Bing | Cheryl Waller

Microsoft Improves Windows Phone Voice Recognition: 2X Faster, 15% More Accurate

June 17, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Google may have acquired Geoffrey Hinton’s DNNresearch and is now using his technologies to power its Google+ photo search features, but the academic work Hinton did on deep neural networks (DNN) is now also helping Microsoft to improve its speech-recognition systems. Microsoft today announced that it is using DNNs to double the speed of its speech recognition engine for Windows Phone while bringing down its word-error rate by 15 percent. Bing Voice Search, the company says, now also works far better in noisy conditions.

For now, these improvements are only available for users in the U.S.

Microsoft says it quietly started rolling this new system out to Windows Phone users over the last few weeks. The new system is the result of the Bing Voice team working closely with Microsoft Research, the company’s network of 13 research labs that work on anything from improving cell phone battery life and machine learning to research in game theory and economics.

DNNs, Microsoft says, help researchers build a smarter acoustic model to represent the acoustic representations of a language. Essentially, the idea is to build a model of how the brain listens to and interprets speech. You can find more info about how Microsoft uses DNN here.

There can be little doubt that voice recognition is a pretty hot area right now. Google, with its conversational search feature, is currently leading the way, but Apple (with Siri), Microsoft and a number of startups like Maluuba are also all working on products that use voice recognition, natural language processing and other techniques to get users just a little bit closer to the “Star Trek computer” ideal.

Filed Under: Bing, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Microsoft, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, speech recognition, TC

Apple Slips Default Bing Integration Into iOS 7

June 10, 2013 by John Biggs Leave a Comment

In an odd, throwaway line, Apple’s Eddy Cue mentioned that Siri, the voice control app for iOS 7, will let you search directly in “Bing.” In fact, the absence of Google was quite noticeable, reduced to a mention in the iWork portion of the event that the new web apps would work with Chrome.

Apple has been weaning itself off of Google for years now and with this release – and this pointed note regarding Bing – shows how deep the disaggregation has gone.

Earlier, the company shut down Google’s mapping app by creating its own (arguably sub par) solution. With this version of iOS the rejection of Google seems to be complete. While many will argue that the entire OS is wildly reminiscent of Android in the aggregate, this seems to be a catch-up effort that allows iOS to stack up to similarly outfitted devices from Google and Microsoft. Most important, however, it shows who Apple sees as its only – and most dangerous – competitor.

Filed Under: Bing, Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: apple, Blogging, Facebook, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC, wwdc

Microsoft Launches Bing Translator App For Windows With Augmented Reality Translations, Support For 40 Languages

June 6, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Microsoft today launched its Bing Translator app for Windows (including Windows RT). We don’t usually write all that much about Windows apps, and translation apps aren’t exactly new, either, but it’s nice to see that Microsoft has finally brought virtually all of the features of its mobile translator app for Windows Phone, including camera-based translations for seven input languages, to the desktop. Bing Translator, which is only available in Windows’ Modern UI/Metro mode, supports a total of 40 languages and also allows you to download language packs for offline use.

This is par for the course for language translation apps these days. Google’s Translate for Android app also features all of these tools and supports 70 languages.

Here are the languages the Bing app currently supports:

The seven camera input languages include Chinese (Simplified), English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
The app can translate to Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong Daw, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Klingon, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

Microsoft’s implementation of the camera-based “augmented reality” translation mode is a bit smoother, however, as it will just overlay a translation over the camera image (and you can tap to save the caption). Google Translate, on the other hand, makes you tap on the words you want to translate. Admittedly, that’s not exactly hard, but Microsoft’s approach feels a bit easier and more like what iPhone users are accustomed to from tools like Word Lens.

Heavy Windows 8 users (there must be some…) will also appreciate that the app integrates with the Windows 8 “Share” charm to give you easy access to the translation tools.

Filed Under: Bing, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Microsoft, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Yahoo Updates The Look Of Search, Bumping Up Results And Adopting A Google-Like Nav Bar

June 5, 2013 by Darrell Etherington Leave a Comment

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Yahoo has tweaked its search-results page today (yes, it still does search, albeit now powered by Microsoft’s Bing), with a visual refresh that’s meant to better emphasize top search results and that clears up some visual clutter in the navigation bar and additional settings sidebar. Yahoo’s redesign may look familiar, because it’s quite similar to the one that Google introduced a couple of years ago.

As you can see by Yahoo’s own amazing animated GIF, results now appear higher up on the page, thanks to a single-line navigation bar that appears at the top-most edge of the browser window. Yahoo’s branding is also now smaller, and there’s a sign-in area right of the search bar itself. Along the left-hand side you have a simple navigation menu, allowing you to change the search category type and choose from different time options for results.

Yahoo also says there are some improvements on the backend that should result in faster load times, and notes that the new Navigation bar will spread to other Yahoo properties soon (which is also something Google did before). The page takes most of its cues from the new Yahoo homepage design, which it launched in February.

