Remember the flurry of new features Bing rolled out last week?  Bing announced Wolfram Alpha results for nutrition searches, more in-depth weather results, enhanced hover previews, better maps, and turned MSN Video into Bing Videos. Well, it turns out it is also quietly launched another feature which highlights the latest posts from news sites.

If you do a search for “TechCrunch” or “New York Times,” for instance, underneath the summary information and deep links there are the three latest headlines under “Latest posts.”

This format is similar to when you search for certain widely-followed Twitter users and you get their latest Tweets. It’s part of Bing’s obsession with providing realtime results. Just as the recent broader integration of Twitter into search results brings the latest conversations into search, showing the latest headlines for news sites shows readers what’s breaking on the site without having to click through. Funny that it doesn’t work for the “Associated Press.”

Just to be clear, this is different than searching for a topic which is in the news and getting news results at the top in the form of headlines, which all search engines do. The “Latest posts” appear when you do a search for a specific news site. You’d think it would work for any blog with a feed, but it doesn’t seem to come up for many smaller blogs I tried.

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Remember all that talk about Bing starting to fizzle in September? Well it didn’t happen, and now October numbers and Bing gained another half a point to reach 9.9 percent market share of U.S. searches, according to comScore’s qSearch service. Five months after launch, Bing has steadily gained two points of market share.

And it is keeping the pressure on, with deals to index realtime data streams from both Twitter and Facebook (Google also has a deal with Twitter, but not Facebook), a deal with Wolfram Alpha for nutrition and diet data, and the constant rollout of new features such as better video search.

The biggest loser in the search wars, however, continues to be Yahoo as it awaits approval to hand over search to Bing.  In a single month, Yahoo’s U.S. search share dropped 0.8 percent to 18 percent, and is down 3 percent since the beginning of the year.  Meanwhile, Google seems unfazed, gaining another half point itself in October to finish with 65.4 percent share.

Bing’s progress is encouraging (someone needs to compete with Google in search), but so far all Bing has shown is that it can take share away from its future partner Yahoo. Bing has yet to put a ding in Google’s share.  Perhaps it needs to do something radical, like cut deals with major news and media sites for exclusive rights to index their content.  Otherwise it will just keep eating away at Yahoo’s slice of pie, which it’s already been promised anyway.

U.S. Core Search Share, September 2009 (Source: comScore qSearch)

(Table below via JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan. Click to enlarge.)

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The meeting came literally days after Rupoert Murdoch said he was considering withdrawing his vast newspaper empire from Google’s index, despite the possibility of losing a lot of traffic.

What was discussed provides a glimpse of what newspaper publishers may do next, and how Bing will collude in this new war on Google.

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Ever since Microsoft launched its Bing search engine last May, there’s been buzz that it’s been talking with Wolfram Alpha to license some of its search data. In August, I was able to confirm that a deal had indeed been struck between the two. Today, Bing is finally rolling out its first integration with Wolfram Alpha for searches around diet and nutrition.

Whenever you do a nutrition or diet-related search on Bing, it will serve up structured data from Wolfram. For instance, a search for any food item will bring up a nutrition tab and summarize nutrition facts about that kind of food, including the total fat in a single serving, along with the percentage of the recommended daily allowance that represents and other nutritional data. The results will be marked as “computed buy Wolfram Alpha.” Wolfram will also power a body mass index (BMI) calculator which lets you enter your height and weight, and calculates your BMI.

In that August post, I speculated:

Perhaps Bing’s deal with Wolfram is to license some of its data to create a specific science category search or a Q&A portion of the site.

Whatever it is, if it turns out to be popular, Bing might end up licensing more data for more categories of search. In the end, Wolfram could have more luck licensing its data to other search engines than bringing people to its site, despite the surge in “fall traffic” Stephen Wolfram is still hoping for.

There has been no discernible surge in fall traffic at Wolfram’s main site. Striking licensing deals with Bing could prove much more lucrative since Bing has much more search traffic and does a better job presenting complex data in an intuitive way. This deal makes Microsoft one of the first commercial licensees of Wolfram’s API.

Bing is also releasing two other improvements today. When you hover over a search result, it will bring in more information into the pop-up preview pane, including deep links to the most clicked-on pages in that site and a search box which lets you search the site without leaving Bing. If the result is a Facebook profile page, it will show the person’s picture, their network, and allow you to send a message or friend request.

The second improvement is a weather results page which brings together all sports of weather data whenever you search for a place or weather. Much of the data is what you can already find on MSN Weather—multi-day forecasts, satellite maps, and monthly averages—but it gathered on the fly in a new Weather Results page on Bing. You get the feeling that, just like it did yesterday with videos, this may be another content category Microsoft will eventually move entirely from MSN to Bing.

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But this latest video almost had a very different tone. “I thought about writing them an anti-corporate anthem, something they could raise their tiny, furious fists to, but ultimately decided on this,” Mann tells us. Too bad, because that would be been awesome. It could have been “Another Brick In The Wall [Part 2]” for the 21st Century.

Representatives for Bing also wrote us after our “torture” post to point out the backstory about the students singing the Bing jingle. Apparently, they decided to do it on their own — or rather, their teachers decided to make them do it. Still, it’s very creepy. And as a number of readers pointed out, a little bit too much like Jesus Camp (trailer below Mann’s new video and the students singing his song).

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The main change is that Bing has been completely revamped for touchscreen smartphones and devices. Currently, this means the G1, the Verizon Imagio, the Samsung Omnia, the Zune HD, and yes, the iPhone. In its blog post, Bing even uses a picture to highlight how nice Bing Mobile looks on the Apple device.

