Microsoft has created the Firefox with Bing website to distribute a special version of the Firefox web browser. This particular version of Firefox ships with Bing set as the browser’s homepage, default search engine and search provider in Firefox’s address bar.

Internet users who click on the Get Firefox with Bing button are redirected to a download on the Mozilla website. The download pops up automatically, the download itself is the latest stable Firefox browser version. Users who install the latest stable version of Firefox this way will use Bing instead of Google in the browser.

This does not really change anything else. Firefox versions available for download directly at Mozilla will still ship with Google as the default search provider. And that’s the place where most Firefox downloads happen.

It is up to Microsoft to promote Firefox with Bing, and it remains to be seen if a lot of users will take up Bing’s offer and download the Bing Firefox version from the promo page.

Existing Firefox users can install the Bing add-on for the browser instead to add the same functionality. If you do not want to install and add-on for that, you can head over to the Mycroft Project website instead to pick search providers from the list there.

So, Mozilla is teaming up with Microsoft, and probably rewarded handsomely for it. Some may see the move as a first step to become less dependent on Google, which in my opinion is a path that Mozilla should have taken a long time ago.

You can read the official announced over at the Bing Community blog.

What’s your take on this?

Internet users who visit the daily deals website may to subscribe to deals for their city. Users who want that need to fill out a form asking for an email address and city on the Bing Daily Deals site. Once done subscribed users will receive daily deals with offers up to 90% off in their inbox.

But subscribing to the newsletter is not the only option to see what’s currently on offer. The today’s deal lists the current offer for the selected city.

Deals currently on offer include a 50% discount on a one month Salsa class in New York, a 50% discount for a one night stay in an in San Francisco or a 50% off hair styling services in Los Angeles.

What I personally like about the deals page is that it not only lists the deal information but also additional helpful information like the location of the place on a map.

You can also look at past deals for that particular city to see what you have missed. The deals page does not seem overly successful just yet, with 0 sold items being a common sight on the past deals page.

The core reason for this may be that the deals site is not advertised on Bing’s homepage. It is likely that the deals will become popular once Microsoft starts promoting the daily deals service actively.

Interested users can visit the Bing Daily Deals website to check out deals and subscribe to the daily newsletters to receive daily deal emails.

Would you personally use a daily deals website like Bing Daily Deals or Groupoon?

While that’s distracting from the search form, it also is something that is highly popular.

Bing today announced an addition to their search engine’s homepage. Users with HTML5 capable browsers may see a video playing instead of the static wallpaper image.

The developers note that this is not something that Bing users should expect to see every day, but that it will be used regularly in the future. Most modern web browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome, Firefox or Opera) should display the video just fine.

It has to be noted that only the US homepage of the search engine is currently showing the HTML5 video on the frontpage. Users from other countries that head over to Bing need to change the country to United States first in the upper right corner to see the HTML5 video in action.

Bing announced that the videos will be rolled out to international markets in the coming months, so that users from all over the world can view the videos on localized versions of the search engine.

I personally have to admit that it looks really well on the homepage, and that loading times do not seem to be longer than before. I was not able to test the connection on a slower machine. It can be that users connecting with low speed Internet connection may have a different experience.

Microsoft has created a video that gives us a look behind the scenes of the Bing homepage.

Have you seen the new HTMl5 video on the Bing homepage? If so, what’s your take on it?

Today Bing announced that they have added a second authoritative feature called Action Buttons. Action button basically suggest common actions performed on the site. The Bing community blog has two examples for that.

First the results page for United Airlines which lists the United Airlines homepage as an authority site. The action buttons for the United Airlines result case are Check in, Flight status and Book a flight. These buttons are displayed on the right of the search result.

The second example is for a car rental company and the action buttons Rent a car, Locations and Contact us relate to that.

