasons. Bing uses public Facebook information and content you’ve given Bing permission to use, such as friends' photos on Facebook. We won’t match friends based on other Facebook content such as status updates or check-ins. Bing also respects you and your friends' privacy settings so you won't see friends who have opted out of Facebook instant personalization or blocked the Bing app.

We’re just getting started bringing friends into your search experience and will continue getting better over time. Like everything with Bing, we’re constantly working to improve the product so let us know if you have feedback.

- Derrick Connell, Vice President, Bing

Four under-utilized Webmaster Tools features

Duane Forrester — Fri, 11 May 2012 18:02:00 GMT

This week we’re going to take a quick look at four features which often go unused by websites. Not exactly sure why this is, as they’re very useful, and at times, critical. Still, we see folks time and again who open an account, verify their domain, yet fail to take basic actions that can help them both immediately and down the road.

Preferences

Under preferences you’ll find the ability to control whether we email you alerts, which alert we email and to which address we email. This may sound like a ploy to get you to sign up for marketing emails…but consider this:

We don’t email you marketing info.
We do email you alerts about malware.

Now, this assumes you give us the permission and spec an email address you actually use frequently. Be sure to put in a legitimate email address here, or you could out think yourself and be responsible for missing important alerts like content we can’t reach because your robots.txt is blocking it, or that we’ve found malware associated with your site. I suspect any savvy SEO would cringe if they realized they were missing those alerts.

URL Normalization

For a lot of sites, cleaning up URL-related issues is a pain. Using the URL Normalization feature found inside our Webmaster Tools can help you, however. If you put the parameter you’d like us to ignore into the tool, we’ll do just that – ignore the parameter. In short, we’ll ignore the URL in which the parameter appears, and the content associated with the parameter.

If you do not want us to be indexing your /print/ content, then specifying print in the URL Normalization feature will alert us and will help us understand we should not index that content. URL Normalization does not replace your robots.txt, and you should take care to not put contradictory statements in these two locations. Robots.txt has the final say, so be careful.

Users

This feature is extremely valuable. Let’s look at two examples of why.

In our first example, you’d like to allow access to view the data inside the Webmaster account with a senior manager. You can easily do so through the features in the User section. You can control what that manager can access as well. By selecting Read Only, they can see everything but change nothing. Great protection when allowing those new into the tools space.

In our second example, we’ll focus on protection at a much more fundamental level. Let’s say your SEO has left the company. Do you have your User parameters set in such a way as to protect you against that ex-employee logging back into the tools and telling Bing to block your entire website? That employee may not have access to YOUR network and YOUR computers any more, but they could still log into the Webmaster account and cause some damage there. Make sure you have at least two Administrators set up who then can control what all other users can access. If any employee who had access to the Webmaster Tools leaves your company, one of those alternate Administrators can login and change passwords for everyone, etc. There are limits to this protecting you, but the tools exist to manage access. The rest is in your hands to plan.

URL Submissions

We hear a lot of folks saying they don’t see their newest content in the results fast enough. They are concerned we’re not finding it, not crawling them frequently enough, etc. In addition to submitting sitemaps via our tools, you can also submit, directly to our index, any URL from your site. Now, there are limits on these submissions (50/month and 10/day) to protect Bing against spammers trying to inject content. But, for a legitimate website, this feature is an excellent way to make sure valuable content is seen by us quickly.

You have to understand, however, that with this power to submit the content can come some potentially harsh realities. Unlike the normal process of crawling, indexing, rating and ranking that content goes through, what you submit takes a much straighter path to the results page. This means that while you might feel your content is the best content ever created, the searcher is the ultimate judge. If your content is shown, and searchers interact with it, that helps the content (which is new to us and has virtually no signals of its own at this point – no history, no pattern of engagement, no social signals, etc.).

This means that your content sinks or swims based on whether or not searchers interact with it. If they do, and we sense their interactions are positive, you’re in great shape. If they don’t, that’s a strike. If they do and we get the sense they don’t like it, that’s a strike. The bottom line here is your content needs to be very compelling to be successful. And just because you think its compelling, that doesn’t means others will, too.

Bing is for Doing: Ian Somerhalder and Kat Graham

The Bing Team — Fri, 11 May 2012 18:00:00 GMT

Last night marked the season finale of the CW’s Vampire Diaries starring Ian Somerhalder and Kat Graham. Don’t want to wait until next season to see more of these two? Check out another side of these versatile and inspiring entertainers.

After the Gulf Coast Oil spill, Ian created the Ian Somerhalder Foundation and started a movement, empowering thousands of people to help restore the natural balance to the ocean and beaches after the oil spill. Watch below to hear more from Ian about the work he is doing off-screen.

Whether flexing her superpowers on Vampire Diaries, or making the whole club bounce with her music, Kat is always on the move. See how she manages to do it all while staying connected with her fans.

Can’t get enough of Kat and her music? Check out her latest video- Put Your Graffiti on Me.

- Karin Muskopf, Bing

Nokia Lumia 900 & Xbox 360 Winners, Plus New Bing Rewards Sweepstakes

The Bing Team — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:30:00 GMT

We are pleased to announce the winners, pending official confirmation, of five Nokia Lumia 900s and the Xbox 360® prize pack offered in our April Bing Rewards sweepstakes. Two new sweeps have begun and end on May 31. Keep reading for details on the great prizes we’re offering and how to enter, but first congratulations to our latest winning Bing Rewards members!

The five lucky winners picked in the Nokia Lumia 900 sweepstakes were: Chris M. of Caribou, ME; George E. of Queen Creek, AZ; Linden S. of Marietta, GA; Terry P. of Heyburn, ID: and, Brian P. of St. George, UT. Enjoy your new, amazingly fast Windows Phones!
Perry L. of McDonaugh, GA was drawn as the winner of the Xbox 360 Prize Pack with Tiger Woods 13. Have fun with the awesome Kinect™ integration.

The two new sweepstakes* for Bing Rewards members have kicked off and will end May 31, 2012. The prizes include:

Xbox 360 Prize Pack & Kinect Star Wars. Ready to unleash your inner Jedi? The lucky winner will become the proud new owner of the highly anticipated Xbox 360® Limited Edition Kinect™ Star Wars™ Bundle, which includes a custom R2-D2-themed Xbox 360 console, white Kinect Sensor and a C-3PO-themed wireless controller.
500 Amazon.com Gift Card - 5 Winners. Win one of five $500 Amazon.com Gift Cards** that can be used toward Books, Electronics, Music, and more. The Amazon.com website is the place to find and discover almost anything you want to buy online at a great price.