The new interface is easy to navigate, offering tabs for different types of searches, and an easy way to clear old searches and start fresh. It also offers a nice, visual way of looking up movies. Visual search is one of the key things Bing has been focusing on to differentiate itself from Google.

For those users without these touch devices, Bing Mobile has some new features you can use as well. An easy-to-use flight status checker is nice, but the key new feature is the NFL search results. Now, with Bing Mobile, if you do a search for “Tom Brady,” you’ll get a player card at the top of the results with his picture, season stats, and previous and upcoming games this season. This is a nice feature for football season, and could actually drive some usage of Bing Mobile on Sundays.

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As you can see in the video below, Microsoft has forced a bunch of middle schoolers in Pennsylvania to learn and perform Mann’s Bing song. The horror. It’s hard to watch this without immediately thinking about parents who accept money to allow their child to be sponsored. Is this the future of branding?

Mann actually sent us the video along with the following note:

I literally cried a little bit when I saw this video. On the one hand I’m happy I was able to provide some kids with an excuse not to do school work for a few hours. On the other hand, not sure how I feel about these kids being indoctrinated into the cult of, well, whatever. It’s kinda creepy. But on the other-other hand, the kids do look damn happy. So…oh well?

It is kind of creepy. Actually, it’s terrifying. Hopefully these kids at least got free copies of some Microsoft product that they won’t be able to use on their Apple computers.

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Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a surprise appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today. He spoke briefly with John Battelle.

Of note, Brin said that he’s excited about Twitter’s success because it’s interesting for him to see entrepreneurs that succeed twice. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams first big break came when he sold Blogger to Google in 2003. It reaffirms the difference a good entrepreneur can make, Brin said.

When asked if he had anything to do with the Google/Twitter search deal yesterday, Brin said he was aware of it but wasn’t personally involved. He also noted that he hasn’t attempted to buy Twitter in the past, though it’s not clear if that just meant him or anyone at Google. He went on to say that Google talks to a lot of companies about partnerships and the idea to buy is always one of the options.

Battelle asked Brin to comment on whether Google would eventually make its own phone hardware. Brin said that was a better question for Andy Rubin (Google’s Android head) but noted that Google has worked closely with a number of phone makers since the G1 to closely tie the software to the hardware, which he believes is important.

Speaking of hardware, Brin said that is an area that keeps him up at night with excitement. He loves the pace of innovation and is always thinking about what Google can do with new and faster devices.

On Bing, Brin noted that he uses all the search engines (presumably to test them out against Google). He said that he thinks it’s good that Microsoft is bringing stronger competition in the market. He also expressed disappointment about Yahoo and Microsoft’s search deal. He wishes Yahoo would continue to go it alone.

Finally, someone asked him where Chrome for Mac is — a topic near and dear to our hearts. Brin says that he’s already using it, the unstable developer’s version. He said that it’s personally troublesome to him that it has taken this long to get it out. He wishes they could have launched it at the same time, and really wishes they had a beta out already.

Below find the Q&A (paraphrased):

JB: So you got to chat with Tim Armstrong. Do you miss him?

SB: Oh yeah it’s great to see him here. We miss him a lot. But it’s great for AOL to have a leader like him.

JB: So yesterday the Twitter deal, how did that go down?

SB: I was aware of it, but not personally. It’s exciting to see an entrepreneur be successful twice. Blogger was great, and I got to work with Ev for a while obviously. It reaffirmed the difference an entrepreneur can make. It’s nice to see him be successful. We have quite the alumni community, which is great for partnerships and trust.

JB: Did you try to buy Twitter.

SB: Um, I did not try to buy Twitter. But when companies approach us, we consider the opportunity to buy.

JB: We talked to Sheryl Sandberg yesterday, another alum. What’s Google’s response to Facebook and Twitter?

SB: I would dispute that Google dominates the economy of attention. From the beginning, it’s just about coming on and doing a search and find these other websites. The web has grown, but people don’t spend all the attention in the search box.

JB: But you can make money there.

SB: When we started, you couldn’t make any money there though. But we made a bet that this would be important. It took several years to make what is now something that’s very lucrative. There will be others that we don’t realize now.

JB: What about the push into premium display ads?

SB: I can’t forecast what it will be. But at a high level, the Internet as an ad platform is efficient. It’s a rising tide, rates will go up.

JB: Google has been criticized for doing too many thing. Boiling a lot of oceans, mobile, search, ads, etc. Can you succeed in all of them? Do you want to bat .350?

SB: I don’t know baseball, is that like 35%? I think we can do better than that.We started Gmail, it was a pain to deal with email. There were client solutions, but none were that great. The web offerings were toys basically. With Android, we were trying to use other platforms, but they were closed, different, etc.

JB: Will there be a Google hardware device for Android?

SB: I’ll leave that for Andy Rubin. But we have been very involved. Ever since the G1. We want to work closely with a few at any time. You can’t make software totally divorced from the hardware.

JB: Do you like Bing? You a Bing user?

SB: I use all search engines out there. Bing reminds us that search is a competitive market. There’s Powerset that Microsoft bought. There’s Cuil. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on. It’s a shame Yahoo is abdicating.

JB: They would say they’re not.

SB: Sorry that was my impression.

JB: Do you have a comment on Microsoft/Yahoo search deal?

SB: I shouldn’t comment on that. But Yahoo had some interesting things, they should stick with it.

Audience Q&A

Q: What keeps you up at night?