The first thing that I noticed was that some of the site links led to the same pages on the site. This resulted in a few follow up questions that I had. For instance, why is it necessary to display actions twice in the results. And as a consequence, if it is not time to revamp the sitelinks part of the algorithm on Bing to make sure that sitelinks and actions are not identical.

There are arguments for the way Microsoft is laying out those information on the page. The action buttons are larger than the sitelinks, which makes them more prominent on the results page. Search engine users on the other hand are used to sitelinks, and some might feel left alone when those links suddenly display different kinds of pages for sites that they visit regularly (do not get me started on why they do not access the sites directly. Many use search engines for everything, even if they visit a site daily).

You will notice some irregularities when it comes to the new feature. Banks for instance return only a log in action button and nothing else. Viable options here would be to link to the bank’s contact and support pages.

Regardless of that I think that it is an interesting idea that works very well for some industries, and not so well for others. What’s your take on Action Buttons.

Bing up until now did not make use of some of those techniques. The company did however announce a new concept called adaptive search yesterday. Adaptive Search basically uses previous searches to determine the best results for a user on Bing. These results are then displayed more prominently on the search engine (they get bonus points so to speak).

The concept is all about ambiguity. Search engines sometimes do not know what you are looking for. Say you enter cars in the search form. You could be looking for automotive information, or the movie cars, or someone with the last name Cars.

Adaptive search looks at a user’s previous searches to determine which results the user is after. Someone who searched for Disney and Cars 2 before may see more information about the movie Cars than about automobiles. The same is true for a user who searched for car brands like Mercedes before, only that this user would see more automotive related results.

Here is a video that demonstrates the concept.

Some users may have privacy concerns. Microsoft notes that the feature can be disabled by turning off the search history on Bing.

Adaptive search has its shortcomings. Lets take the Australia example from the Bing news page. Say you research your next vacation in Australia. You perform a few searches and get all things sorted out. Just before the start of your vacation, you decided to look up the movie Australia to watch it before the trip. If you just enter Australia, you might end up with no movie information whatsoever. You can counter this by searching for Australia movie obviously.

What’s your take on Adaptive Search?

The two search engines may promote results to the first page simply because they have been “liked” by a person from the searcher’s social circle.

But are those likes and recommendations always helpful? That’s highly doubtful. Even worse, what if you see recommendations that you never wanted to get in first place? Here is a top 8 of recommendations and likes that you do not want to see, ever in the search results.

• Diseases:
• Sexual Preferences
• Shopping
• Financial
• Relationship
• Criminal
• Drugs
• Tasteless

Want some examples? How about finding out that your dad has a thing for BDSM and your mom loves that sex store around the corner? How about a husband that recommends a divorce attorney website, or a friend who is liking hemorrhoid treatment websites?

Still not convinced? How about finding out that your fiancee likes an ex-con forum, that your parents like a site where people file for bankruptcy or that your wife likes a forum where parents discuss cuckold childs?

There are many possibilities where likes and recommendations can backfire. You obviously do not get recommendations for something from your social circle if a person of that circle has not “liked” a page or site. And it means at the same time that you need to search for a similar theme or topic to find those recommendations in the search engines.

Another aspect that needs to be considered is that you may see those recommendations and likes on the social networking site as well. Even if you do not search for it, you may see it in your dashboard there.

This suggests that it is not inherently a issue brought up by the search engines. They may however act as catalysts.

For now, all you need to do to avoid getting those recommendations is to avoid logging in while searching on Bing or Google. The likes are tied to your account. In the future, search engines might use all recommendations to present sites to you even if you are not logged in or use social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook at all. You may not see people you know then in the search results, but you may get a message like “15% of all users recommend xyz” or something like that.

What about you? Do you think there need to be boundaries when it comes to displaying likes and recommendations? If so, what are they?

What’s the reasoning behind adding friend likes to the search results? According to Microsoft, it stems from the fact that the majority of people may delay decisions until they have asked a friend for advice.