To enter, visit http://www.bingrewards.com and please follow the instructions to create a Bing Rewards account or simply visit our redemption center here. You can find the sweepstakes Official Rules here. Good luck!

You can follow @BingRewards on Twitter for the latest program news, extra ways to get rewarded and exclusive offers.

Alex Danskin

Marketing Communication Manager, Bing

* No purchase necessary. Open only to Legal residents of the 50 US +D.C. 13 +.Ends 5/31/2012 at 11:59 a.m. PST

**Amazon.com is not a sponsor of this promotion. Except as required by law, GCs cannot be transferred for value or redeemed for cash. GCs may be used only for purchases of eligible goods on Amazon.com or certain of its affiliated websites. For complete terms and conditions, see www.amazon.com/gc-legal. GCs are issued by ACI Gift Cards, Inc., a Washington corporation. ©,®,™ Amazon.com Inc. and/or its affiliates, 2012.

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

New Bird’s Eye Imagery & Streetside Coverage on Bing Maps!

Bing Maps Blog — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:45:00 GMT

We’re happy to announce the release of new imagery from around the world, including London! Check out where Eugene can take you for a tour.

BIRD’S EYE: IMAGERY CAPTURED AT A 45 DEGREE ANGLE, GIVING DEPTH AND THREE-DIMENSIONALITY TO ORTHO PHOTOGRAPHY

Total coverage of Bird's Eye imagery currently live on Bing Maps!

With more timely Bird's Eye published to Bing Maps, our imagery reflects prominent cities undergoing transformation with respect to cultural landmarks and other types of development. This includes the tremendous strides London has made in preparation for the 2012 Olympic Games. Our new imagery reveals major changes to the Olympic venue and its surroundings.

BEFORE	AFTER

Click here to see the London Olympic Park in Bird's Eye!

Circa 2008, Bing Imagery Technologies (BITs) published over 1.1 million sq km of Bird's Eye imagery around the world, most notably in the Continental United States plus Western Europe. Since 2009, BITs has published 1,105,738 sq km. That's over 2.2 million sq km of our unique 45 degree perspective now live on Bing Maps. Our latest release was a total of 130 TB of Synthview data, as well as 60 TB of native Bird's Eye.

A Synth (or Synthview) is a style for creating immersive 3D experiences. Some of the best Synths are made up of many overlapping strong textured images and is most useful when you want to capture different sides or details of a particular object. Find Synths on Bing Maps

Our Bird's Eye imagery is extremely popular with end-users because its high-resolution, oblique look angle, and four look-directions provide them with great context for many spatial tasks, such as looking for a new house or planning a vacation.


Basilique du Sacré-Coeur Brussels Region, Belgium	Jewish Museum Berlin, Germany

Navy Pier Chicago, Illinois	Spanish Steps Rome, Italy

ADDITIONAL HEIGHLIGHTS:

Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia
Newport Beach, California
Colosseum, Rome, Italy
Nordic Museum, Stockholm, Sweden
"The Bean," Chicago, Illinois
UC Berkeley Campus, Berkeley, California
Battleship Texas, Houston, Texas
Mt. Vesuvius, Italy

STREETSIDE: WITH MICROSOFT'S VEHICLE-MOUNTED ULTRA-CAM MOBILE, OUR STREETSIDE CREW IS COLLECTING IMAGERY AT GROUND LEVEL PROVIDING A VIEW AS IF YOU WERE STANDING THERE IN PERSON

Since the last release, Streetside has published an additional 125,000 kilometers. That's a total of 365,000 linear kilometers of imagery available for users.

PARIS, FR (BEFORE)	PARIS, FR (AFTER)

PHOENIX, AZ (BEFORE)	PHOENIX, AZ (AFTER)

To view our full Streetside coverage, visit the "Streetside" Map App, or simply click here! Your Streetside tour guide, Eugene, would be happy to show you around! Simply drop Eugene in an area with a blue overlay to explore that region.

For more information about our Streetside services, click here.


Manhattan Bridge New York, New York	Eiffel Tower Paris, France

Le David Brasserie Marseille, France	Las Vegas Boulevard Las Vegas, Nevada

ABOUT BITs

Bing Imagery Technologies is located in Boulder, CO, and is responsible for the creation and publication of four imagery types available on Bing Maps- Aerial, Streetside, Bird’s Eye, and Vector. With unparalleled processing power and a thriving team of developers, program managers, and production engineers, we produce data at a record-setting rate.

- The Bing Maps Team

Viva la Human Revolution

The Bing Team — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:00:00 GMT

At Bing we are always looking for ways to do a better job building a product that can help you do more, achieve more, and feel more confident about your outcomes. As we sit and dream up the next big set of things we can build to help in this quest, something has kept nagging at us. Namely that too many of the things we see being built today in our industry put the technology first. All too often people have to learn new terms, new interaction models, and entirely new user experiences just to do something as simple as watch a DVD on their home TV. Even for me, I was sitting at my desk hunting for another USB drive and I emptied my pockets. Besides my 4 screens, I had 5 phones, 3 laptops, and an old Xbox controller someone left in my office – I am literally a geek surrounded by tech. But the most meaningful thing to me was the scanned drawing my daughter did on my laptop and it really reminded me of the humanity of the tech should be there in front of us.

As technology becomes more integral to our lives and our participation in society, we thought it would be interesting to go back to basics. We questioned the design philosophy of things, wondering if rethinking technical product development to be more people-centric could be an idea worth promoting.

So that’s what we’re doing. In conjunction with Big Think we are developing the Humanizing Technology series. It’s designed to do three core things:

1) Engage some of our favorite minds in thinking about how technology can be brought to serve us, rather than the other way around. Some of my favorite people like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Peter Diamandis, and Jane McGonigal tackle the question of how technology can be more human-centric.

2) Host a “Virtual Expo” featuring companies, academics and technologies that are building things to align with psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, including:

Safety and Security
Human Relationships
Personal Growth

In addition, we have a panel of rockstar judges including Jaron Lanier, Peter Diamandis, and Sonia Arrison who will help decide which of the technologies best exemplify this shift towards a more human-centric technical world. While we’ve chosen many companies and people who are doing interesting work in each of these areas, but we also invite you to tell us who you think is pioneering the humanization of technology.

