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Bing team released several top keywords during this year’s holiday shopping that was started one day after the Thanksgiving Day in America.
Black Friday shopping was on November 25, while Cyber Monday occurred on November 28, 2011.
Based on searches data compiled by Bing team, here is a table (on the right) showing a comparison between the two biggest shopping days in America.
Bing’s social networking partner Facebook controlled about 86% of all social media web traffic during this year’s Cyber Monday (November 28) and Black Friday (November 25), as per data compiled by IBM’s Coremetrics. Social networks influencers referred 0.56% of all ecommerce sales on Cyber Monday 2011, while they also referred 0.53% of all ecommerce sales on Black Friday 2011.
Online retailers have sold more stuff this year than last year. The two biggest sales days of the year jumped over last year’s sales total. According to IBM’s Coremetrics, Cyber Monday 2011 sales increased about 33% over 2010. Cyber Monday 2011 went up 29.3% over Black Friday 2011. As per the IBM report, the total amount of orders went up to $198.26 for Cyber Monday 2011, compared to one year ago which was totaled $193.24, or an increase of 2.6%.
(Chart: IBM)
Using its powerful database of billions of search queries, the decision engine provided several lists of most searched of 2011, including:
In term of searching for famous people, Justin Bieber’s baby rumor has helped the superstar to capture the decision engine’s top spot for the most searched people in 2011. The Canadian-born teen sensation and singer only captured number six spot in 2010.
This past summer married of Kim Kardashian to a basketball player also helped the American reality TV star to retain one of the two top spots of the most searched people in 2011. Kim was number one in 2010.
Several people who were popular in 2010 had dropped out of the top-10 lists, including former top-ranking golfer Tiger Woods, America’s current president Barack Obama, pop superstar singer Michael Jackson, and others.
(Table: Bing team)
One day after the Thanksgiving is called Black Friday, as Americans will flock into shopping malls, online ecommerce stores to buy stuffs to celebrate the holiday seasons. Many stores will open exactly in midnight of Friday to welcome all bargain hunters to get the cheapest products in the market.
The decision engine will run a new special URL at BingBlackFriday.com to help users to find the information needed for a particular product and find place to buy. The new URL BingBlackFriday.com will provide weekly update by pulling info from Sunday’s newspaper coupon sections, retailers’ coupons and special offers. At the same time Bing Shopping will crunch products information faster and provide data in simpler way to help users to make better shopping decisions.
(Screenshot: Bing team)
Bing Video is very popular among the decision engine’s users as the website can play short video clips instantly using "autoplay" tool, so users do not have to visit the URL of the particular website. The decision engine has just added a new weapon into its list of features as Microsoft acquired VideoSurf. Bing’s parent will pay about $70 million for the video search startup.
This well-funded Silicon Valley-based company has developed a very advanced technology that can scan and locate video clips from many websites include Hulu, CNN, TMZ, Metacafe, Fancast, Comedy Central, and Dailymotion, as reported by globes.co.il. VideoSurf received over 20 million users to check out video clips every month.
(Screenshot: VideoSurf)
Microsoft's adCenter has released several pre-holiday features to help Bing and Yahoo advertisers to run their campaigns smother. According to adCenter blog post, there are three top features include a sleeker web interface, a simpler desktop control panel, better tracking and reporting tools.
Web user interface:
Desktop control panel:
Tracking and reporting tools:
There are so many reasons for Bing to get in bed with smart people from the Great Wall nation as the world’s largest software company said “Ni Hao Beijing” and at the same time opening a new research center focusing on Internet technology in China called the Microsoft Advanced Technology Center. This unofficial announcement was cited from Sina Tech and later reported for America’s audiences by The Next Web. As per the report, Microsoft will open the research center to tackle four online services, including Bing decision engine, AdCenter, MSN portal site, and mobile Internet service.
Here are several reasons why Bing bets big on China? First, Bing’s decision engine master and also the online services division’s president, Qi Lu, was originally from China and graduated from top university in America. He can help to connect people from the two continents and two cultures easily. The decision engine master can attract top talents and engineers from China who graduated from colleges in America. By having an office in Beijing, this will help to attract top talents from the Far East countries (Japan, Korea, Taiwan) and South East Asia nations (Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam). Beijing is considered the capital of Asia continent.
Second, Bing signed a big partnership deal with China’s largest search engine as Americans celebrating the Independence Day on July 4th this year. Baidu will hook-up its English language search on Bing. This partnership is important as Google was kicked out of China early last year while Bing has set its sight to grab half billion Internet users in China and growing on daily basis.