Bing tries to speed up the decision making process by combining standard search results with the likes of a user’s Facebook friends and likes of all Facebook users.

The decision delay can be shortened by combining the technology of Bing with Facebook, to incorporate the friend effect into search. Bing now uses the interests shown by friends on Facebook to deliver a personalized search experience. With more than 30 billion pieces of content shared each month on Facebook alone, there is power in the collective know-how of the Web, and Bing is the first search engine to harness this information in a useful way.

So how does the integration look like on Bing search results pages?

Likes are displayed beneath individual results on Bing. Webmasters should take note that Bing may promote results to the first page if friend’s have liked them, even if they would not be on the first page of results for the query otherwise.

The Facebook integration does not stop here as Bing will make use of Facebook likes to present the searcher with popular sites and messages from companies and brands that match the query.

For example, when planning a vacation and searching for a rental car, Bing will show recent Facebook posts alerting people to a new deal at the top of the results.

Facebook has been integrated in other areas as well. If you search for a city for instance, you will see who lives in or nearby. Other features include flight deals that lead directly to company offers on Facebook and shared shopping lists for your local area.

Here is a video that visualizes most of the features:

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-us&#038;vid=243216f7-9941-4f48-a2d0-2065e06a47b5&#038;src=SLPl:embed::uuids&#038;fg=sharenoembed" target="_new"title="Facebook Friends Now Fueling Faster Decisions on Bing">Video: Facebook Friends Now Fueling Faster Decisions on Bing</a>

Criticism

Liking a website does not really give you the reason behind that like. What are some of the reasons behind a like? A friend may have done business with the site, may like the design of the site or the product offered. It may also be that the site was liked because your friend was paid to like it, or that it was liked because another friend liked it.

You basically cannot tell from a like why it was added by a friend.

Another aspect to consider is the trust you put into your friend’s likes. If your grandparents liked a hotel in Florida, does it mean that you will like it as well? What about book recommendations. All your female friends recommend the latest Harry Potter, does it mean that you will like the book as well if you are male?

There is a lot to consider about individual likes before you can make the decision if it will aid you in your decision making process.

Disable Bing’s Facebook Integration

You can disable most “Friend Effect” features by being logged out of Facebook when searching on Bing. You furthermore need to make sure that you have not linked Bing to Facebook on the Bing page.

You still get general Facebook recommendations but not personal ones.

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-us&#038;vid=d4847c17-86be-449f-89da-bc5ad973d7ce&#038;src=SLPl:embed::uuids&#038;fg=sharenoembed" target="_new"title="Bing Puts User Control at the Center of Search Experience">Video: Bing Puts User Control at the Center of Search Experience</a>

You can find out more about that at Bing’s social site.

Closing Words

All major search engines are integrating social results into the search results. That should not be a problem as long as they offer options to block the results from showing.

What’s your take on the friend effect and social integration into search in general?

I suspected that Bing’s quality was not really better as that of Google, but I wanted to make a point, and thought it would be interesting to see how I would do with Bing as my main search engine.

When I say Bing I think of an English search engine. Yes, Bing has localized sites but the results there are not good at all. That, and Microsoft’s obvious concentration on the US market forced me to switch to localized Google search engines for many non-English queries.

Bings English results are not as bad as many Internet users might think they are. Plus, it has some features that Google does not have. What I really like is that the official site is highlighted on Bing search results.

The association that the first entry on the search results page is always the official site is not always correct, and this may help users distinguish between official sites and unofficial ones. It is on the other hand brand related, Ghacks for instance has no official site listing on Bing.

I also like that there is generally less advertisement and Microsoft properties on search results pages. Yes, there are some queries where you see ads all over the place plus links to other Microsoft properties, but most pages are cleaner than Google’s.

The quality of the results depends highly on your searches. I’d generally say that Bing displays less splogs (Spam Blogs) and exact keyword domains with thin content in the results. This may be because most sites like those tend to concentrate on Google when it comes to SEO.