SB: There are things that keep me excited at night. Primarily hardware. Moore’s law still continuing is amazing. 8 core processors, 2 terabyte hard drives, it’s incredible. Fiber optics too. Google looks at what we can do with this new powerful technology that we couldn’t do before.

JB: What do you make of the recent complaints about Google not paying their fair share to places like the AP and Rupert Murdoch?

SB: I think they’re just tying Google with change. The world is changing, the business models are changing. They’re making a leap that we’re causing that or we’re stealing from them, I think. I don’t agree with the conclusion, but I hear the pain.

Q: Where’s Chrome For Mac?

SB: I am using it. Anyone can. You have to go to a page that says you shouldn’t use it, but you should. To be fair, it’s not as stable as I’d like it to be. The timing has been an issue. I’d be much happier if we launched at the same time or had a beta now. We are all suffering from this. I do use it a lot now, but it’s somewhat unreliable.

Q: Give a 2 years or 3 years out vision of what Google Books will be?

SB: Yeah thanks for that question. I’ve been surprised about the controversy there. We want to make books available on a huge scale. We overcame tech challenges. We had to overcome the legal dispute, which we’re working on. These books have great content, even if they’re 50 years old. People need to access them and we need to pay them for that, we know that. I’m surprised by the resistance. But I’m optimistic that we’ll be successful and that we’ll provide access to tens of millions of books.

That’s a wrap

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After months of negotiations and holding both off at bay, Twitter now has agreements with both Bing and Google to give them access to its full feed of public Tweets. Both search engines have been yearning to drink directly from Twitter’s the realtime firehose of micro-messages and all that they carry. A rudimentary version of Bing’s Twitter search is already live, and it will soon add public Facebook updates to its search results as well.

While financial terms of the deals were not disclosed, full access to Twitter’s data stream is very valuable to both search engines. Depending on how much Twitter was able squeeze out of Google and Bing for these licensing deals, they are likely to provide its first major source of revenue. (Imagine, if they have to pay by the Tweet).

Tweets and other realtime data streams are valuable to Google and Bing because for many types of searches (news, events, sports, stocks, shopping, etc.), the most recent information is often the most relevant. And it’s hard to beat millions of people Tweetng out their thoughts—the “pulse of the planet,” if you will—for realtime information about every subject imaginable. Google and Bing need access to this stream of data if they want to keep their results fresh and relevant.

Up until now, they had to try to index Twitter’s site selectively by concentrating on high-profile Twitterers like celebrities. Twitter wouldn’t let their robots gobble up and index every Tweet because its servers wouldn’t be able to take that kind of pounding. But Twitter didn’t just want to hand over the feed of all of its public Tweets (the firehose) to the search engines without getting paid for it either.

Now that Google and Bing are getting the firehose, it could have a big impact on search results. For the search engines, the firehose is much more valuable than any single Tweet. They can index it and sift it, looking for patterns and spikes in keywords and shared links to get a better sense of what people across the Web are paying attention to at any given moment. This data can then be folded back into regular search results, even if the top result isn’t a Tweet.

For example, if a link to a post about healthcare reform on an obscure blog suddenly gains currency and is retweeted hundreds of times, that is a signal to perhaps rank that link higher in searches about “healthcare reform.” If people stop Tweeting about it, then maybe it goes down in the ranking. But Google and Bing can use the firehose as a rich source of signals to mine and then blend back into regular search results.

Of course, Tweets and other micro-messages will become part of results. And how the search engines display them and rank them will also determine how relevant their results are. Here is where it gets interesting because realtime search is a hard problem that has not yet been solved. Do you show the most recent, random Tweets first, or the ones with the most authority? And how do you rank a Tweet? We already have PageRank, but what we now need is StreamRank.

Many startups are tackling this problem, as is Twitter itself. And now Google and Bing can try their hand at finding the most important bits of data in the firehose. The results should be a more relevant, faster feedback loop between data appearing on the Internet and the search engines finding it.

Photo credit: Flickr/ZeroOne

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Sandberg’s key point through all the questions was clear: Facebook is all about sharing. But it’s different from a competitor like Twitter because you can use Facebook to easily share with one person, just your high school friends, or the world.

Sandberg also noted that Facebook sees a shift going on from an information economy to a social economy. This can be thought of a move from everyone just using Google to get information, to using social services like Facebook and Twitter.

She spoke at length about the importance of Facebook’s development community, both the Platform and Facebook Connect. She expanded on some data Facebook VP of Engineering, Mike Schroepfer, gave earlier, noting that Facebook now has over a million developers working on its platform. And 250 applications now have a least a million users each.

Sandberg alsp spoke a bit more about the new Bing deal, which Microsoft only mentioned briefly while announcing the Twitter deal. She made it clear that the data Facebook will share with Bing is only the data that users opt to make public.

She also noted that no money changed hand in the deal. “We’re not trying to make money on data,” she said. While Microsoft would not comment on the deal with Twitter, Microsoft’s Qi Lu did imply it was a deal that involved money changing hands.

Here’s a chart from Mary Meeker’s talk yesterday at Web 2.0 Summit that shows how time spent on sutes like Facebook is going up.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

JB: So earlier we saw the Bing announcement, but we

SS: We’re announcing today that we’re working with Microsoft to give them a feed of our updates that are open to the public. In the Bing search results you’ll see all data that users make public.

JB: So when will that be in Google?

SS: Oh you almost got me. Nothing to announce at this time.

JB: So Facebook is profitable now. That’s something you must be proud of. How did you do it?

SS: Yeah we knew that was going to happen. We think the numbers are finally showing the promise of advertising on the web. It’s no longer a one-way communication that you blast to people. Facebook is where you are your authentic self of the web, and marketers love that. We’re not only profitable but cash flow positive as well.

JB: What’s the date of the IPO?

SS: Oh, we’re announcing that later (laughs). Nothing to announce now.

JB: How important have online ads been to scale the business?

SS: Really important, we’re international now with it. We sell directly and we have a platform, both are really important for it.

JB: It seems like the referral system is shifting. It’s not just about Google searches anymore, it’s Facebook and Twitter now. Did you notice that when you were still at Google? Is that why you shifted to Facebook? Should Google be worried?

SS: What we see at Facebook is that there’s a shift going on from information economy to the social web. Google will continue to be important, the search for sites, but we believe in the wisdom of friends. That’s how I learned not to take my kids to see Where The Wild Things Are.

JB: What about Aardvark which using IM and other things to answer questions? How do you manage the tension between the things you do in house between what the development community creates? Like Aardvark.

SS: The developer community is very important to us. We don’t try to build everything our users want to use. We do the core technology. We have over a million developers. 250 applications now have at least a million users each. We don’t care how people share using Facebook, it just matters that we’re the technology to connect.

JB: What is Facebook’s unique proposition versus Google or Microsoft in competing for the social graph?

SS: No cake is ever baked on the Internet – we have to be vigilant. Facebook is about where you are on the web. You put up your most personal information. We’re the only place that you can share with one person, just your high school friends, or the world. And we can scale, as Mike talked about earlier.

JB: Let’s talk about Facebook Connect. Give a quick overview. Is it now better than it was when it launched?

SS: It’s an extension of our platform. So if you’re on a third party site, you can log in there with your FB credentials, and share back information to Facebook. I used to have meetings with people who want communities on their sites, but every site can do that. We make it easy to add your friends which you already have on Facebook.

JB: How much more will you be able to do? Not everyone is my Facebook friend. Will the core Facebook funcitonality come outside of Facebook too?

SS: Our goal is to help you share the most you can both on Facebook and off.

JB: Facebook Connect looks like a potential Trojan Horse for a monetization service, like an AdSense like product. Is that in the plan?

SS: Not now. We’re asked that all the time, and it’s a good question, but we’re not focused on that right now. Right now we want Connect to be easier to use, an work with partners for deep integrations.

JB: Are developers asking for monetization through Connect? How do you keep developers happy?

SS: There are different types of developers and sites that use us. Some are big like Huffington Post or ABC News. ABC News used Facebook Connect when Michael Jackson died – users talked through Connect. It’s good for us and them. But it’s not about monetization, it’s more about making it easier to interact. On the Platform side, Mark Pincus/Zygna is a great exmple.

JB: Glad you brought up Zynga, they make their money through PayPal. Will you do your own payment system?

SS: There’s a lot of speculation about that, but I won’t speak to that. But we do have payments already on the site for buying ads, for example. We’re also allowing people to buy virtual goods with Facebook Credits. We’re doing testing with a few developers to take payments in their apps. That’s all I’ll say.

JB: When Ev Williams of Twitter was here, I asked if he was flattered that FB is more like Twitter now. Was that planned?

SS: Change is in the DNA of Facebook. That existed long before Twitter. We think Twitter is impressive – they’ve built something important. The world is shifting towards realtime sharing. When we launched status updates, no one got it. Now people are realizing Twitter is important. That’s a global movement. Like Evan said, there’s room for more than one player in that.

JB: The scale is really different too, right?

SS: We do 45 million status updates a day, from 30 million individuals. That’s a lot.

JB: Has the vision behind Facbeook shifted?

SS: I don’t think it has. It’s always been about helping people connect. Certainly we build new things that change the service. We’re evolving.

JB: So you were in the Treasury during the Clinton administration. How do you think the Valley is doing at having a conversation with D.C.?

SS: Silicon Valley is an amazing force for our country. We’re changing the world. I think our impact on policy is not as profound. Other industries are better at that. Globalization, immigration policies for us to hire, we as an industry have more to do for those things. They’re important for all of us – free capital and labor. We can do better.

Audience Q&A Session

Q: Aren’t you moving more in the direction of strangers with your changes?

SS: Privacy has always been at the center of what we do. Facebook allows you to differentiate who you want to share with. A lot of people, or just a few. And now you can share with the public. It’s all about user choices. They need to be more granular. Should this status update be for everyone, or just for my friends? We’re still working on it.

JB: Yahoo, AOL, and MySpace are all moving towards content. Facebook isn’t doing that now. Will that change?

SS: No, that’s not going to change. We’re about sharing, our content comes from users. We’re an important referer of content. We will not hire an editorial staff and do our own.

Q: Any advice for marketers who want to use Facebook?

SS: Do it quick and iterate. Facebook is much more iterative, it’s two way marketing. Make a Page and update it.

Q: Can you imagine a future where Google and Facebook work together?

SS: I can imagine a lot of things, but still nothing to announce. More broadly, are we working with lots of partners for sharing information? Yes. We have an open platform, we want to work with a lot of people.

JB: That was not a “no.” (laughs)

Q: Does Google have to have an agreement to access your APIs? What’s with the Bing deal?

SS: The Bing agreement is giving them a feed of our “everyone” data. No money exchanged hands. We’re not trying to make money on data.

Q: What about older people now using Facebook?

SS: We want everyone to use Facebook. It started in college, but we’ve grown quickly. The fastest growing group is over 35 now in the U.S. The great thing is that Facebook is personal for everyone.