The company says this is just the beginning, and seems to indicate that further changes for Search results will be coming over the course of the next few years. The company has clearly been acquiring enough in terms of new product and talent to make some big changes to all aspects of its business, so maybe we’ll see some Summly summaries make their way to the results page, sort of like they’ve already done on mobile.

Filed Under: Bing, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, search engine optimization, search results, SEO, Social Networking, TC, Yahoo

Bing Improves Its People Search With Autosuggest

May 13, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Bing recently introduced its updated people search feature and today, Microsoft is adding a few improvements to its people search that will make it even easier to find information about celebrities, politicians, athletes and many people with public LinkedIn profiles. Bing’s search box now auto-suggests names as you type. Because many people share the same name, this also means that it’s now easier to tell Bing who exactly you are looking for before you even hit the return key.

According to the Bing team, about 10 percent of searches on Bing are currently about people. This makes it the second most important search category on the service, right after navigational queries.

Microsoft has invested heavily in improving its people search and other semantic search features on the site, which now compete directly with Google’s Knowledge Graph. Bing’s Satori Entity Engine powers all of these features, which are typically revealed in Bing’s Snapshots bar (that is, in between the regular web links on the left and the social sidebar on the right).

In many ways, Satori’s mission is akin to Google’s Knowledge Graph, as it aims to help Microsoft understand more about the world. As Microsoft’s director of online services Stefan Weitz told me when the company released its last update to Satori, Google’s Knowledge Graph is a “kick-ass encyclopedia,” but Bing wants to go a step further and make all of this information “actionable.”

This new update, Microsoft notes in today’s announcement, was co-developed by its Search Technological Center (STC-E) in London in close collaboration with the User Experience team in Bellevue, Wash.

Filed Under: Bing, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, google knowledge graph, Microsoft, satori, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Now You Can Comment on Facebook Posts Directly From Bing

May 10, 2013 by Emily Price Leave a Comment

Interacting with your friends on Facebook just got a lot easier — If you’re a Bing user, that is.

Starting Friday, Bing will show comments from Facebook relevant to your search in the sidebar. From that search, you can Like a friend’s post, comment, or see the original post in its entirety on Facebook

For instance, my search for "New Kids on the Block" brought up several posts from my friends who are fans, one who was excited to hear a NKOTB song on the radio, and another who was excited to be going to an NKOTB concert this summer. So, if I happened to be looking for a friend to go to the concert with, I could potentially contact one of them. Read more...

More about Facebook, Bing, Microsoft Bing, and Social Media

Filed Under: Bing, Facebook, search engine optimization, Social Networking Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Microsoft Bing, search engine optimization, SEO, social media, Social Networking

Bing Now Allows Users To Like And Comment On Facebook Entries Right From Its Social Sidebar

May 10, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Bing‘s social sidebar, which shows relevant entries from your Facebook friends, Twitter, Klout, Quora and other services, just got a lot more interactive. You can now like Facebook posts in the social sidebar and add their own comments. In addition you can now also see all of the existing comments on a post right in the sidebar, too.

This, Microsoft believes, will make the social search experience on Bing even more interactive, engaging and helpful than before.

It also means users don’t have to leave Bing to engage with these posts. Chances are, after all, that they will get distracted by all of the other goodies Facebook has to offer once they leave Bing and won’t return anytime soon.

Personally, I’ve never found these social search results all that useful. Microsoft, however, clearly believes that this, in combination with what they are doing around semantic search, will allow it to continue to compete with Google, which seems to have de-emphasized social search over the last few months.

With its Scroogled campaign and “Bing It On” challenge, Microsoft has obviously been taking a far more aggressive stance against Google in recent months and it’s slowly adding new users. Currently, Google has a market share of about 67 percent in the U.S., and Bing is close to reaching 17 percent.

There have been some recent rumors, however, that Yahoo is looking to drop Bing as its search provider (Yahoo currently commands just under 12 percent of the U.S. search market with its Bing-powered search), but given the long-term deal between the two companies, that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.

Filed Under: Bing, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Microsoft, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, social search, TC

Klout Gets Into The Q&A Business By Launching Klout Experts (With Help From Bing)

May 8, 2013 by Anthony Ha Leave a Comment

So what does a high Klout score actually get you? The influence-measuring startup already offers prizes through its Klout Perks program, and there are bragging rights (unless your friends think you’re a loser for caring about your Klout score). Now Klout is asking users who are influential on a given topic to answer short, factual questions through the new Klout Experts program.

It sounds like the program won’t be rolled out to every user today, but when it is, you might Klout and be prompted to answer a question like “What is the best way to care for tulips?” or “What is the best place to take your date in the city?” You’ll have 300 characters with which to offer your answer. (Why 300? Co-founder and CEO Joe Fernandez said 140 characters isn’t always enough, but he wanted to keep the answers direct and to the point.)

Fernandez told me that Klout is working closely with Bing on this feature, so if there are relevant answers on Klout, they’ll be featured prominently when people search for a given question on Bing. Fernandez said the search engine team is also suggesting future questions that Klout could ask its users. At the same time, while Klout doesn’t have the same cozy relationship with Google, the answers should show up there, too.