For some searches, I had to switch to Google after searching on Bing for a while. This can be mainly attributed to Google’s time filter which Bing only displays on some results pages and not all.

I personally like the time filter a lot, especially on searches where “old pages” are shown on the first search results page. This happens for Windows troubleshooting searches a lot. You search for something and see that only Windows XP or Windows 2000 results are shown, even though you are looking for Windows 7 results. Adding Windows 7, or other descriptive terms helps sometimes but not always. A limit to display only search results of the past year does wonders to the results though. This has helped me more than once, and I consider it essential.

The biggest factor that is holding Bing back in my opinion is the concentration on the US market. Sure, it is Microsoft’s home market, and concentration on a single market works for other search engines, Baidu anyone, very well. But Microsoft wants to compete with Google and not Baidu, which means that they have to improve the results on their localized search engines and the features on those search engines to compete with the almighty Google (Google has a market share of 90%+ in many European countries, which makes me wonder why the EU never stepped in here.)

I do about 80% of my searches on Bing nowadays, and the remaining 20% on Google. I usually switch to Google if the Bing results do not turn up the right results, or if I want to use a localized search engine. Bing’s results have improved over the course of the year.

Have you tried Bing?

Still, Facebook Search is not here yet, and it is not clear if it ever will. What seems to be clear is that search engines add social components to their search. Google and Bing utilize Twitter messages for instance and add them to the search results.

Microsoft recently made a change to its Bing search engine. You may remember that Bing announced a partnership with Facebook in October 2010 which added links to the Bing search results that a user’s Facebook friends liked.

Back then Bing added a “Liked by your Facebook friends” to the end of the search results page. The information were presented to the user in addition to the regular search results.

Bing has now made changes to the integration of Facebook likes. They basically did away with the Liked by your Facebook friends module at the end and integrated likes directly in the search results listings.

Your Facebook friend’s likes may appear right beneath individual search results on the Bing search results page.

The example screenshot above shows how it looks like in Bing Search. Not every search query will trigger Like results. It depends largely on the number of friends and their likes. Some users may never see likes in the results, while others may see them constantly.

The usefulness of the information depends largely on the friends of the searcher. It always boils down to this: Do you trust your friend’s likes?

A simple example. If you search for the “which movie should I see in cinema today”, you may see results that contain likes of some of your friends. Say you are male and the likes are all from female friends. While it is possible that this movie may be fun to watch, another movie may be a better choice.

The integration of Facebook information in Bing should be seen as one additional signal that may aid user’s in the decision making process.

What’s your take on the integration of Facebook in Bing Search? (via)

There can be absolutely no doubting that the Internet is anything but boring.  There are billions of websites out there and so much fantastic content that it would be impossible to get bored.  Everything from games to videos, interactive websites, chat, education it’s all there and there’s so much of it.

The problem arises when you have to find this content.  How many of you, and feel free to comment below, generally tend to go to the same websites day-in day-out, week-in, week-out?  You’d probably be surprised just how many people don’t experience the broader Internet.

I would include myself in this.  I have a hard-core of about 30 websites I visit on a regular basis and outside of that I tend not to explore too much for fun.

So why is this?  The problem lies in being able to find and access that content.  Back in the early days of the Internet we had services such as Yahoo! and AOL.  These companies aggregated content into portals and delivered us chunks of the Internet that were vetted, relevant to their users and interesting.  There was frequent criticism though of these services, especially AOL, just giving people access to a small walled-garden, and not to the wider world.  Eventually they fell out of favour with the general public and companies like Google stepped up to fill the gap.

Google’s approach made a lot of sense to people, they would place at or near the top of their search results the websites that people used the most, that were the highest rated and linked to.  If you searched for anything on Google in the early days then you could guarantee to get the most popular websites for whatever category you wanted.

