Google, Yahoo and Bing collaborate to form Schema.org

The three big internet companies and competitors of all time, Google, Yahoo and Bing have team up to create a unified project called Schema.org. Today it�s really rare to see three big rivals collaborate on a single project. The collaboration is a positive sign that even though Google and Bing are fighting for market share, they are able to put aside differences to help out the average consumer. Schema is a website which is all about how web developers and owners have to work on their website to gain more online identity on internet and on Search Engines.

Schema.org is a new website aimed to help website owners and developers with using a common set of schemas. This new initiative is "aimed at creating and supporting a common set of schemas for structured data markup on Web pages." The search giants worked together to create a one-stop shop for website owners and developers.

According to Microsoft:

Schema.org will become a one-stop shop for site owners and developers, providing the tips and tools necessary to help improve how their sites appear in search results on Bing, Google and Yahoo! It will also help search engines better understand websites, and moving forward, Bing will work jointly with the larger Web community and its search partners to extend the available schema categories. Consumers will also benefit from this effort by experiencing richer search experiences and content from a much broader set of publishers.

While this new initiative is definitely for the technical user, it should help to create a more unified playing field now that Google, Bing, and Yahoo are all onboard. The goal is to help site owners and developers improve how their sites appear in search results.

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4:56 AM | 0 comments

Enter Into Microsoft Speller Challenge & Win $10K

Microsoft have started a new competition between users knows as "Speller Challenge". In this competition people have to correct incorrect spelling of Bing Search Engine for better search results and the top five winners can win upto a prize of $10,000.

Bing feels that there is a lot of room for improvement in this area of their search engine as they are teaming up with Microsoft Research to offer a reward to the team that develops the best spelling alteration technique. They are calling it the Speller Challenge and goal is to "develop a spelling alteration system suitable for large-scale statistical data mining-based web search."

A common approach to spelling alteration is the noisy channel model, in which the received query (q) is treated as a noise-corrupted version of the target query (c). In this model, the spelling alteration system alters q into c and returns the latter's results. The techniques to best identify query/target pairs and best estimate these statistics are the active research problem that underlies this challenge. But that's just the foundation. Place the spelling alteration task in the context of web search, and you have another dimension to consider. The effectiveness of using a fixed lexicon is a known problem because it can lead the speller not only to miss "real word" errors but also misrecognize out-of-vocabulary tokens as errors.

If this challenge sounds like something up your alley Microsoft is offering a sample dataset for developers and researchers to use, a similar dataset will be used to test the effectiveness of the spelling alteration engine. There will be five winners with the first prize winner getting $10,000.

Click here to Enter into Challenge!

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10:16 PM | 0 comments

Bing To Integrate Facebook Features in Search Engine Soon

You may start seeing some familiar faces in Bing search results soon.

Microsoft deepened its corporate friendship with Facebook Wednesday, announcing tighter integration with the social network into Bing's search results.

Bing will display data from Facebook, such as user profiles and pages your friends have "Liked," to complement Web searches.

For example, if you search Bing for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 26-year-old chief executive, you might find a link to his personal profile, with buttons for sending him a message or adding him as a friend. That's in addition to the standard links to Wikipedia articles and news stories.

A link on that same results page to the website for "The Social Network" could show pictures of your friends who have inidicated on Facebook that they "Like" that movie.

The new Bing features will also show up in searches made from Facebook's website.

Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi was unambiguous about his excitement for the Facebook partnership.
"This is going to profoundly change how we search," Mehdi, the company's senior vice president for its online audience business, said at the news conference.

Last week Yahoo added new features to its search results pages, which are powered by Bing. In addition to slideshow enhancements and a new shortcuts feature, Yahoo began pulling in some photo albums from Facebook.

Despite advancements by rival search engines, market leader Google continues to gain.

Google was used for 66 percent of internet searches in September, according to market research firm comScore. During that period Yahoo had 17 percent and Bing had 11 percent, the report said.

But Google has struggled to form partnerships with Facebook. The search giant says it wants to tap into the social network's 500 million users.

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10:52 AM | 0 comments

Bing's HTML 5 Browsing and Animation

Amongst all of the excitement with the launch of Internet Explorer 9 today, the Bing team made another presentation with the introduction of Bing in HTML5.

The updated search engine will answer back at Google�s instant search results with their very own kind of search improvements, including taking the power of HTML5 and introducing it into their home page.

The new improvements will allow for an animated home page using the Canvas HTML5 tag. Bing demonstrated an animated beach home page, where the water crashes onto the beach, all without the use of additional plug-ins or video.

We also showed off a preview video of the new Bing home page last week, with smooth transitions from the search page, to your actual results, all without reloading the page.

The video below shows just how the new Bing.com will work, with animated home pages, smooth transitions between the home page and your results, including hovering over tabs to show off content, to animated weather.

The new updated home page is expected to preview in a month, and expected to replace the existing home page within the next few months.

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12:15 PM | 0 comments

Bing's Reply on Google Instant Search

When Google introduced their instant live search earlier this week, some curious web enthusiasts looked towards Bing to answer back at Google, including Long Zheng from istartedsomething.

Back in August 2009, Long Zheng developed a tool using Bing�s public API�s that gave the search engine an instant live search. What�s more shocking is, this could have easily been added to Bing, with as much as a simple JavaScript file, according to Zheng.

12-months later and Bing still hasn�t included any feature similar to instant search, however, during Apple WWDC 2010, Bing showed off a brand new version of the site, powered by HTML5 with some very exciting and cool features.

The early future Bing preview showed a smooth transition between your query and your results, a feature close to instant search. The HTML5 version of Bing also included a quick tab preview of weather, maps and other features just by hovering over the menus, reducing the amount of clicks and page loading.

The video also demonstrates a brand new mobile version of Bing, including endless image scrolling and seamless transitions between images, all using the iPhone or iPod�s touch screen. The mobile Bing preview also includes the background image, giving the appearance of a native app, all within Safari.

Bing in HTML5 could be Microsoft�s response to Google�s instant search, and we could likely see this being released by the first quarter of next year, right around the Internet Explorer 9 launch.

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1:50 AM | 0 comments