Indeed, calendar-wise it can be mid-December. But that isn;t stopping Microsoft from calling a new set of social, cellular and nearby search enhancements it is rolling out to Bing customers over the following few weeks its “fall update.”The Softies showed off a number of these updates at the Bing Summit 2010 event in San Francisco on December 15. Microsoft further detailed the updates in a handful of new blog posts.Some of the updates expand on the Facebook-Microsoft search partnership outlined in October by integrating extra of Facebook;s “Like” functionality into Bing results. There were a number of updates made to Bing Maps, and a few new “vertical” partnerships unveiled with OpenTable (for restaurant reservations) and FanSnap (for sports ticket purchases). Microsoft is adding new functionality to Bing for iPhone and Android (though not Windows Phone 7). And the company is updating its m.bing.com cellular site with “the latest HTML5 technologies” to “deliver an amazing browser-experience across many modern devices,
Windows 7 Professional Key,” company officials said.(Lookup Engine Land has a detailed and granular run down of the Bing fall update particulars on his site.)In related news,
Office Ultimate 2007, comScore;s latest search-share market data is out. Bing managed to up its share slightly in November 2010, while Google and Yahoo both declined a bit, in terms of “explicit core lookup share” in the U.S. (Explicit core search share removes certain categories of searches that comScore doesn;t deem to be actual “user engaged” searches.) Google had 66.2 percent (down from 66.3 in October) of the U.S. explicit core search share for November. Bing had 11.8 percent (up from 11.5 in October) and Yahoo had 16.4 (down from 16.5 in October) percent, according to the latest comScore data.Back to the Bing Summit announcements from today. TechCrunch noted that Microsoft is continuing to cluster its Bing improvements around the categories that are most popular among buyers: Travel, shopping, celebrity news,
Office 2010 Activation Key, nearby searches,
Windows 7 Activation, etc. As I often tell those who ask me whether Bing is my default lookup engine, the answer is no. If I was searching for a new camera to buy,
Office 2010 Pro, I;d Bing it. If I was searching much more generally — for news, an article I wrote, or information about something not-consumption-specific, I;d still Google. For me, it;s alot more about the right tool for the right search job….