But then the Internet exploded in size and became commercialised.  Now for any search you perform you’ll have to wade through a mountain of sales, price comparison, fake search and other services to find the exciting and engaging content you want.

This is where services like Bing stepped in with its decision engine.  With Bing Microsoft attempted to make search smarter by predicting what it was you were really looking for and giving you that.  It is a popular approach and one that’s now often copied.  The problem with this approach though is that these heuristic search engines rarely work properly or effectively.  Whatever you search for you will still be bombarded with fake sites, search sites, price comparison and shopping sites and so on.

What the Internet needs, and needs badly, is a way to be able to aggregate the most fantastic content on the web so that you can find it quickly, efficiently and with the minimum of fuss.

To a certain extent social networking websites have stepped into the mould here and Facebook has been particularly successful at helping people to find and share engaging and interesting content.  Even Facebook now though is beginning to sag under their weight of commercialism and it’s turning people away.  I’ve seen regular Facebookers’ using the service much less than they used to as a result.

So what’s the solution?  One section of society already has it.  Young children have plenty of services tailored for them where not only the most appropriate content but also the most interesting content is aggregated from across the web.  These services aren’t free but they’re an invaluable extra for parents who want to keep their children engaged, entertained and educated, while at the same time keeping them safe from advertising and inappropriate content.

Could a similar service work for adults?  I’d argue that yes it would, and moreover that it would be something that a great many people would be prepared to pay for.

Heuristic technologies exist today that can deliver this.  Companies can use their own computer systems and black/white lists to block inappropriate content.  They can monitor what websites and content we like and enjoy, give us more like that and ask us with questionnaires what subjects we like and what types of experiences we want online.

Is this giving up valuable information to advertisers who can deliver targeted ads to you?  Is this giving up the freedom to experience a truly independent Internet?  The answer to both questions is yes, but I’m not sure how many people would be too concerned.

Another walled garden, or a choice of them, where we could easily find and experience the best on the Internet that’s relevant to us would be a very valuable service indeed.  In fact as social networking has to evolve into something I would argue that this is one distinctly possible future.

The Internet is simply too big to navigate on your own.  We’ll never find all the best stuff out there and the main search engines are all letting us down in this regard.

So bring on the walled garden, make the Internet fun and engaging again and keep us busy and occupied for years to come.  It wouldn’t be our only way to experience the web, just a portal website or browser plug-in that we could use.  We’d also still have Google, Bing and all the traditional ways of find our way around.  It would be an invaluable service for many however an I’d certainly pay something for that!

The first improvement tailors search results based on the searchers physical location. Imagine that Joe is searching for Pizza on Bing. He may be looking for the history of Pizza, how to make Pizza or, which is probably the most likely, the nearest pizza joints. Bing, with location lookup enabled in the browser, takes the guess and personalizes the query based on the user’s location.

A user from New York will see results listing the nearest pizza joints next to the physical location. It does not mean that results for other possible meanings are hidden from the search page. Bing still displays a Wikipedia article as the first result for instance.

Pizza is just one of the examples where personalized search may be helpful.

Here’s another example. We’re in San Francisco for work and looking for things to do in the city over the weekend. Where before we had to specifically highlight my location, now all I have to do is type “things to do.” With today’s improvements, Bing recognizes our location and conveniently serves “Top 10 things To Do in San Francisco” as the second link.

One could say that this helps lazy searchers, those who do not add a location to their search query when the are searching for local information. That may be true in some regard, but the majority of users seem to favor simpler queries and that’s where the location may improve the results for those searchers.

The second improvement takes a user’s search history into account. A good example is the search for acronyms like AA. The acronym has dozens of meanings from Alcoholics Anonymous to the Architectural Association School of Architecture. It is impossible to judge the searchers intention based on the acronym alone. Bing now analyzes the search history to make an educated guess of the user’s intention. If the user made architectural searches in the past Bing may display the Architectural Association School of Architecture prominently, a user researching holiday locations might be presented with a link to the American Airlines website.