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Another part of Bing Wave 2 is Facebook data, but that will come later, and it’s vague as to how that will work. Today was all about Twitter as Lu introduced another Microsoft employee who works under him to demo the new version of Bing (screenshots below).

The demo results were impressive. It’s like a better version of Twitter search because it has more options and Microsoft has access to Twitter’s entire (public) feed of tweets to work with. With Bing, when you do a Twitter search, you will see both the most recent tweets, as well as the top links that are being shared dealing with whatever query you made.

And the most recent tweets come into Bing in a constantly updating realtime feed (there’s a pause button for it too). There is also a retweet button to easily retweet and tweet you see in the results.

Lu would not disclose what the financial terms were for this deal, but he did imply there was one. He also noted that the deal is non-exclusive. That’s important as there are also rumors floating around that Google is working with Twitter on a similar deal.

Bing with Twitter is live now, you can find it here.

Below, find the full Q&A (paraphrased):

TO: Why go to Microsoft (from Yahoo)?

QL: I left Yahoo simply because I had been there a long time (10 years). I told Jerry that was a long time. I sat around awhile, then decided to go with Microsoft. I took it mainly because I had the opportunity to have a big impact. We launched Bing about 5 months ago and we’re seeing good traction.

TO: Are you gathering new forms of data to help users? Is the strategy to be better than anyone than giving users what they want from many different pipelines?

QL: Yes, that’s our long term goal. In the early days of search, queries were largely about navigational results. Engines are now good at finding web pages. But we need to get better at determining user intent. The web has a lot of stuff like Flickr images; images are very important in search results, not just as separate queries.

TO: With Bing you got good momentum, so what’s next?

QL: Ahead we have things like Facebook and Twitter. Particularly Twitter. It’s still in the early stages, but there is so much information out there.

TO: Any truth to those rumors about your deal with Twitter?

QL: To answer the question let’s do a demo.

(A Microsoft search employee comes on stage to give a demo of Bing)

This is what we call “Bing Wave 2.” One big thing is visual search which we showed off last month. Visual search helps a lot for things you that regular search queries may not help with, like shopping for a camera. And top iPhone apps.

But the real big part of Bing Wave 2 is about real-time information. Today we’re making two announcements. We’re going live with a beta shortly after this announcement. First is a strategic announcement with Twitter. We have access to all the Twitter information in real-time. Ev Williams and Dick Costolo have been great partnerss. The other partner will be Facebook – that’s coming at a later date.

But the big partnership is Twitter. You’ll remember in Bing Wave 1, we had some Twitter integration for some users, but this is much bigger. We have access to the full (public) data feed. You can see the full feed of tweets natively in Bing experience, and this updates in real-time.

But this isn’t just about the most recent tweets, we also have “best match” to search the tweets. We do de-duping, to get rid of repeats. Then we focus on the quality of the results, based on relevancy. One way to to see how many people follow a user. We also look for context, maybe they have a link in the tweet that is relevant. And if a tweet is being retweeted a lot, we loot at that.

We also filter out spam and adult items that shouldn’t be in results. We also have the “hottest topics on Twitter,” which is a tag cloud that you can click on to dive in. A real key is to look at the links. We look at what’s buzzy and show those to you.

And with Bit.ly URLs we will show you the domain of where you’re going to land, so you aren’t tricked.

Basically, that’s a quick peak. Remember, this is just in beta, but it should be live in a few minutes. In an hour it should be fully up and running. http://bing.com/twitter is how you find it.

Back to the Q&A

QL: We’re very excited about the Twitter deal, but remember that’s just one part of what we want to do.

TO: Financial terms.

QL: We’re not disclosing financial terms.

TO: I had to ask. What about length of the deal?

QL: I’m not sure, but this is a win-win and there will be other partnership.

TO: If your goal is to build a mind-reader, you’re going to have to learn a lot more about people. Privacy concerns?

QL: Great question. We need full disclosure and full transparency.

Audience Questions

AQ: Will this real time Twitter feed influence actual Bing results?

QL: Great question, again this is just the beginning. There’s a lot of signal from Twitter, but the signal is still evolving. We can use them to augment today’s search experience, but it’s very early for what we want to do with this. When you lower the barrier for consuming information, it’s great.

TO: Are you keeping the Twitter stream? Is Microsoft archiving these?

QL: I’m not going to answer that cause I’m not sure yet.

AQ: In your deal with Yahoo, can you talk about the data sharing? Is the Twitter deal non-exclusive?

QL: The Twitter deal is non exclusive. With Yahoo, we’re working together with them to make sure we protect both sets of users with this data.

TO: What’s the value of the data you’re getting from Yahoo?

QL: The scale of search from Yahoo is the key. What we want to do is data-driven, they have a larger footprint in search, so we can do more with more data.

That’s a wrap.

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The deals will integrate real time updates from users of the services into search results. Google and Bing aren’t good at pulling in this real time data today because of the need to constantly index user pages, and the difficulty in knowing when those pages have been updated. Users have turned to Twitter Search and other real time search engines like Topsy and OneRiot to get this information.

Similar deals with Google have been rumored for some time, and we’ve confirmed that at least Twitter has been in discussions with Google around a data deal for months. But Bing is going to be first to announce these deals.

It will be weeks before the new features are live on Bing, we’ve heard from our source.

Facebook swamps Twitter in the number of status updates, with some 45 million of the short emotional grunts by users daily. However, Twitter updates are by default public. Facebook, in contrast, is default private and the vast majority of updates are currently protected from search engines.