3) Enable people to experience these technologies, thinkers, and visionaries first hand at a “Humanities Fair” live in NYC the weekend of June 15-17.

I hope you all can enjoy learning about the innovations that these pioneering institutions are building to turn technology into something that serves us and not the other way around.

Stefan Weitz

Director, Bing

Kat Graham Star of The CW’s Vampire Diaries Joins #BingIt

The Bing Team — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Just ahead of the season finale, Kat Graham one of the star s of the CW’s supernatural smash Vampire Diaries will be joining us this Wednesday. Kat will field live questions about the show, her career and how the season might end.

Learn firsthand, about the amazing things that Kat is off and on the screen.

Join us Wednesday, May 9^th from 12-1 p.m. PT to tweet directly with Kat (@katgraham)

To participate, follow @Bing, @katgraham and tweet out your questions and commentary with the hashtag #BingIt. As an added bonus, we’ll be giving away two $50 gift cards at each of the chats.

- The #BingIt Team

Kari Dilloo - @karidilloo
Ted Roduner - @roduner

To crawl or not to crawl, that is BingBot's question

Frederic Dubut — Thu, 03 May 2012 23:39:00 GMT

If you are reading this column, there is a good chance you publish quality content to your web site, which you would like to get indexed by Bing. Usually, things go smoothly: BingBot visits your web site and indexes your content, which then appears in our search results and generates traffic to your site. You are happy, Bing is happy and the searcher is happy.

However, things do not always go so smoothly. Sometimes BingBot gets really excited about your quality content and ends up crawling your web site beyond all expectations, digging deeper and harder than you otherwise wanted. Sometimes you did everything you could to promote your quality content but BingBot still does not visit your site.

As much as robots.txt is a reference tool to control BingBot’s behavior, it is also a double-edged sword that may be interpreted in a way that disallows (or allows) much more than you thought initially. In this column, we will go through the most common robots.txt directives supported by Bing, highlighting a few of their pitfalls, as seen in real-life feedback over the past few months.

Where does BingBot look for my robots.txt file?

For a given page, BingBot looks at the root of the host for your robots.txt file. For example, in order to determine if it is allowed to crawl the following page (and at which rate):

http://us.contoso.com/products.htm

BingBot will fetch and analyze your robots.txt file at:

http://us.contoso.com/robots.txt

Note that the host here is the full subdomain (us.contoso.com), not contoso.com nor www.contoso.com. This means that if you have multiple subdomains, BingBot must be able to fetch robots.txt at the root of each one of them, even if all these robots.txt files are the same. In particular, if a robots.txt file is missing from a subdomain, BingBot will not try to fall back to any other file in your domain, meaning it will consider itself allowed anywhere on the subdomain. BingBot does not “assume” directives from other hosts which have a robots.txt in place, associated with a domain.

When does BingBot look for my robots.txt file?

Because it would cause a lot of unwanted traffic if BingBot tried to fetch your robots.txt file every single time it wanted to crawl a page on your website, it keeps your directives in memory for a few hours. Then, on an ongoing basis, it tries to fetch your robots.txt file again to see if anything changed.

This means that any change you put in your robots.txt file will be honored only after BingBot fetches the new version of the file, which could take a few hours if it was fetched recently.

Which directives does BingBot honor?

If there is no specific set of directives for the bingbot or msnbot user agent, then BingBot will honor the default set of directives, defined with the wildcard user agent. For example:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /useless_folder

In most cases, you want to tell all search engines the URL paths where you want them to crawl, and the URL paths you want them to not crawl. Also, maintaining only one default set of directives for all search engines is less error-prone and is our recommendation.

What if I want to allow only BingBot?

In your robots.txt file, you can choose to define individual sections based on user agent. For example, if you want to authorize only BingBot when others crawlers are disallowed, you can do this by including the following directives in your robots.txt file:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /

User-Agent: bingbot
Allow: /

A key rule to remember is that BingBot honors only one set of directives, in this order of priority:

The section for the bingbot user agent, discarding everything else.
The section for the msnbot user agent (for backwards compatibility), discarding everything else.
The default section (wildcard user agent).

This rule has two main consequences in terms of what BingBot will be allowed to crawl (or not):

If you have a specific set of directives for the bingbot user agent, BingBot will ignore all the other directives in the robots.txt file. Therefore, if there is a default directive that should apply to BingBot as well, you must copy it to the bingbot section in order for BingBot to honor it.
If you have a specific set of directives for the msnbot user agent (but not for the bingbot user agent), BingBot will honor these. In particular, if you have old directives blocking MSNBot, you are also blocking BingBot altogether as a side effect. The most common example is:

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /

Does BingBot honor the Crawl-delay directive?

Yes, BingBot honors the Crawl-delay directive, whether it is defined in the most specific set of directives or in the default one – that is an important exception to the rule defined above. This directive allows you to throttle BingBot and set, indirectly, a cap to the number of pages it will crawl.

One common mistake is that Crawl-delay does not represent a crawl rate. Instead, it defines the size of a time window (from 1 to 30 seconds) during which BingBot will crawl your web site only once. For example, if your crawl delay is 5, BingBot will slice the day in smaller five-second windows, crawling only one page (or none) in each of these, for a maximum of around 17,280 pages during the day.

This means the higher your crawl delay is, the fewer pages BingBot will crawl. As crawling fewer pages may result in getting less content indexed, we usually do not recommend it, although we also understand that different web sites may have different bandwidth constraints.
Importantly, if your web site has several subdomains, each having its own robots.txt file defining a Crawl-delay directive, BingBot will manage each crawl delay separately. For example, if you have the following directive for both robots.txt files on us.contoso.com and www.contoso.com:

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 1

Then BingBot will be allowed to crawl one page at us.contoso.com and one page at www.contoso.com during each one-second window. Therefore, this is something you should take into account when setting the crawl delay value if you have several subdomains serving your content.

My robots.txt file looks good… what else should I know?

There are some other mechanisms available for you to control BingBot’s behavior. One of them is to define hourly crawl rates through the Bing Webmaster Tools (see the Crawl Settings section). This is particularly useful when your traffic is very cyclical during the day and you would like BingBot to visit your web site more outside of peak hours. By adjusting the graph up or down, you can apply a positive or negative factor to the crawl rate automatically determined by BingBot. This fine tunes the crawl activity to be more or less at a given time of the day, all controlled by you. It is important to note that a crawl delay noted in your robots.txt file will override the direction set within the Bing Webmaster Tool, so plan carefully to ensure you are not sending BingBot contradictory messages.