Both of these features are only available for users who have their location at the top of Bing set to the United States. (via)

According to Danny Sullivan’s article Google setup a honeypot to lure Bing into the trap. Google manipulated their search engine to rank honeypot pages for 100 words that neither Bing nor Google have found matches before. In the second step 20 Google engineers began to run test queries from their home computers running Internet Explorer with Suggested sites and the Bing toolbar enabled. The engineers were also asked to click on the first search result on Google that would come up.

Some of the results started to appear in Bing 14 days after the experiment had started. Interestingly enough, only 9 out of the 100 searches produced the same result on Bing and Google.

As a result, Google assumed that Bing was copying Google Search results.

Harry Shum, Corporate VP at Bing, today replied at the Future of Search event:

We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users.
To be clear, we learn from all of our customers. What we saw in today’s story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking. It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment. But it doesn’t accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience.

It is a fact that Bing uses data from its toolbar to improve their search results.

The question is: Did Bing copy Google’s search results, or did they merely use the anonymous usage data from those 20 Google engineers (which included a search term and an url they clicked on) to improve Bing’s search results for that query?

There are to many open questions that the claims are not justified, for instance: Why have only 9% of the search results been identical and not a higher number or even all of them.

The honeypot alone is no proof that Bing is indeed copying search results from Google. The explanation that Microsoft is making use of user queries and actions seems more reasonable.

What’s your take on this? Let me know in the comments.

A new landing page was introduced that is showing the 20 top image searches of the moment. Users need to note that the new landing page is only available if the location is set to the United States. Everyone else will see the standard frontpage when they try to open the web address of the new Bing Images landing page.

A click on an image loads the results page for that image search query.

The new top image searches page is helpful if you want to know what people in the US are currently searching for image wise. It is a bit like Google Trends only for images.

More interesting are the new features on the Bing Images search page. The top has changed quite a bit as it now displays the top five searches related to the query in tabs with options to flip through them without a full page reload. These suggestions usually narrow down the original search term. Suggestions for my search on Budapest were Budapest Hungary, Map of Budapest, Budapest 1956 and Budapest Parliament.

This feature again is only available if the location has been set to the United States.

The major problem with Bing is that the search engine feels like an US-only search engine most of the time which surely is keeping some users from using it as their main search engine. (Bing blog, via)

Try This Search On optimizes the process by embedding links to other search engines right into popular search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo Search.

The links available are listed at the bottom of the search result page. This behavior can be changed to display them at the top instead. A click loads the results in the same tab, a middle-click in a new tab.

The userscript offers customization options to add or remove links from the default set. The list of search engines depends on the type of search. A general search displays different search engine choices than a shopping or video search.

Search engines are identified by ID. A full list is available on the userscript profile page and the preferences help page.

Search engines are removed by deleting their ID from the preferences. Users need to make sure to include the underscore before and after the ID when deleting or adding search engines from the preferences. Failure to do so can corrupt the full listing so that it becomes useless until the error is corrected.

Try this search on is a handy userscript for Firefox users who sometimes want or need to search on different search engines for a search term.

The feature which is going to be rolled out in the United States in the coming weeks will show friends’ recommendations on Bing. If you search for top movies you see which friends liked the movies shown in the results.

Today, we’re partnering with Bing to give you a way to bring your friends’ recommendations to online search. Your friends have liked lots of things all over the web, and now instead of stumbling across a new movie or having to look at a friend’s profile to see which restaurants they like, we’re bringing everything together in one place.

When you search for something on Bing or in web results on Facebook (powered by Bing), you’ll be able to see your friends’ faces next to web pages they’ve liked. So, you can lean on friends to figure out the best websites for your search.

Now, I’m not sure if this new “liked by your Facebook friends” integration in Bing is showing up for all kinds of searches, as it could be quite awkward to find out that some of your friend’s like specific adult movies for instance, or weirder things..

It is not clear if the feature will be rolled out to all users, but only available on the Bing US search engine, or only to US users on Bing. Another thing that needs consideration is that it is likely that Facebook users need to be logged in on Facebook to see the recommendations.

Most commenters at the official blog announcement post seem to like the feature, but would have preferred to see a mashup with Google instead of Bing.

What’s your take on the new feature? Is it improving search quality on Bing, or yet another feature that does not really improve it.

My personal concerns are that you may need to be logged in on Facebook to use the feature. Oh yeah, that, and I generally do not listen to my friend’s recommendations anyway, haha. Will there be an option to turn it off? Lets hope so.

There is no comparable Firefox add-on available to view videos that are linked on a page. The closest is GoogleTube, the YouTube Player. GoogleTube is only compatible with the most popular video platform of them all Youtube, and works only on search results pages in Google Search, Bing and Yahoo.

Video viewer, in comparison to that worked with three additional video sites and was not limited to search results pages either.

GoogleTube places visual indicators next to each video link. To be precise, three buttons are placed next to each video linked on a search results page offering to play and download the video as well as to display additional information about it.

That’s superior to Video Viewer, which does not indicate videos it can play at all on the page. A click on the play button opens the video player in a popup on the screen.

The player can be moved freely on the screen, and works independently from the rest of the browser. That’s interesting as it can be used to play videos in a small browser window on the screen while working on other things at the same time.

The add-on displays related videos and such, which means that it can be used to play new movies all the time with minimal interaction. The player can also be minimized, which is handy when listening to music that has been posted as video on Youtube.

The player can be started from any search results page that links to a video, or directly from the icon in the Firefox status bar.

The video player is fully re-sizable to fit any screen requirements.

While it does not offer the flexibility of Video Viewer, GoogleTube offers several interesting options like the ability to download videos directly from the search result pages. Firefox users who want to try the add-on, can download it from the Mozilla Firefox add-on repository. It is only officially compatible with Firefox 3, but can easily be forced to be compatible with Firefox 4. It appears to be working just fine in Firefox 4 as well.

In the interview, Schmidt described Microsoft’s search engine as their main competitor, describing it as a “well-run, highly competitive search engine.”

He said that Microsoft need to be watched and implied that they had perhaps been written-off prematurely by the media, especially where Bing is concerned.

The Bing search engine now also powers Yahoo! search and Bing recently overtook Yahoo to take second place in the search engine rankings.  This isn’t bad for a search engine that comes from a family of search engines that had awful reputations, and that’s achieved this in less than 18 months.

It was also clear that Google’s smartphone and tablet operating system, Android, is a secondary concern and that Apple, as a result, isn’t the main competitive focus of the company.

This is not really a surprise as search and advertising provide Google with almost all of its revenue.  The free Android OS must be a drain on resources and is really only a way to help market the Google name and maintain consumer goodwill towards the company.

You can view the entire interview on the Wall Street Journal’s website.

While eleven may not sound like much, it is a solid start and the developers have already confirmed that they will be adding additional cities in the future.

Currently, the following cities are supported on Bing Maps: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New Jersey, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC and Vancouver.

bing maps transit directions

Transit information can be displayed by adding two supported locations in the From and To fields, and selecting the Transit symbol afterwards on Bing Maps.

Calculations take a few seconds the most and display suggested routes to the user of the map service. Transit information include walking information to reach the destination.

Options are provided on the screen to receive car and walking directions as well, to compare those without much effort.

Directions can be send to email or GPS as usual in the end.

The transit information are very US-centric at the moment, and it is not clear when and if cities from other parts of the world will be added to the service.

Google’s Transit service is currently supporting more cities than Bing Transit. That on the other hand seems natural, considering that their service started a few years earlier.

The information are similar for supported cities.

Users who are living in one of the supported cities may find Bing’s Transit directions useful. Everyone else may use Google Transit instead, or rely on the information provided by the local metro site.

