A Letter to Bing

Dear Bing (the Author),   We couldn’t help sit up and take notice of your offer of services from one Bing to another.  We were moderately surprised and mildly excited. As you might have guessed, today is quite a big day for us.  Even so, we dropped everything when we saw your press release this morning.  After an emergency meeting (three people were invited, all declined), we’ve decided to take you up on your...
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The sound of found: Bing!

This morning, Steve Ballmer is speaking at the D Conference where he’s unveiling our new search service — named Bing. Bing is rolling out internally to Microsoft employees worldwide today and will be available to you and your friends in the coming days. We spent lots of time listening to you, learning how you use search today and what you’re trying to accomplish with search. We found that search is no longer just a tool for...
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Announcing Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine

As you may have seen, Steve Ballmer unveiled Bing, Microsoft’s new search product today. Bing will begin rolling out internally to Microsoft employees today and will be unveiled to the public in the coming days. For more information on what Bing is all about, take a look at today’s post on the main Bing blog. So what does Bing mean to you as a webmaster? All good things; including an improved Webmaster Center with access to the tools...
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Are you content with your content? (SEM 101)

Let’s just say it. Content is king. There. It’s done. That’s everything you need to know about improving page rank, right? Well… Content may be king, but as in modern monarchies, the king may not be the sole authority. Parliaments now rule, and they are made up of many constituent parts of society. And while the quality of your site’s content can have a leading role in helping you optimize your site’s organic...
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MTV Movie Awards on Live Search

  This Sunday, Andy Samberg will host the 18th Annual MTV Movie Awards and unveil the winners in categories ranging from best movie to best kiss, and lots in between. As you may remember, we did our first awards show instant answer for the Oscars back in February. After all the great feedback we decided to continue the tradition with our new MTV Movie Awards instant answer. Just type in “mtv awards” and you’ll see our pre...
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Live Search Makes Playoff Searches Easier

Live Search Makes Playoff Searches Easier     When I last blogged, Derek Jeter searches had tripled and major league baseball was in full swing. Fast forward a few weeks, and while Derek Jeter is probably still a top search (when is he not?), some may argue that the current show stopper is Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins, who’s leading his team in the Eastern Conference finals of the 2009 NHL playoffs. Or Kobe Bryant, who...
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Live Search is listening

In a blog post last month, we identified the preferred method for providing feedback on any Live Search crawler issues you may have experienced. We would like to thank everyone for taking the time to provide us with this feedback and let you know what we have done on our end. But first, a little background. Our crawler, MSNBot, performs many different functions. We have blogged about our cloaking detection in the past, so I’m not giving away...
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Put your keywords where the emphasis is (SEM 101)

In my previous post on developing your keyword list, we discussed techniques and considerations for developing a list of relevant keywords and key phrases for the pages on your website that are highly specific and (hopefully) not overly competitive. All of this is effort is geared toward making your website stand out from the competition in search engine results pages (SERPs). But developing a list of great keywords is just the start. You now...
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What Do You Want to Ask Qi Lu?

As you may know, our fearless leader Qi Lu will be keynoting SMX Advanced on June 3 in Seattle. We’re looking forward to a good discussion between him and Danny Sullivan about the great stuff we have cooking on the search business. This will be Qi’s first public speaking engagement since he took the helm of the Online Services Division in January, and we know that you are all anxious to hear from him.   After the discussion with...
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Live Search offerings top the Webware 100 list!

Today CNET announced the winners of the 2009 Webware 100 awards (visit the blog post from March for a refresher on the Live Search offerings nominated). Live Search, Live Search Maps, and Live Search Farecast are all winners! The Web 2.0 user community cast more than 630,000 votes to determine the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications that are leading the next wave of innovation.     Other Microsoft winners include Windows...
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