Twitter has recently been criticized for exposing messages from users that have turned their accounts private – previously public messages remain indexable by search engines even after privacy settings have changed. Facebook is creating privacy controls, we’ve learned, that will allow users to set even previously public status updates to private, meaning search engines will be prohibited from indexing the content. It won’t be perfect, since anything published on the Internet is often spread far and wide. But it may allow users to hide previously public data to some extent.

There are two big questions that remain unanswered at this point. First, what will Google’s response to the Bing announcements be? And second, is Bing paying for this data? Twitter is clearly counting on data streams as a revenue source, but our position has been that the data is simply too valuable to give to competitors. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free and all that.

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At the time, the domain simply pointed to a page with a bunch of links. But since our story, the author decided to do something a bit more fun with it. As you can see now, wwwbing.com is a lovely page featuring a squatting troll. As a bonus, the troll is picking its nose and snot appears to be dripping out.

The site is titled, “Welcome to Walter Will Wawrinka Bing Fansite,” and it’s supposedly about an upcoming children’s book, due in 2010, that the author hopes “can be as successful as Harry Potter.”

So that might sound at least somewhat legitimate, right? But the funniest part is that Patrick McAuliffe, the owner of the domain also writes, “Feel free to do a search for Walter Will Wawrinka Bing in the following search engines,” and then goes on to list every single search engine besides Bing. Yes, even Lycos, AltaVista, and Excite. Naturally, Google is first.

What else is funny is that a query for “Walter Will Wawrinka Bing” provides absolutely no results at all on any of the search engines (though it may after this post!). This despite McAuliffe writing, “I know I have many fans around the world.”

In case you haven’t gotten the joke yet, let me spell it out: Walter Will Wawrika Bing.

I asked McAuliffe if Microsoft had reached out to him about acquiring the domain. Instead, it was McAuliffe who reached out to Microsoft with a proposal to sell the domain, and here is the response he got back:

Hello Patrick

I was asked by Bill’s team to personally respond to your proposal.

I am a business development manager that works with teams across
Microsoft to manage a review process of unsolicited proposals.  We
provide resources, feedback and next steps.

I have forwarded your information to our domain registrations group
for their consideration.  This group works directly with the various
business groups on domain names and reviews proposals to determine
alignment with our business.

I do want to help set your expectations on follow-up.  Given the
volume of inquiries they receive, they generally only respond where
there is interest on behalf of the business group. Once submitted to
the team, I will no longer have any visibility regarding the
submission or its status.  As a general guideline, if you have not
received a response within a two week timeframe, it is unlikely there
is any interest in your domain property.

Thank you for your interest in Microsoft.

Gotta love that Microsoft bureaucracy. But maybe they don’t mind that a site a ton of people are probably mistyping, redirects to a picture of a squatting troll picking its nose that suggest you search on Google. Who knows.

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The company expects the API (which will reside here when it goes live later today) to be useful for a number of things including injecting data into other websites, mobile applications, cloud computing apps, and even blog posts and articles that need certain data.

As we reported this past summer, one such website using this data will be Microsoft’s search engine Bing. But before that, the first use of the API will be with the soon-to-be-released Wolfram Alpha iPhone app. And the iPhone app actually served as a test case to make sure the API was ready to go, we’re told.

Data from comScore suggests that after starting fast out of the gate, and bottoming-out in July, Wolfram Alpha’s traffic is moving in the right direction again (see chart). Might this iPhone app, and the API further fuel a post-hype comeback? We’ll see, but they can’t hurt. More importantly, both will further emphasize what Wolfram Alpha considers its key asset, its computational knowledge.

From a technical perspective, this API “operate as a REST-style webservice, and can be called from any internet-connected computer or device and can be used with any programming language that supports HTTP and XML,” we’re told.

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Earlier this month, a couple reports came out suggesting that Bing’s search market share took a hit in September. Hitwise reported that Bing’s share of U.S. searches was down 5 percent (in absolute terms, it was a half-point drop to 8.9 percent share). StatCounter marked an even steeper 12 percent decline (or a full 1.1 percent drop to 8.5 percent share). The headlines followed. But now comScore says all of that’s bunk.

Tonight it released its qSearch market share numbers, which are widely followed on Wall Street, and they show no decline for Bing in September. According to comScore, Bing’s U.S. search market share remained steady at 9.4 percent in September, up from 9.3 percent in August. That is not blowing the doors off of anything, but it is at least holding its own.

Meanwhile, Google’s share went up 0.3 point from August, to 64.9 percent share. The biggest loser was Yahoo, which was down 0.5 percent in absolute terms to 18.8 percent share.  Since the beginning of the year, Yahoo is down 2.2 percentage points in share, while Google is up 1.9 percent and Bing/Microsoft is up 0.9 percentage point.

Bing still has its work cut out for it, but the shine isn’t gone just yet.  Here are the numbers:

U.S. Core Search Share, September 2009 (Source: comScore qSearch)

(Table below via JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan. Click to enlarge.)

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Case in point: Last night, we covered Google teaming up with DigitalGlobe to be a part of the just-launched WorldView-2 satellite. We called this “mildly creepy” since Google is now gathering images of all of us from space on quite a few different satellites. But not to be outdone, we got pinged from someone who was upset that we didn’t note that Microsoft is on the same satellite as well. In fact, there was even a Bing logo on rocket that took the thing to space!

So yes, we concede that Bing is trying to be every bit as creepy as Google, though I still think Google has the GeoEye-1 exclusive deal. Microsoft fanboys: If you want your beloved company to up its creepiness, I’m sure there are deals to be struck with private eyes, or maybe peeping toms, that can out-sketch Google. Good luck.

Here’s a bit more about Bing’s deal with DigitalGlobe. It’s worth noting that they also have a contest to inspire students to learn more about rocket design and science. Okay, that’s nice, not creepy.

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There’s no denying it is hands down the best porn search engine on the planet (although ChaCha is pretty good too). But Bing also had a snafu with Google ads that showed the search engine for “pornography” queries. Google took the blame for that one (see updates to that post), and at least it only showed up for people actually querying the adult term.

Now, a new controversy has popped up around a Microsoft ad unit that scrapes a page for content and then shows relevant Bing queries. The ads normally work fine. But last week Bing started showing an ad unit that contained sexually explicit terms, including at least one that I had never heard of before (the swizzle stick). Best of all, the ads were displayed on a WonderHowTo web page showing only Home & Garden content.

You can see the queries that were self-generated by Bing for the ad unit in the image. This isn’t just R-rated run of the mill porn stuff. This is stuff that’s still illegal in some states. Particularly that top query.

Microsoft is saying this is a bug, and they’ve taken down all of these ad units on all sites until they understand what happened. The unit is supposed to scrape only the page being viewed. In this case, WonderHowTo has sexually explicit content on other areas of the site, which may be triggering the ad content.

Said Microsoft’s Senior Director Online Audience Business Group Adam Sohn, who wasn’t too happy with the ad: “We are very cognizant of what we want the Bing brand to stand for, and this is not it.”

My response – “well, at least it’s educational.”

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As the video below demonstrates, you can use the new interface to search the Web by speaking your search query, compose a text message or dial a contact by simply talking instead of typing. The company cites a study from Sanderson Studio that found 40% of smartphone usage occurs in multitasking scenarios where the user cannot offer their undivided attention to their phone, and claims the new voice command feature should simplify their lives.

Despite what the title suggests, I think it’s perfectly fine for Microsoft to add features that plenty of people will find useful, whether Google came out with them ages ago or not. Competing companies copy stuff from each other all the time, so it’s hardly something to get overly worked up about.

Of course, the feature is restricted to just one phone on one carrier only for the moment, so in the meantime you can check out services like Dial2Do, although that application is more suited for action commands than searching the Web.

I hope in time Microsoft comes out with apps for the most popular platforms rather than keeping this type of feature phone-specific.

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Bing is beginning to find its way onto the iPhone through apps that build on top of its APIs. One that just hit the iTunes Store is an augmented reality app called Robotvision (iTunes link). Like other AR apps, it uses the video camera on the iPhone 3GS, as well as the GPS and the compass to bring up data about nearby restaurants and shops, including reviews. It gets this local business data from Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Once you find a place nearby, you can call it the business from within the app. A lot of this functionality is already in the current Yelp iPhone app hidden as an Easter Egg, but Robotvision has some nice extra features. For instance, a feature is triggered by looking down at the screen, which shows the business and others like it as pins on a map. You can toggle back and forth between augmented reality view and map view depending on how the phone is positioned. (see video demo below).

Robotvision also shows you nearby Tweets and geo-tagged Flickr photos. I’m not sure how useful these are in an augmented-reality app. Basically, these are best suited for surfacing information about a place directly in your view or right around the corner. There are plenty of Twitter apps, like Twinkle, that show you nearby Tweets. For the most part these are pretty useless unless they are people you know. I guess it would be cool to be able to point your phone’s camera to a crowd and see related Tweets from people in that crowd, but Robotvision isn’t quite that advanced yet.

Last month, Microsoft announced its Bing iPhone SDK, which this app is using.

Here is a video demo recorded last month:

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Every month since its launch, Microsoft’s Bing search engine keeps taking a little bit of market share. In August, Bing gained 0.4 percent to end the month with 9.3 percent of search query volumes in the U.S., according to comScore’s Qsearch estimates. Meanwhile, Google’s share came down 0.1 percent to 64.6 percent and Yahoo/s remained flat at 19.3 percent.

In other words, Bing showed the only significant gain, while everyone else stayed relatively flat. That $100 million marketing campaign must be working, or maybe it’s the improvements Bing is making to the search experience, or maybe it’s both. Whatever it is, it is translating into nearly a half-point market share gain every month for the past three months.

Bing is up a total of 1.3 percent from its launch at the end of May. Yahoo, however, is down 0.8 percent in that same period, so the combined gain is only half a point. But Yahoo has stabilized its share, and if Bing can continue to nibble away at the same rate, Google will have to start to actually worry.

In August, it grew faster than Google for the first time, with a 31.9 percent annual increase in search queries compared to 21.6 percent growth for Google and 16.8 percent for Yahoo. How long can Bing keep it up?

U.S. Core Search Share, August 2009 (Source: comScore qSearch)

(Table below via JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan)

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Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand keywords. Today at TechCrunch50, Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi announced a new visual search feature on Bing which returns results as an interactive gallery of images.

For instance, if you type in “dog breeds,” it organizes them for you in a grid of images that you can scroll through using a slider on the right. When you hover over a particular image, it enters the name of that dog breed in the search box. And you can re-order the image results by size, breed, exercise needs, and Bing popularity.

There are more than 100 visual galleries ranging from movies, books, and cars to products, animals, and sports teams. The sorting categories change each time. So for movies, you can filter by release date, title, or rating. Cars can be sorted visually by make, price or mileage.

When you resort, the images fly around the screen to find their new positions. The visual search acts as a showcase for Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, which makes the animations and visual rendering possible.

“The whole concept,” says Mehdi, “is that the world of search will change. There will be a more graphic way people will search, and it will pivot how people search.”

The judges were impressed with his demo. Ron Conway noted, “I think the huge winner here will be consumers because competition breeds innovation, and this nice little battle between Google and Microsoft is fantastic for consumers.”

Video:

Other Coverage:
Microsoft launches Bing ‘Visual Search’ CNET.
Microsoft’s next attack on Google: Bing gets visual search VentureBeat.
Bing Tries More Pictures, Less Text Silicon Alley Insider.
Microsoft’s Bing Introduces Visual Search Feature paidContent.
Making Search Prettier: Bing Launches Visual Search ReadWriteWeb.
Microsoft Updates Bing with ‘Visual Search’ FeaturePC World.
Microsoft Bing Adds Visual Search Option Bits NYTimes.
Bing: Now With Visual Search Digital Daily.
Meet an Awesome Search Engine for iPhone Apps – Bing Digital Inspiration.
Bing Search Gets Visual Technologizer.
Hands on: Bing gains Silverlight-only Visual Search feature Ars Technica.
Microsoft Bing Adds Picture Searches for Some Queries Bloomberg.
Microsoft Bing gets visual search; full 2.0 update later this fall All About Microsoft.
Microsoft Adds Visual Search to Bing PC Magazine.
Bing’s new visual search tools are both stupid and cool Daily Finance.
Bing 2.0 “Visual Search” Launches, Allows Search By Pictures Search Engine Land.
Is Bing Optimizing for the Short Snout? The Noisy Channel.
Microsoft announces Bing Visual Search MobileTechWorld.
Bing Goes the Visual Internet AppScout.
Visual Search – Why type when you can see it? Bing Blog.
Microsoft Bing Visual Search Option Helps Us Become Lazier Searchers Google Watch.
Bing encourages visual search Computer World.
Google Leads in Search Engine Quality Test, But Bing ImpresseseWeek.
Bing 2? Microsoft Debuts Visual Search Engine internetnews.com

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Bing is an excellent search engine. For one thing the surprising early reviews probably forced Yahoo’s hand as they entered into one of the dumber corporate transactions I’ve ever seen. So, kudos to Bing. Golf clap. Etc.

But one thing about Bing really stands out – it may be the best porn search engine ever created (see Badda-Bing Indeed). In private conversations Microsoft employees always said that the porn search feature was an unintended byproduct of good video search. But we always wondered if that was true.

Anyway, in May we noticed Bing ads on Google, which seemed a little ironic to us given how seriously the two companies compete with each other.

But one thing we didn’t notice until now is that Bing is also advertising on Google for the query “pornography.”

Which in our opinion removes all doubt about Bing’s intentions. There’s nothing wrong with being a good porn search engine, in our opinion. And why not go ahead and advertise it to the world.

Discovered via a TechCrunch employee who has asked to remain anonymous.

Update: From Microsoft:

“Microsoft has not purchased the keyword ‘pornography,’ and this term has never been in our AdWords account. It is our policy on the Bing marketing team that we do not have any adult content as part of any of our keyword buys or other marketing campaigns. The keyword that seems to be triggering these results is ‘free videos.’ We are following up with Google to understand why this ad is showing up in these types of queries.” – Microsoft Spokesperson

Update 2: From Google:

“Hi, Mike. Just wanted to follow up quickly on your piece on Bing from a couple of days ago. We can confirm from our side that Microsoft did not advertise on the keyword “pornography”. We have taken steps with Microsoft to ensure that their ads no longer appear in connection with this term.”

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Anyway, the treasure hunt apparently ended quietly a while back, when the campaign’s Twitter account announced that on August 18 someone had successfully retrieved both a website address and the password needed to access it. The winner, Gavin Ballard, was announced 11 days ago and I just stumbled across this blog post on i.techreport who revealed that the website was FastSafePrivateBetter.com and the password was ‘Courval’.

When you go to that website and enter the password, you can download a document with all the answers to the clues that were provided by Microsoft in order to find where the $10,000 was ‘buried’. Or you can just download the doc here or view the answers in the embedded file below.

Reading the document, I have to admit the campaign was more elaborate than I’d have thought and actually quite clever. The clues that were transmitted through the campaign’s Twitter account (which currently only has about 3550 followers left) were apparently quite mind-challenging at times and often required the treasure hunter to use Microsoft’s and many other – some even competing – online products to solve the puzzles.

It took Ballard 67 clues and 65 days to get to the correct answer.

And now I’m wishing I had participated in the online treasure hunt too.

Ten Grand

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Residents of San Francisco are a bit put off by the temporary closure of the Bay Bridge this holiday weekend. For the next 2+ days, the short bridge commute between the city and the East bay is closed, forcing people to take 30 mile detours through Marin County to get to Oakland, Berkeley and beyond.

This is a perfect opportunity to test the map products on the major Internet portals. Who noted the temporary closure and helped users figure out the next best route?

The short answer – Google wins. Yahoo a close second, and Microsoft Bing fails in this particular test.

Google Maps notes the closure, telling users “The Bay Bridge is closed from September 4 to September 8. Try dragging your route to a different path.”

Yahoo also seems to know about the closure, but doesn’t mention it to users. Instead, it routes you 35 miles through Marin county and over two other bridges to get to your destination. This is useful, but without pointing out that the Bay Bridge is closed, most people will likely think it’s a glitch and simply try the easier route (and be disappointed).

Microsoft Bing fails this test completely. Oblivious to the current road conditions, it blithely tells users to use the Bay Bridge to zip on over to Oakland.

Thanks to Noah Veltman for the tip, and the stunning image of the Bay Bridge above was taken by Thomas Hawk.

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