For now, Fernandez said he expects most of the Klout Experts traffic to come from Bing, but you can also browse the content on the Klout site itself. The company will be highlighting recent answers from your friends. Fernandez also suggest the on-site experience will improve over time. For one thing, he said users’ various answers to a single question are currently being sorted on a single page by human editors, but Klout is working on a voting system where people can endorse the answers they like — though you can only vote if you’re influential on that topic.

Fernandez suggested that this could eventually integrate with Perks and Klout for Business — for example, businesses could start asking their own questions and offer Perks for good answers.

When he described the new feature to me, I asked if people might think he was basically turning Klout’s user base into a content farm. Fernandez countered that these answers are going to be tied to people’s real identities, and emphasized that they won’t be able to post unless they’ve got a good score.

“What we’re good at is understanding the quality of engagement,” he said, adding that Klout scores are “a really good fitness function” for ensuring that people will create high-quality, useful content.

But why is Klout getting into this business at all? Well, Fernandez argued that Klout has become “the standard” in measuring online influence, so now it can start building other applications and uses on top of that system. Klout Experts is the first example of that.

“Influence and reputation is our platform,” he said.

Nonetheless, he also acknowledged that creating the feature has been a bit of a shift, pushing Klout to hire people who have more experience on the editorial side and with user-generated content: “How do we get people from Yelp versus Google Analytics?”

The Experts program is currently focused on technology, food, music and travel. You can view some sample answers here and here and sign up for early access here.

Filed Under: Bing, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, klout, Klout Experts, search engine optimization, SEO, social, Social Networking, startups, TC

Microsoft Quietly Shuts Down Bing Deals, Launches Bing Offers As A Replacement

April 25, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

The daily deals hype around Groupon, LivingSocial and all of their clones has markedly cooled down over the last few months, but that isn’t stopping Microsoft from launching Bing Offers, a new local deals aggregator for the U.S. market, today. The odd thing about this launch is that Bing previously offered a very similar feature called Bing Deals since 2011 – a service that now seems to be gone.

As a Microsoft spokesperson told me, Bing Deals went through “a number of iterations” over the years, and Bing Offers is essentially the next version of Bing Deals. As far as I can see, Bing Deals’ emphasis was on aggregating the best deals from across the web. Bing Offers puts its focus more on local deals, but it also features a number of national offers, as well.

Bing Offers, the company says, will aggregate deals from “a broad set of partners, including many of the leading local deal providers.” Microsoft hasn’t made a full list of partners available, but I’m seeing offers from LivingSocial, Groupon (via Yipit), Spotted Fox, DoubleTakeDeals and a number of other smaller providers.

The service features the same kind of flat design that’s now the hallmark of most of Microsoft’s products and as a daily deals aggregator, it’s actually quite nice. You can browse offers by categories (food, activities, health and fitness, etc.) and, as Microsoft stresses, “the Bing Offers experience works seamlessly across tablets, mobile devices, and PCs, so you can access great deals regardless of where you are.”

Filed Under: Bing, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Bing Deals, bing offers, Blogging, Facebook, groupon, LivingSocial, offers, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Bing Questions Study That Claimed It Delivers 5x More Malware Than Google, Says It Blocks 94% Of Clicks To Malicious Sites

April 19, 2013 by Frederic Lardinois Leave a Comment

Last week, a study by German antivirus testing company AV-Test claimed that Microsoft’s Bing delivered “five times as many websites containing malware as Google.” Unsurprisingly, Microsoft does not agree with these findings and today, the company released a full rebuttal of AV-Test’s study. The researchers, Bing argues, used its API to execute queries instead of performing its searches directly on Bing.com. This methodology, however, Microsoft claims, bypassed Bing’s malware warning system.

Bing, Microsoft’s senior program manager for Bing David Felstead notes in his response, “actually does prevent customers from clicking on malware infected sites by disabling the link on the results page and showing the below message to stop people from going to the site.” Microsoft doe not explicitly remove potentially malicious sites from its index, he writes, “because most are legitimate sites that normally don’t host malware but have been hacked.” Instead, it pops up a warning when users click on these links.

The reason for this, Felstead says, is that when users search for a site – even if it’s a known malware vector – they do expect the site to appear in Bing’s index and would think Bing’s directory is incomplete if it didn’t show up on the search result page.

Overall, Bing says it shows results with malware warnings for about 0.04% of searches. Felstead also claims that Bing’s warning system blocks “94% of clicks to malicious sites.”

Despite the fact that the competition between Google and Bing has been somewhat heated lately, Felstead does note that detecting malware on websites is a very complex problem and that “no engine will be perfect 100% of the time.” On the other hand, though, he also argues that Microsoft does show these malware warnings on its site instead of removing the links from its index in order to protect users who may otherwise go to Google and “then click on it (because Google may not have detected it as malware) their machine could be put at risk.”

Here are the original results from AV-Test: