Bing Homepage Contest

For many people, their favorite feature of the search engine Bing is the beautiful photograph featured on the homepage. Now Bing is having a contest to select a users photograph for their homepage for 24 hours. The winner will be selected based on user ratings and by the Bing homepage editorial team. The theme for the contest is “Summer Travel” and the last day for the submissions is July 16th. So, if you are interested in submitting your photograph, visit the Bing Photo Contest on Facebook.

Focus Group on Bing Versus Google

A recent study performed by TechCrunch compared search usability on Bing versus Google. To sum up the study, most people prefer the design of Bing, but will stick with Google due to familiarity, the fact that they already use many other Google applications, and Bing’s new features are not large enough to make them want to switch.

The focus group consisted of 12 people and before the test all of them said Google was their main search engine. After the test, 4 out of 12 people said they prefer Bing.

Bing’s New Features

Are you wondering how Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is going to affect your organic rankings? Microsoft now offers a white paper for webmasters outlining Bing and it’s new features.

After reading through the white paper, it appears that Bing is still following the standard SEO practices. Click here to download the PDF.

Google Places “Discovering the Web” link on their Homepage

With the continued buzz of Bing, Google is taking precautionary measures to make sure they maintain their position as being the #1 search engine. Google hasn’t had to do much to hold this spot in the past. They have now added to their homepage a link saying: Discovering the web: Explore the world of Google search. When you click this link you are taken to a page that outlines Google’s features. This page seems to be very useful for beginner internet users. Google has had help pages before, but the help pages have never been featured on the Google.com homepage. Many of the features that Google offers are also available on Yahoo and Bing.

Bing TV Commercials

Over the past couple of weeks I have seen a tremendous amount of Bing television commercials. I have been impressed with the commercials that position Bing as the first ever decision engine.

What have you thought of these commercials? Do you think they will entice people to start using Bing over Google?

Bing is Now Live

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is now live. If you try and go to live.com you will be redirected to bing.com.

Here is a great article on Bing Tips & Tricks.

Try it out and let us know what you think.

Microsoft’s New Search Engine, Bing?

Back in April, I blogged about Microsoft Rebranding their Search Engine. Well, next week Microsoft is scheduled to launch this new search engine, rumored to be called Bing. Microsoft is planning on spending $80-$100 million promoting it through TV, print, and radio. This is a sizable marketing campaign, considering the fact that Google only spent $25 million on all their advertising last year.

In the meantime, Microsoft is going to unveil the revamped search engine at an industry event starting today in San Diego. At this event we will likely hear the confirmed name of the search engine. Microsoft plans to generate a lot of buzz about this new search engine, but will it really be able to directly compete with Google, the #1 search engine?