Bing Gets a New Look

The Bing Team — Wed, 02 May 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Bing is getting a new look. Starting today you will notice a fresh, de-cluttered experience designed to help you find the results you want faster. Over the past few months, we’ve run dozens of experiments to determine how you read our pages to deliver the link you’re looking for. Based on that feedback, we’ve tuned the site to make the entire page easier to scan, removing unnecessary distractions, and making the overall experience more predictable and useful. This refreshed design helps you do more with search—and gives us a canvas for bringing future innovation to you.

The results themselves are cleaner. Removing the “left rail” and minimizing the header raises the level of consistency and predictability while making it easier to scan the page and quickly find the information you want. Increasing the space between lines improves readability and optimizes the page for touch devices. Putting all our result annotations and social data in one consistent spot makes the page easier to use and understand.

The new experience is more than skin-deep. You will also notice faster page-load times and improved relevance under the hood. After all, our goal is to help people spend less time searching and more time doing. And changing how we look is the next big step in doing just that.

New

Old

We’re not finished. Today, we’re also testing out some new ideas for the homepage, including a larger version of the popular daily image. If you happen upon the homepage changes, please let us know what you think.

Sally Salas

Principal Group Program Manager

Twitter Sweeps: @Bing + Death Cab for Cutie at The Bing Lounge

The Bing Team — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:30:00 GMT

Attention, music fans! Alt rock group Death Cab for Cutie, will be giving a live performance at the Bing Lounge in Portland, Oregon on May 11. To share the love, we’ll be giving an exclusive meet and greet to one lucky Twitter follower and a guest to attend the group’s highly anticipated show.

On April 30^th, we will ask followers to retweet specific tweets from the @Bing handle to be entered into the sweepstakes (one entry per handle). We will randomly select one lucky winner from the eligible followers who retweet the @Bing handle sweepstakes tweets during the following time period:

10 AM PT on April 30, 2012- 5 PM PT on May 1, 2012

Good luck & let’s get rockin’! Be sure to retweet the sweeps and start spreading the word so that we can get the party going!

Open to US Residents 21+ only, for details on how the sweepstakes works, read the official rules here.

Cheers,

The Bing Team

Better than canonical; URL Normalization

Duane Forrester — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 21:30:00 GMT

At Bing, we have to crawl and index The Internet and The Internet is pretty big. One common question that Fabrice Canel, a veteran of search here, is commonly asking people is to figure out how big the Internet is? How many URLs are out-there?

The answers that come back fluctuate from “a few thousand” (ok you clearly don’t use The Internet), a few million (ok good start, plenty of people on Facebook, but please continue thinking), a few billion (more than 1 billion people are using the internet and having some kind of profile page set). This is all good thinking, but keep going. A few trillion, maybe? (Well, now the numbers are becoming so huge that they have different meanings per country.) After a while, some talented people get it right: the real number of URLs on the Internet is “infinity”.

The Internet is so huge that we can crawl forever discovering new links. Not only regular, good content but also plenty of unexpected content; not necessarily relevant for search engines, such as a “Next Day” link in a calendar hosted in web pages, keyword tag cloud links, etc. The list is almost endless.

Webmasters can help the search engines and themselves by removing useless and duplicate content from the crawler’s path – make sure we don’t see it. Guiding search engines to your most relevant pages and helping them to discard less relevant pages is an SEO recipe for success. We have a couple blog posts related to this idea that “less is more”, such as our blog post on optimization guidelines for large sites and our blog post Building Websites Optimized for All Platforms.

Today, we want to remind folks that among the solutions you have to fix duplicate problems on your site, relying on canonical tag is not necessarily the perfect solution to fix all your duplicate content problems. Let me share an example of a site outputting hundreds of millions of URLs including plenty of dupes and I’ll explain what happened when the search engines started implementing canonical tags. Names will not be named, but this is a real example.

Search engines will follow links to canonical destination URLs discovered in the canonical source URLs, but they will continue to visit canonical source URLs as the canonical destination may change and they check similarity between the content of the source and the content of the destination. By visiting canonical source pages, search engines waste the limited crawl bandwidth they generally have assigned to a website, and worse, may continue discovering inside the canonical source page plenty of URLs with extra useless URLs parameters. This extra-crawling and processing impact the overall quality of the site in our index and can create unneeded crawl loads on websites. Testing of differences between sources and destinations may impact the transfer of signals from source to destination, as well.

So we want to tell you that at Bing, we have a better solution to fix your duplicate problems than simply relying only on the canonical tag.

When you have duplicate problems due to extra URLs parameters, using the URL Normalization feature in the Bing Webmaster Tools is the preferred method as you are telling us which parameters can go away; we call this URL normalization. By normalizing, we mean that our crawler will not visit the URLs with extra parameters except for an occasional test of the quality of the normalization rules. You benefit through less pointless crawling which reduces resource loads on your server, fresher copy in our index of the canonical destination URLs and less out-links being discovered with extra-parameters. You can still use the canonical tag on these pages as complimentary information to the URL Normalization rules provided. Another advantage of using URL Normalization in the Bing Webmaster Tools is that you don’t need to wait for your engineering team to implement the canonical tag to fix your problem. You can implement these normalization rules right away in the tool without any code change. You can also do http 301 redirection instead of using the canonical tag when possible.

The solution to some major content duplicate problems you may have can be as easy as a 5 minute task: connect to Bing Webmaster Tools and suggest URL Normalization rules. To help you we provide in the tool the most common duplicate URL parameters detected on your site. You can also review what we index via the Index Explorer feature to see any other parameters you’d like us to skip when crawling.

Thanks for your help removing duplicate content from your sites and in helping to keeping a lid on infinity.

Integrating Bing Maps With WPF

Bing Maps Blog — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Back in August, Chris Pendleton announced the Beta for our Bing Maps WPF control. Today, Bing Maps moves beyond Silverlight and AJAX with the new native WPF Control, which enables you to build interactive tools for visualizing geographical data on the desktop.

“The two main alternatives to Bing Maps with WPF are Bing Maps AJAX in a Web application and Bing Maps Silverlight. I've used -- and like -- all three approaches, but I really like Bing Maps with WPF. It gives you the combined power of Bing Maps and the WPF programming model, with the convenience of the C# language.

