As we alluded to in last week’s Index Quality blog, today’s update will focus on one specific spam filtering mechanism we rolled out a few months ago that targets a common spam technique known as URL keyword stuffing (KWS.) What is URL KWS? Like any other black hat technique, the goal of URL KWS, at a high level, is to manipulate search engines to give the page a higher rank than it truly deserves. The underlying idea unique to URL KWS relies on...
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Today, Apple unveiled the latest incarnation of the iPhone. Underscoring Bing’s increasingly important role as a service layer across Microsoft and beyond, we’re excited to support the release as Bing will be powering the new integrated web search in iOS Spotlight. When you search on your iPhone or iPad, alongside the contents of your phone Bing will provide web search links so you can find information even faster. Bing was designed from the...
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Last month, we announced the expansion of Windows Phone 8.1 with Cortana to China (nicknamed “Xiao Na”).  As you can read about here, the team did a tremendous amount of work to tailor the experience to ensure that Cortana felt intelligent and natural for Chinese speakers. Today we wanted to share some related work that was inspired by the question Alan Turing posed in 1950: “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the...
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Do you find that you spend more time digging through documentation trying to figure out what properties do rather than spending time building great apps? IntelliSense can help. A few weeks ago, someone asked me if there was any IntelliSense support for Bing Maps. I vaguely remembered there being an open source project that added IntelliSense for Bing Maps AJAX v6.3 in Visual Studio. With a quick search on Bing I found the project on CodePlex and...
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Bing Rewards is now offering yet another way to use your credits and turn them into fabulous prizes with a new Scratch & Win game.  For 3 credits, you get a chance to ‘scratch’ and win an Xbox One, Surface Pro 3, Nokia phone or over 5,000 other great prizes. Bing Rewards was designed to help you discover ways Bing can help you do the things that are most important to you. You can earn credits by searching the web every day with Bing and then...
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Coming off an exciting and successful World Cup campaign, Bing Predicts is shifting focus from the world’s most popular sport to America’s most popular one – football.  In particular, we set our sights on the NFL. As with the World Cup and unlike that of our voting show predictions where we had very high accuracies, we expect to get a majority correct, but no statistics or sentiments can fairly capture the energy, the passion and the preparation...
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Looking for an Xbox One or a new all-in-one PC?  How about a Surface 3 or an HTC One?  We’re teaming with the Microsoft Store to make that easier.   Starting today and running through November 1st, people who shop on the Microsoft Store will get free two-day shipping on orders over $75.  If you have a Bing Rewards account linked to your Microsoft Account, all you need to do is select the two-day shipping option at check-out.  Not yet a Bing...
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In October 2012, I was sent on a mission to get coverage for Korea in Bing Maps. And, let me tell you…it was not easy. When I started my mission, our maps looked a little something like this: Having been to Seoul several times over the last few years, I can assure you there are more than the eight roads you see above. As such, I set out to find the best quality map data available and chose to partner with SK Planet as our maps provider. South...
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As I mentioned in the July 15 blog introducing Bing Index Quality, one of the key dimensions of our work is web spam detection and filtering. The overview of our approach to this complex problem will be the focus of today’s update. What is web spam? On the surface, our definition is fairly straightforward and intuitive. We think of a webpage as spam if its owner uses black hat SEO techniques in an effort to game our search algorithms with the goal...
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We recently enhanced Bing Maps with greater transit coverage and additional transit-related features in Japan, helping get you to your destination as smoothly as possible. Expanded transit coverage               With this release, we’ve expanded the number of agencies and routes in Bing Maps. This means that no matter where you’re heading in Japan, if there’s a transit route that can get you there, we know about it and can tell you how to use it....
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