Hasta La Gadget!

It’s been awhile since Microsoft made the Bing Desktop application compatible with more versions of Windows, but today the company’s giving current (and potential) users more reasons to enjoy it. Most notably, Bing now lets social folks peek Facebook’s News Feed and friends’ photos from within the application, leaving out the need to launch a browser in a separate window. Furthermore, Microsoft also added the ability to search via the Windows Taskbar and some handy customization features, such as keyboard shortcuts and more wallpaper options with the help of Bing’s renowned homepage images. Those in the US, UK, Australia, China, Canada, France, Germany, India and Japan can check out the revamped Bing Desktop now, though it’s worth mentioning that the presence of a few of the new tidbits will vary depending on the country you’re in and the Windows version you’re running. Either way, you’ll find the download at the source link below.

Filed under: Desktops, Internet, Microsoft

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Source: Bing

“Google it!” seems to be the mantra for anyone without having to blink twice these days when it comes to naming a search engine. Well, sure Google commands the lion’s share of online search queries, but this does not mean the “crumbs” left in the market are by any means small. Microsoft and Yahoo are still in it, and Microsoft’s Bing.com has not really taken off in a big way, but it has survived until now. It seems that Microsoft has decided to update the rather tired looking history page user interface in Bing.com without much fanfare at all, and the new look resembles what you would normally see on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 devices.

The text link is no longer there, as it has been replaced by a series of squares, where there are blue colored boxes which show searches for particular topics which have generated more than a lonely result, while white and black boxes will depict text searches on Bing, and you will also be greeted by video or image thumbnails in the boxes whenever similar search results under those categories are part of the equation. Bear in mind that this is not a worldwide change just yet, so do not expect to hear anything official from Microsoft until that happens!

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google Could Work On Next Day Shipping Program, ASUS Transformer AiO: Where Windows 8 Meets Android,

Microsoft has announced that Bing Maps has received a major update, with in excess of 13 million square kilometers of satellite imagery being updated. With the updates, the base satellite imagery is now comprised of 15 meters per pixel, giving a high-resolution look at the world from the comfort of your laptop or mobile device.

With the updated resolution, users can now zoom in to Top of the World imagery to a 13x level, at which point further zooming will pull up high-resolution satellite images. More detail is also visible in certain locations now thanks to cloud reduction, which removes clouds from locations where they are often present, revealing the details below them.

The base satellite imagery was provided by TerraColor, while bathymetric imagery has also been added, which is basically underwater topography. Because of this, oceans no longer look like endless blue swatches of water, but instead have coloring to indicate depths and mounds of the ocean floor. This provides quite a bit more detail than was previously available, which you can see represented in the image above.

Finally, there has been a release of additional Global Ortho imagergy to the tune of a tad over 203,000 square kilometers. This amounts to a total of 11,001,500 square kilometers, of which there is 100-percent coverage of the United States and 90-percent of Western Europe. Global Ortho imagery is high-resolution orthophotos that were taken “straight down” from an airplane.

[via Bing]

Bing Maps updated with 13 million square kilometers of updated imagery is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Bing, Microsoft’s attempt to take on Google directly. When it first launched there was quite a bit of fanfare and its market share grew quickly. It didn’t exactly hack away at Mountain View’s dominance, but it certainly made a small dent. Since then, things have slowed down and other players have asserted themselves in the global search battlefield. While Baidu has been riding high for quite some time, Yandex is a relative new-comer to the leader board. And, somewhat surprisingly, has already surpassed Microsoft for global market share according to stats provided to us by comScore. Though the margin is small, the Russian company saw more searches performed through its site than Microsoft in both November and December of 2012. The difference is small enough that those positions could swap again but, where as Bing has seen its numbers plateau over the last six months, Yandex has continued to grow. Of course, neither is anywhere near challenging Google which accounts for roughly 65 percent of the search traffic according to comScore’s numbers and both only see about half the traffic of the number three competitor, Yahoo. Microsoft can still claim one victory over Yandex in the number of unique searchers, though. If you’re curious for more we’ve put the entire chart after the break.

Filed under: Internet, Microsoft, Google

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Via: DailyTech, Search Engine Watch

It’s an embarrassing day for Bing, with the search engine officially falling in ranking under the apparently not-completely-obscure Russian search engine Yandex, which now holds steady as the fourth largest search engine in the world. This information comes from a ComScore report that shows Yandex as hitting a higher number of users per month in both November and December 2012 than Microsoft’s offering.

Not surprisingly, Google came in at number one with a total of 114.7 billion searches, totaling a whopping 65.2-percent of the market share. Baidu, a Chinese search engine, held steady in second place with 8.2-percent of the market share and 14.5 billion searches. Yahoo! came in at a modest third place with 4.9-percent market share and 8.6 billion.

Then, in a surprising turn of events, Russia’s Yandex came in number four, with 2.8-percent of the market share and 4.8 billion searches. This nudged Bing out of its fourth-place slot by a relatively small amount. Microsoft’s search engine is ranked at 2.5-percent of the market share with 4.4 billion searches.

Although Yandex is not a common name in much of the world, it is a popular search engine in Russian-speaking locations, responsible for over 60-percent of searches performed in Russia. Its ranking is likely established for the same reason Baidu’s is – the large population to which it caters. The thing to keep in mind, however, is that while Microsoft’s search engine score is determined by multiple services/properties, Yandex is just Yandex – a Russian search engine that stands on its own, with no outlier software, that still beat Bing.

[via Search Engine Watch]

Bing falls in the rankings, is replaced by Russian search engine is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.