I've found Bing Maps with WPF especially useful when I have to deal with very large data sets. In those scenarios, Bing Maps with WPF was much faster than Web-based alternatives, and it allowed me to effectively handle SQL databases with millions of records, and to display thousands of data points in real time.”

- Dr. James McCaffrey as quoted in [Visual Studio Magazine] [04.01.2012]

Figure 1. A new control/library allows developers to add Bing Maps functionality to a WPF application.

To find out more, check out the Feature Article: Integrating Bing Maps With WPF written by James in Visual Studio Magazine.

A BIG thank you to James for his contributions!! See what James is up to on his personal blog.

Dr. James McCaffrey Works for Volt Information Sciences Inc., where he manages technical training for software engineers working at the Microsoft Redmond, Wash., campus.

- The Bing Maps Team

ARTICQUE Using Bing Maps to Localize French Election Results

Bing Maps Blog — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:50:00 GMT

This website is provided by ARTICQUE, an electoral specialist and editor of statistical mapping technologies. With this application, you can easily analyze election results at a Country, Department and even Community level.

“ARTICQUE chose to use Microsoft Bing Maps because of their responsiveness and the system reliability. Users will be able to localize the data in an efficient and user friendly way.”

- Helene Junin, Managing Director at ARTICQUE

Official results are available! Watch presidential elections results on a map thanks to http://2012.franceelectorale.com and discover all the local specificities of votes.

- The Bing Maps Team

Video killed the radio star, but we still want your videos

Joseph_Laria — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 22:19:00 GMT

Feeds allow Bing to easily learn about the videos on your website. The purpose is to help Bing include your video content in the Bing index, which may not have otherwise been discovered by Bing's web content crawlers. Submitting a feed provides you with a higher assurance that your videos will be included in the index in a more complete and timely manner. In addition, the feed can provide Bing with rich descriptions (i.e. metadata) about your videos that can be helpful for better understanding by users.

The Bing Media feed specification is an optimized media RSS (mRSS) feed for inclusion in the Bing Video index. It specifies three types of video feeds : full back-catalog feeds (aka “full feed”), incremental update feeds (aka “incremental feed”), and expire feeds. All three have different purposes, but all share the same structure and format. The Bing mRSS video specification document covers optional and required tags, date/time format, and includes a complete example of a video feed.

Bing can also support other feed or sitemap protocols. Please contact Bing Content Feed Support for inquiries.

Other Feed or Sitemap formats:

Media RSS

Media RSS supplements the enclosure element capabilities of RSS 2.0 to allow for more robust media syndication by handling other media types, such as short films or TV, as well as provide additional metadata with the media

http://www.rssboard.org/media-rss

RSS 2.0 with media enclosures

RSS enclosures is an older standard that specifies how to attach multimedia content to RSS 2.0 feeds by providing the URL of a file associated with syndicated entry. This has largely supplanted by media RSS feeds

http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification#ltenclosuregtSubelementOfLtitemgt

Yahoo mRSS specification

The Yahoo mRSS specification is similar to Bing’s mRSS and could work on a basic level. However Bing mRSS specification adds several enhancements. For details on the yahoo mRSS see:

http://video.search.yahoo.com/mrss

Google Video Sitemap

Google adheres to Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as defined by sitemaps.org.

For further information or details refer to Google webmaster

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184

Baidu Internet video open protocol.

It is an XML based markup format used by Baidu web partners to include video content into the Baidu search index. For further information refer to Baidu Webmaster

http://video.baidu.com/videoop.html

Also with sufficient advanced notice, Bing Video may be able to extend support to a custom feed that conforms a well formatted XLST. Contact Bing Content Feed Support for additional for more information.

Bing Desktop Brings Beauty and Convenience to Windows 7

The Bing Team — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:00:00 GMT

From the beginning, Bing has been a place for exploration. The Bing homepage images aspire to spark your curiosity giving you something to talk about and connect with. Over the years, many of you have requested a simple way to enjoy these images as your Windows desktop background. With today’s release of Bing Desktop, we’re introducing an easy way to do just that.

Bing Desktop marries the beauty of Bing’s daily homepage with a quick and convenient search interface so you don’t have to open your browser to start a search session. Every day, your Windows Desktop Background will automatically refresh to a high resolution version of the day’s home page, drawn from the images we use around the world.

Bing Desktop provides a fast and simple route to get search results. To start searching, simply click on the Bing taskbar icon and the search bar will automatically appear at the center of your screen. Type what you’re looking for and the search results will appear in your default browser. You’re off and running in a matter of keystrokes. When you’re not using the search box, it goes to the background so you won’t lose precious screen space.

If you prefer, you can dock the search box to the top of screen and it will slide up out of view until you hover and click at top of screen. Just use the settings icon to pin to top of screen. We’d love your feedback on this experimental user experience.

You can download Bing Desktop right now. Like our homepage, you can find out more about the image by simply hovering over the icon in the search interface. Bing Desktop works on Windows 7 for US English. We hope to expand to additional markets in the near future. For image licensing reasons, we’re showing images that we use globally, so there are some days where it won’t match the home page image you see on Bing.com in the US, but it will always be a crisp, engaging way to start your day.

Bing Desktop is the result of a strong collaboration between Microsoft’s China Innovation Group in Beijing, China, who originated the idea based on user feedback, and our core client development team in Bellevue, WA. Please let us know what you think of Bing Desktop in the comments below or on Twitter (@Bing.)

- Tony Chor, Bing Clients Team and Yong Rui, China Innovation Group

Reducing the Complexity of Rendering Shapes

Chris Pendleton — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:00:00 GMT

One of the most common themes I hear about Bing Maps is that we don’t make it easy to render “GIS Stuff” via our APIs. In fact, one of the first features I spec’d when I moved to the Bing Maps team as a Lead PM was the ability to render holes in our polygons. I’d seen many attempts to make this easy and find workarounds via the community; however, at the end of the day, developers are reliant on us for this. Well, today I’m happy to announce the availability of the Bing Maps Advanced Shapes Module – a module to add to your Bing Maps AJAX v7 Control implementation for rendering complex shapes on our maps.

In this initial release, the idea is fairly straightforward: if you want to render holes in your polygons, now you can by simply passing in an array of lat, lons and, holy maps it’s done! There are many scenarios that are applicable for a polygon with holes: polygons for land, holes for lakes; polygons for areas of importance, holes for those without importance; or, polygons for retails space; holes for areas not available (or vice versa). The code is simple and the documents provide full examples allowing you to cut, paste and run to get you started.

In addition to the rendering of polygons and holes, the Advanced Shapes Module supports a few aesthetic features such as fill color, fill opacity, border color, border style (dash), border thickness, visibility (for showing and hiding) and infoboxes for annotation. I’ll be looking for some cool community implementations of this, so don’t let me down!

Win a Nokia Lumia 900 & Xbox 360 prize pack from Bing Rewards

The Bing Team — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Bing Rewards has launched two new sweepstakes for a Nokia Lumia 900 and a Xbox 360® that will run through May 1st. Continue reading for details on these great prizes and how to enter, but first congratulations to our latest winners! We are pleased to announce, pending official confirmation, the following winners for the three Bing Rewards sweepstakes that ended on April 2nd:

The five lucky winners picked in the $500 Target GiftCard sweepstake were: Matthew H. of Roswell, NM; David T. of Somerset, KY; Ryan L. of Omaha, NE; Connor D. of Redmond, WA: and, Connie L. of Santa Clara, CA. Congratulations!
Nicholas C. of Marlboro, NJ was drawn as the winner of the Xbox 360 Prize Pack with Mass Effect 3. Have fun with the awesome Kinect™ integration.

Our two new sweepstakes* have kicked off and will end May 1, 2012 at 11.59 a.m. ET. The prizes include:

Nokia Lumia 900 - 5 Winners. The amazingly fast Lumia 900 has a crisp 4.3-inch display screen and is the first Nokia Windows Phone with 4G LTE connectivity. This beautifully designed phone also comes with cutting-edge apps such as Xbox Live and ESPN Sports Hub. We’re also including $200 cash toward a new contract with AT&T.
Xbox 360 Prize Pack & Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13. One lucky participant will take home an Xbox 360 console with Kinect, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13, and a 12 month Xbox 360 LIVE® Gold membership. Tiger Woods 13 is the franchise’s first version to work with Kinect, which means the game just got a whole lot better.

To enter, visit www.discoverbing.com/rewards/web and please follow the instructions to create a Bing Rewards account or simply visit our redemption center here. You can find the sweepstakes Official Rules here. Good luck!

Start following @BingRewards on Twitter for the latest program news, opportunities to win and exclusive offers. If you have an idea for a Bing Rewards sweepstake prize you’d like to see in the future, we want to hear it!

- Alex Danskin, Marketing Communication Manager, Bing

* No purchase necessary. Open only to Legal residents of the 50 US +D.C. 13 +.

Bing Bar 7.1 Rolling Out: Connect with Facebook Chat, Listen to Slacker Radio, Get Relevant News and Search Faster

The Bing Team — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:00:00 GMT

We’re constantly looking for ways to make Bing Bar more useful. The primary way we do this is based on how you are using the product- which features are used most, which aren’t being used. You’ve told us that you love the clean look, convenience, and quick performance of Bing Bar. You also told us that the app buttons we delivered in Bing Bar 7.0 and subsequent releases were valuable and useful.

Today we are excited to release Bing Bar 7.1. This new release, based on your feedback, provides richer access to your social connections, new entertainment options, and updated versions of the most popular Bing Bar apps.

Below is a snapshot of the new features and benefits shipping with Bing Bar 7.1, which new users can download at the Bing Bar page on Discover Bing. If you’re already a user of Bing Bar 7.0, you’ll get the upgrade automatically delivered to you over the next few months. Can’t wait? You can always upgrade manually via the link on Discover Bing.

Facebook Chat: Have you ever wanted to reach out and chat with one of your Facebook friends, but don’t have Facebook open in the browser? Now you can chat with your friends from wherever you are on the web. This complements the MSN Messenger app that we delivered earlier this year.

Slacker Radio: Listen to music, sports, news, comedy and more without interrupting your web browsing. Slacker has the most personalized content of any radio service.

Fresh News App: We’ve made the Bing Bar news app more visual and expanded news sources so you can focus on the topics that matter most to you. When news breaks, you’ll get an immediate notification right from the Bing Bar.

Search Suggestions: You often trigger a search from a web page you’re browsing. To make it even easier, the Bing Bar provides suggested search terms as you browse. We’ve expanded the sites and methods of suggesting searches, making it even easier to search via the Bing Bar.

Note that not all features are available in all markets, but we’re working to expand our app offerings on a global basis. There are countless other improvements throughout Bing Bar 7.1 regarding notifications, configurability, and performance. We love hearing from you so keep the feedback coming, and look out for new apps in the coming months.

- John Licata, Bing Bar Team

New Translator App for Windows Phone Powered by Bing Available for Free Download

The Bing Team — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:13:00 GMT

Achtung! Внимание! Attenzione! Aufmerksamkeit! 注意! Attention! Today we are releasing an updated version of the Translator App for Windows Phone powered by Bing.

Over the last decade, world class researchers - both at our own research labs and around the world have been working on the problem of language translation, the results of which you enjoy today on Bing. Now you can take that experience with you as you travel across the globe with the new Translator app for Windows Phone. Let’s check it out:

Point, Scan and Translate

With the Translator App for Windows Phone you can now translate printed language by simply pointing the camera. From street signs and posters to transit schedules and restaurant menus translating is now a snap. Well, easier than a snap – all you do is point and scan. Think of this as automatic subtitles for everyday life- a view that provides continuous translation smoothly overlaid over the original language (English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Chinese Simplified.) To see it in action, check out this video:

Offline Translation

No network connection in Barcelona? No hay problema. Simply download the language pack you need and the Translator App is functional offline. The highly optimized and compressed translation system was built using the same technology that powers Bing’s translation features your familiar with on the Web.

Type and Translate

Have a word in mind? The Translator App also enables instant translations using keyboard input. When online, the supported languages for translation expand to over 30 (see the Bing Translator language list here). For several of the languages you can also playback the spoken version of the translated sentence. This is particularly handy for languages in a script you can’t read.

Speak and Translate

Want to have a conversation with a local? With the voice translation you can communicate in English (both US and UK), German, French, Italian, and Spanish. Once in the mode and connected online, you simply tap the icon, speak and tap to translate. Voila!

With Windows Phone, you literally have translations at your fingertips. Simply pin your preferred mode (or all of them) to the Windows Phone home screen. It is one of the shining ways in which we were able to take full advantage of Windows Phone’s innovative design that puts people at the center of the experience. You can also pin the app itself to the home screen – to unlock a useful “live tile”, helping deliver a translation a day in the language of your choice. Thanks to this feature, you can learn a new language one word at a time.

If you are an existing user of a previous version, you should shortly see a notification to update. Translator for Windows Phone is now available completely free, on the Windows Phone Marketplace.

In building this app, engineers and researchers on our team solved tremendous technical challenges, and dealt with the nuances of voice, cameras, data availability and language complexity. Yet, our focus was on delivering a scenario that was truly useful to you so we would love to hear your feedback and feature suggestions on our user forums.

Happy travels, feliz viajes, bon voyage, gute reise...

- Vikram Dendi, Director of Product Management, Microsoft/Bing Translator

Find Venue Maps, Businesses and Buildings Faster on Bing Maps

Bing Maps Blog — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:37:00 GMT

Today we’re excited to announce the release of a handful of updates to maps to help users navigate faster and find business, building and venue information to help you go from doing to done more quickly. Some of these features will also be available in select initial international markets. Let’s take a closer look.

Never miss a venue map again.

Did you know Bing Maps has nearly 900 venue maps including interiors maps of malls, airports, casinos and shopping districts? Well you will now because with this update, we’re making venue maps much easier to find and use. When using Bing Maps, now you can simply zoom-in into your favorite shopping mall or airport and click on its footprint to immerse yourself into it.

Las Vegas strip area featuring the venue maps of several casinos including that of the Bellagio interior

This feature will be initially available for the following markets: United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

Local businesses? No problem.

Visiting a new city? Zoom-in into Bing Maps and find some of the most popular businesses in the area, including hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions, shopping centers, art galleries, ATMs, and much more.

Even if you are a local, we think you’ll find this feature useful to find grocery stores, libraries, post offices, schools, and even parking garages.

Simply click on a business name or icon and find out more details about it.

Portland’s Pearl District

This feature will be initially available for the following markets: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, and Germany

3D building outlines help you navigate easier.

Ever wondered how the city looks like when using a non-aerial map? Well, Bing Maps has just added semi- transparent 3D building outlines for metropolitan areas when you zoom in far enough. This provides the user with a much better context of how the city looks like, where the key buildings and city landmarks are, and ultimately help you better orientate yourself when using Bing Maps. Look for your city!

New York’s downtown area

This feature will be initially available for the following markets: United States and select cities in the United Kingdom, Canada and France.

Zoom-in faster.

Get to the level of detail you want even faster. With this release most of the labels in Bing Maps will act as a shortcut to zoom-in to that place. Try it with states, cities, parks, neighborhoods, and many more. Clicking on a label will get to the best map view of that area quick and easy.

Clicking on Washington State label will zoom you in into the best map view of the state

This feature will be initially available for all markets except Japan.

We hope you enjoy these updates and find them useful in finding information on maps more quickly. Let us know what you think.

- Roberto Bojorquez Alfaro, Jason Willison, Philomena Lobo, and the Bing Maps Team

What Are You Doing for Earth Day 2012? The Nature Conservancy Joins #BingIt Chat

The Bing Team — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Earth Day 2012 is just around the corner. We’re teaming with The Nature Conservancy to inspire you to get out and do something for the environment on April 22^nd. The Nature Conservancy is the leading conservation organization working in all 50 states and more than 30 countries to conserve the lands and waters upon which life depends.

Join us this Wednesday, April 18th from 12-1 pm PT to see how you can get involved in conservation. To participate, follow @Bing and @nature_org, and be sure to include the hashtag #BingIt in all tweets to follow along and contribute to the conversation. As a special bonus, we’ll be giving away $50 gift cards to two lucky participants that will help get your Earth Day project off the ground.

Can’t make it to the chat? Join The Nature Conservancy on April 22^nd for Picnic for the Planet — the world's largest and most delicious Earth Day celebration — by attending, hosting or donating to a picnic. Visit nature.org/earthday to learn more.

- The Bing Team

Kari Dilloo - @karidilloo
Ted Roduner - @roduner
Archana Ramachandran - @archana

Implementing Markup For Paginated And Sequenced Content

Duane Forrester — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:17:00 GMT

Late last week I bumped into David Flink, one of our Lead Program Managers here at Bing and after a brief chat, he agreed to write this week's blog post detailing a view on implementing paganation solutions. He's even agreed to field questions, so feel free to post up with questions related to this blog post and David can chime in with answers.

Traditionally, Bing has relied on a set of heuristics to determine if and how individual pages on a site are related to each other. Now, through the use of the optional rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements, you can provide Bing with a strong indication of the structure and scope of the sequenced content on your site. For example, think about content spanning multiple pages, such as forum threads, or time-sequenced content such as news articles and blog posts.

Using the rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements, you have full control over the sequencing of your pages. Let’s examine the following example:

The use of rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements for an oldest-to-newest sequence

In this example, the webmaster has determined that his user prefer to read news articles from oldest to newest. The webmaster has reflected this order in the implementation of the rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements, with the rel="next" link elements pointing to a newer article on the site. Note that although it is perfectly acceptable to maintain multiple sequences on your site – for example, one sequence for news, one for politics, and one for finance – we encourage you to avoid adding more than one rel="next" and more than one rel="prev" link element to your pages.

Now let’s review this alternative implementation of the rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements for blogs:

The use of rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements for a newest-to-oldest sequence

The universally preferred order for blog posts is newest to oldest. In the example above, this order has been reflected in the implementation of the rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements, with the rel="next" link elements pointing to older blog posts on the site. As in the previous example, the first page in the sequence features just the rel="next" link element, while the last page in the sequence features just the rel="prev" link element. Avoid looping the sequence back to an index page on the last natural page of the sequence (using, for example, <link rel="next" href="index.aspx">), as this obscures the sequence.

Multi-Page Content

Once you have settled on one or more sequences, it’s important to keep multi-page content in mind. A user reading page 1 of a multi-page article will expect the next item in the sequence to be page 2, not a newer article. Review this example:

The use of rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements for an oldest-to-newest sequence with multi-page content

We strongly encourage you to prioritize sequencing for multi-paged content over all other sequences to ensure a predictable user experience.

Eager To Get Started?

Implementing the rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements is a relatively straight-forward process. These pointers will help you successfully complete the implementation:

Link elements should be added within the <head> section of your pages. Alternative implementations, such as the addition of rel attributes to anchor elements in the body of your pages, are currently not supported.
Using the rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements, you establish a relationship between at most 3 pages on your site: the current page, the page immediately preceding the current page (rel="prev") and the page immediately following the current page (rel="next"). Note that the first page in the sequence should just contain the rel="next" link element, while the last page in the sequence should contain just the rel="prev" link element.
Avoid adding more than one rel="next" and more than one rel="prev" link element to your pages.
URL parameters, such as the ones includes in the example above, should be reflected in the HREF attributes of your link elements. URL parameters appended solely for tracking purposes, such as search queries and session identifiers, can also be appended. To avoid having these URL parameter surface in search results for your pages, you can use the rel="canonical" link element to specify a preferred URL for the content displayed. For example, the page http://www.contoso.com/Products.aspx?Page=3&Query=Bikes may contain the following link elements:
- A pointer to the preferred URL for the page content (without the URL parameter used for tracking): <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.contoso.com/Products.aspx?Page=3" />
- A pointer to the next page: <link rel="next" href="http://www.contoso.com/Products.aspx?Page=4&Query=Bikes" />
- A pointer to the previous page: <link rel="prev" href="http://www.contoso.com/Products.aspx?Page=2&Query=Bikes" />
You are free to exclude certain pages within the sequence (after applying the rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements) from indexing using the following meta element:
- <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

Implementing these rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements doesn't trigger a new visual treatment for your pages on our search result pages. It does, however, allow us to more comprehensively understand and index your content. If you have any questions regarding the implementation of these link elements to your site, please feel free to add them the comments section below.

@Bing “Get Things Done this Foursquare Day with Bing” Sweepstakes

The Bing Team — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:00:00 GMT

We’re ‘checking-in’ and kicking it into high gear on Foursquare Day! Foursquare Day was a grass-roots campaign founded by users in 2010 to celebrate the social media platform. This April 16^th (Foursquare = 4² = 4/16, get it?!) we’re celebrating in true mobile fashion by giving away 6 Nokia Lumia 900 Windows® Phones to our lucky Foursquare followers.

To be entered, follow Bing on Foursquare and check-in to any venue with the hashtag #Bing4sq and push it out to Twitter. We will randomly select six lucky winners from the Bing Foursquare followers who complete the above steps during the following time period:

9:00 AM-11:59 PM PT on April 16th, 2012

Foursquare Day wouldn’t be the same without the hundreds of local city events! We’re pumped to have the following six official Foursquare Day events on board in support of our sweepstakes: @4sqATL, @4sqDayPDX, @FoursquareHOU, @4sqLA, @4sqdaySF, and @4sqSeattle.

‘Mayors’ and ‘tipsters,’ good luck! Be sure to follow Bing on Foursquare and lookout for @Bing on Twitter to stay updated on Bing’s Foursquare whereabouts.

For details on how the sweepstakes works, read the official rules.

Cheers,

- The Bing Team

Gearing up for API changes

The Bing Team — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:00:00 GMT

For the past several years, the Bing Search API has made search data available for developers to innovate and build upon. Today we are announcing that the Bing Search API will transition to an offering made available on the Windows Azure Marketplace. The Windows Azure Marketplace is a one stop shop for cloud data, apps, and services, including the Microsoft Translator API. Through this platform, developers can access hundreds of data sets and APIs and distribute their applications through the marketplace.

A few important things to note regarding the upcoming transition:

With the transition, Bing Search API developers will have access to fresher results, improved relevancy, and more opportunities to monetize their usage of the Search API. To offer these services at scale, we plan to move to a monthly subscription model. Developers can expect subscription pricing to start at approximately $40 (USD) per month for up to 20,000 queries each month.
The transition will begin in several weeks and will take a few months to complete. During the transition period, developers will be encouraged to try the Bing Search API for free on the Windows Azure Marketplace, before we begin charging for the service.
At this time, you can continue using Bing Search API 2.0 free of charge. After the transition period, Bing Search API 2.0 will no longer be available for free public use, and instead developers can continue accessing the API on the Windows Azure Marketplace.

Details regarding the transition timeline, pricing structure, and other changes will be announced in upcoming weeks. In the meantime, we encourage you to explore the Windows Azure Marketplace and read the documentation on accessing data sets and APIs. As a Bing Search API developer, you can expect the transition to involve targeting a new API end point, moderate changes to the request and response schemas, and a new security requirement to authenticate your application key. Developers using approximately 3 to 4 million queries and above can expect to transition through a separate process (details will be provided shortly).

We understand that many of you are using the API as an important element in your websites and applications, and we will continue to share details with you through the Bing Developer Blog as we approach the transition. We appreciate your patience during this time.

- Bing Developer Team

Bing Community

Start Doing More Now: Try the New Bing Today

Four under-utilized Webmaster Tools features

Bing is for Doing: Ian Somerhalder and Kat Graham

Nokia Lumia 900 & Xbox 360 Winners, Plus New Bing Rewards Sweepstakes

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

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

New Bird’s Eye Imagery & Streetside Coverage on Bing Maps!

ADDITIONAL HEIGHLIGHTS:

Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia

Newport Beach, California

Colosseum, Rome, Italy

Nordic Museum, Stockholm, Sweden

Viva la Human Revolution

Kat Graham Star of The CW’s Vampire Diaries Joins #BingIt

To crawl or not to crawl, that is BingBot's question

Bing Gets a New Look

Twitter Sweeps: @Bing + Death Cab for Cutie at The Bing Lounge

Better than canonical; URL Normalization

Integrating Bing Maps With WPF

ARTICQUE Using Bing Maps to Localize French Election Results

Video killed the radio star, but we still want your videos

Bing Desktop Brings Beauty and Convenience to Windows 7

Reducing the Complexity of Rendering Shapes

Win a Nokia Lumia 900 & Xbox 360 prize pack from Bing Rewards

Bing Bar 7.1 Rolling Out: Connect with Facebook Chat, Listen to Slacker Radio, Get Relevant News and Search Faster

New Translator App for Windows Phone Powered by Bing Available for Free Download

Find Venue Maps, Businesses and Buildings Faster on Bing Maps

What Are You Doing for Earth Day 2012? The Nature Conservancy Joins #BingIt Chat

Implementing Markup For Paginated And Sequenced Content

@Bing “Get Things Done this Foursquare Day with Bing” Sweepstakes

Gearing up for API changes