Interested users can check out Bing Maps on the official site.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine managed to grow from 9% to 13.6 in the last twelve months, while Yahoo fell sharply from 17.1% to 14.3 and Google Search moderately from 65.2% to 64.2%.

In total percentages, Bing managed to gain 51% in the last twelve months while both Google and Yahoo dropped.

All three search engines combined account for a total of 92.1% of all searches in the US.

us search engine market share

The number of searches confirms that trend even more. The number of searches conducted dropped from 10.5 billion in July 2009 to 8.8 billion one year later. Bing managed to increase the search volume by 28% while both Google Search (17%) and Yahoo Search (30%) lost search volume.

us search volume

Several factors play a role here. First, Microsoft did launch Bing 14 months ago and it is likely that the search engine picked up momentum in the first months after start. And then there is the huge marketing campaign for Bing.

But can it all be attributed to that, or are there other factors that play a role? Yahoo without doubt will continue to decline in the coming months, especially since their US search traffic has been effectively handed over to Bing.

Google has experimented a lot in the last twelve months, and not always for the better. The search engine has added elements to the search results pages, especially the new sidebar, more ads and more links to other services, the majority of which are owned by Google as well.

The search quality seems to have deteriorated in that time, and while not everyone sees it yet, it seems as if it will continue to deteriorate in the next twelve months.

Have you tried out Bing yet? Why do you think that Bing gained market share while Google did not?

Recent changes in Google’s SOAP-API rendered many security tools using Google useless. The aim of the Diggity project is to provide security researchers and network admins with a toolset to utilize Google Search and Bing again to uncover security vulnerabilities.

The two command line programs for Windows, Google Diggity and Bing Diggity, are offered as a free download on the project website.

Google Diggity:

The command line tool comes with a dataset of more than 1500 different vulnerability signatures, including insecure admin interfaces, SQL-injections, Cross-Site-Scripting vulnerabilities or documents that contain sensible information like passwords or financial data.

The commands define the nature of the search. It is possible to run the full set of known signatures against a website, server or IP, or perform a Google custom search which is limited to the first 64 results.

google diggity

With the retirement of Google’s SOAP Search API on September 7, 2009, most of the security utilities available for Google Hacking cease to function, leaving the security industry with a need for new and innovative tools. GoogleDiggity is a new MS Windows command line utility designed to help fill that need. GoogleDiggity leverages the Google AJAX API, so it will not get you blocked by Google bot detection while scanning. Also, unlike other Google Hacking tools available, GoogleDiggity actually allows you to specify a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) id to run Google Hacking vulnerability checks against a customized version of Google that will only return results tailored to your organization.

BingDiggity

Bing Diggity has not been released yet, but will be available for download shorty.

BingDiggity is a new command line utility that leverages the new Bing 2.0 API and Stach & Liu’s newly developed Bing Hacking Database (BHDB) to find vulnerabilities and sensitive information disclosures related to your organization that are exposed via Microsoft’s Bing search engine. This utility also provides footprinting functionality that allows you to enumerate URLS, hosts, domains, IP-to-virtual host mappings, etc. for target companies

Google Hacking Alerts and Bing Hacking Alerts

Google Alerts and Bing Alerts have been created for every vulnerability signature to assist network administrators, security researchers and webmasters with the monitoring of security vulnerabilities.

Currently, only Google Hacking Alerts are offered, with Bing Hacking Alerts released in the near future. Google Hacking Alerts make use of Google Alerts to provide realtime information about new websites appearing in Google Search that are vulnerable to one of the 1623 signatures. A Google Reader compatible RSS feed is provided on the project homepage. The RSS feed alerts are grouped into categories.

google alerts

This, in conjunction with filters makes it a solid defense strategy. The RSS feed is compatible not only with Google Reader but also other feed readers. Downloads and additional information are provided at the project website.