Third, the two super-power teams from China and America recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of Microsoft Research in late September. On September 27, the two teams announced several big projects including the Tiger project which will help search engine users to conduct search and get search results faster by using index system called advanced Solid State Disk technology.
This week’s web traffic data for October 2011 from Hitwise looked a little bit difference from last week’s data from comScore. Bing’s share of search market in America remained stable and increased slightly to 13.23% in October, compared to 12.80% share in September (an increase of 0.43% share).
Yahoo! Search also made minor gains in America’s market share during October and captured 15.39% share, compared to 15.27% share in September (an increase of 0.12% share).
The Search Alliance Bing and Yahoo share increased to 28.62%, compared to 28.07% share in September (an increase of 0.55% share).
Google share of searches in America remained at par around 65% in October 2011. The world’s largest search engine dropped slightly to 65.38% share in October, compared to 66.12% share in September (a drop of 0.74% share).
(Table: Hitwise)
Bing Rewards team urged the decision engine users to redeem their rewards credits by November 30, 2011 and get a chance to win one of the five prizes including College Survival pack with a free Windows 7 laptop and Office 2010, 3 gift cards of $1,000 each from Target, and Xbox and Kinect bundle pack. The college survival pack will come with a $250 coupon for using at Cramster, a $250 coupon for textbook rentals at Chegg, and a $100 Starbucks coffee house gift card.
Bing Rewards November sweepstakes will be offered only for the decision engine users in America age 13 years plus. To get a chance to win the College Survival pack or a Target’s gift card prize, each entry will cost 40 credits points, while redeeming 50 credits points, users will get 10 entries. To get a chance to win the Xbox and Kinect bundle pack prize, each entry will cost 20 credits points, while submitting 50 credits points, users will get 10 entries.
For new decision engine users who signing up this month, they will get one entry each into the Xbox and Kinect bundle and the College Survival Pack sweepstakes.
Click here to read rules regarding the Bing Rewards November Sweepstakes.
(Image: Bing Rewards November Sweepstakes)
The America’s decision engine which is also dubbed as the “new-generation search engine” by Bing Australia team has ditched its beta tag this week. Bing is now running in full swings in the Down Under. Although Bing has removed its beta tag, Microsoft watchers found several features that are usually available for Americans are still missing for Australians, including shopping search, travel search and map apps.
With population of 22.3 million, about “… 3 million Australians use Bing search engine each month…” (or, representing 13.5% of total population), as per a blog post by Bing Australia team.
Formerly known as Live Search, the new generation search engine changed its moniker to Bing in late May 2009. Ever since the decision engine has gained more users in Australia, as Bing team blog post added “Traffic increased by more than 65% between June 2009 and Sept 2011.”
Bing team also urged Australians to download the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer version 9 to experience its enhanced homepage with live streaming video using HTML5 technology. America’s version of HTML5 was released on September 23, 2011 which showed a dynamic video of Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.
(Image: Bing Australia on November 15, 2011)
The decision engine added a new guide to helping its users for searching great sites faster and easier. At the same time, the new service will boost Bing results and helping its users to make better decisions.
The new service is called as Editors’ Picks featuring over 140 topics such as education, event planning, family, travel, etc. The current Bing’s release covers many topics, while as Bing team wrote “we’ll continue to add topics as we find great sites…” To get to know all topics, please visit Bing.com/editors-picks
All selected sites for today’s top issues and seasonal topics (incl. Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Valentine Day, and others) were picked and decided by Bing Editorial Team. For now, the service will only available for users in America.
(Screenshot: Bing.com/editors-picks)
The decision engine has been quietly testing “Bing Trends” that aggregates top stories for a daily basis. A new link was spotted on Bing’s homepage bottom section with text read “Bing Trends, See today's top stories.” The link to Bing Trends can only be accessed from the homepage or type-in the URL http://www.bing.com/trends.
The first series of Bing Trends started on November 6, 2011 with coding system #0, see http://www.bing.com/trends?form=pgbar2#0
As of today, November 11, 2011, Bing Trends has climbed to coding system #5, http://www.bing.com/trends?form=pgbar2#5
Here is a full screen of today's top stories (November 11, 2011)
(Screenshots: Bing Trends)
As Americans turned their clocks back from day-light saving time to standard time this past weekend, the search alliance combo Bing and Yahoo dropped to 30% share of search engine market in America in October 2011, as per data provided by comScore. The search alliance hit 30.2% shares for September, compared to exactly 31.0% shares in August.
In term of explicit core search share (with user intent), the decision engine’s share remained at steady level during the prior two months and captured 14.7% share in August and September. Bing went up a little bit to 14.8% share in October (an increase of 0.1%).
While Yahoo is still searching for its new CEO, the old-timer dropped to 15.2% share in October, compared to 15.5% share in September. In August, Yahoo captured 16.3% share.
Google’s market share in October was 65.6%, compared to 65.3% share in September (an increase of 0.2%).
Bing’s top executive, Yusuf Mehdi, has decided to move on with his career within Microsoft Corporation. Citing an announcement made by Bing’s President Qi Lu, Todd Bishop of geekwire.com posted a Microsoft's internal memo from the decision engine's master. Effective December 5, 2011, Mehdi will be the new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for the Interactive Entertainment Business (Xbox’s division).
Mehdi is one of the most popular executive in Bing’s division. Mehdi gave talks and chats at almost any search engine conferences such as SMX and Web 2.0 and others.
(Screenshot: geekwire.com)
Bing, Yahoo!, and AOL announced on Tuesday, November 8, 2011, that the three companies will form a partnership and cross-selling premium online display ad inventory in America starting in early 2012.
Online advertisers, agencies and publishers, will be greatly benefited from the display advertising alliance. The alliance will provide technologies such as real-time bidding (RTB) and to let advertisers to access the three-combined inventory of premium online display advertising.
Bing Central remained us about bCentral, one of the ill-fated product and service from Bing’s parent company. For the next generation product, the decision engine added Bing Central as the mission controller of all stuffs and settings related to Bing, including a centralized place to manage rewards, preferences, stock market watch-lists, news alerts, search history, and list of places (maps).
By login into one centralized control panel, the decision engine users in America (sorry World) can set Bing Preference, Location, Search History, Rewards, Finance, Travel, Maps, and News (see the top image).
Images: (top) login into Bing Central control panel; (bottom) Bing Central front page
Bing’s hometown university, University of Washington, Seattle, celebrates the 150th birthday on November 4, 2011. To support the birthday party and festival, Bing team showed a homepage image of interior of Graduate Reading Room at Suzzallo Library.
Many Bing’s engineers were graduated from this hometown’s university. University of Washington is one of the top universities in the Northwest of America. The homepage image received about 2K “Like” by Facebook fans. By showing Husky pride via Bing’s homepage will also help to boost the morale of the decision engine’s engineers.
Images: (top) facebook.com/UofWA; (bottom) Bing’s homepage as appeared on November 4, 2011
The decision engine team launched several updates on Bing Webmaster Tools this morning. Most of the updates related to technical issues including, crawl details on 300, 400, and 500 codes; URL normalization suggestions; data indexing explorer, and DNS records. One of the newest update was between adCenter data integration and webmaster tools account.
Bing’s webmaster tools account is now integrated with Microsoft Advertising adCenter. A new column is being added into the regular traffic data with average cost-per-click (CPC) column. The new column will help online marketers to analyze top keywords, keywords positioning, CPC, and traffic data to determine better return-on-investment (ROI) on all campaigns. As Bing team wrote “This new feature allows you to quickly see keywords, and associated CPCs, helping you plan your marketing efforts more effectively.”
(Screenshot: Bing team)
An enhanced version 3.0 Bing for Mobile app was released by Bing team early today. The latest version 3.0 is catered for Apple iPhone and Google Android users. For other operating systems including Windows Phone and RIM BlackBerry, they have to wait for while. The fine print text reads “coming soon to more devices.”
America's iPhone and Android users can download the new app at Apple iTunes store and Android Market. After downloaded the new app, users can go to m.bing.com to explore the combo of HTML5 and web browsing experience.
According to Bing team, here are several updated features:
(Screenshot: Bing for Mobile, Apple iTunes store)
Bing’s partner Yahoo! announced this morning to acquire interclick.com to enhance display business across its properties and partner sites. The acquisition of interclick.com may not have any significant implications on the Search Alliance between Bing and Yahoo, as the decision engine only controls pay-per-click ads on Yahoo! Search.
Interclick.com is popular for its technology solutions to handle display advertising space. The company collects and compiles variety datasets for helping online marketers to get the best return-on-investment (ROI). The company helps marketers to find the best targeted audiences via display advertising with variety of top sites.
According to Yahoo! blog post, the premier digital media company will pay about $270 million for all outstanding shares of common stock of interclick.com which was valued at $9.00 per share. Yahoo! believes the acquisition to close by the first quarter of 2012.
(Logo: interclick.com)
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