Live Search

Live Search

URL	bing.com
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Search Engine
Owner	Microsoft
Created by	Microsoft
Launched	March 8, 2006 (beta) September 11, 2006 (1.0) September 26, 2007 (2.0)
Current status of site	Inactive; rebranded as Bing

Live Search (formerly Windows Live Search and MSN Search) was the name of Microsoft's web search engine, designed to compete with industry leaders Google and Yahoo!. It was subsequently rebranded as Bing.

The search engine offered some innovative features, such as the ability to view additional search results on the same web page (instead of needing to click through to subsequent search result pages) and the ability to dynamically adjust the amount of information displayed for each search-result (such as just the title, a short summary, or a longer summary). It also allowed the user to save searches and see them updated automatically on Live.com.

Live Search was one service among many such web based services, such as Instant Messenger, Blog, Email, file sharing, and others. While dozens of search engines retired from highly competitive search engine market over the decades, Bing (rebranded Live Search) has maintained its popularity due to Microsoft's continuous progress in technology and market strategies.

History

MSN Search

MSN Search was a search engine by Microsoft that included a search engine, index, and web crawler. As of September 12, 2006, MSN Search is now Live Search. Live Search offers users the ability to search for specific types of information using search tabs that include Web, news, images, music, desktop, local, and Microsoft Encarta. MSN Search aims to make its over 2.5 billion worldwide queries each month "more useful by providing consumers with improved access to information and more precise answers to their questions." A configuration menu is available to change the default search engine in Internet Explorer, but the selection is sometimes criticized as being limited, and a custom URL cannot be entered without installing an add-on.

MSN Search was first launched in the fall of 1998 using search results from Inktomi. In early 1999, MSN Search launched a version which displayed listings from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. Since then Microsoft upgraded MSN Search to provide its own Microsoft-built search engine results (list of web addresses with samples of content that meet a user's query), the index of which is updated weekly or even daily. The upgrade started as a beta program in November 2004 (based on several years of research), and came out of beta in February 2005. Image search was powered by a third party, Picsearch. The service also started providing its search results to other search engine portals in an effort to better compete in the market.

Live Search

The first public beta of Live Search was unveiled on March 8, 2006, with the final release on September 11, 2006, replacing MSN Search.

On March 21, 2007, it was announced that Microsoft would separate its Live Search developments from the Windows Live services family. Live Search was integrated into the Live Search and Ad Platform headed by Satya Nadella, part of Microsoft's Platform and Systems division. As part of this change, Live Search was consolidated with Microsoft adCenter.

In the roll-over from MSN Search to Live Search, Microsoft stopped using Picsearch as their image search provider and started performing their own image search, fueled by their own internal image search algorithms.

On March 21, 2007, Microsoft announced that it would separate its search developments from the Windows Live services family, rebranding the service as Live Search. Live Search was integrated into the Live Search and Ad Platform headed by Satya Nadella, part of Microsoft's Platform and Systems division. As part of this change, Live Search was merged with Microsoft adCenter.

A series of reorganisations and consolidations of Microsoft's search offerings were made under the Live Search branding. On May 23, 2008, Microsoft announced the discontinuation of Live Search Books and Live Search Academic and integrated all academic and book search results into regular search, and as a result this also included the closure of Live Search Books Publisher Program. Soon after, Windows Live Expo was discontinued on July 31, 2008. Live Search Macros, a service for users to create their own custom search engines or use macros created by other users, was also discontinued shortly after. On May 15, 2009, Live Product Upload, a service which allowed merchants to upload products information onto Live Search Products, was discontinued. The final reorganisation came as Live Search QnA was rebranded as MSN QnA on February 18, 2009, however, it was subsequently discontinued on May 21, 2009.

Rebrand as Bing

Microsoft recognised that there would be a problem with branding as long as the word "Live" remained in the name. As an effort to create a new identity for Microsoft's search services, Live Search was officially replaced by Bing on June 3, 2009.

The Bing name was chosen through focus groups, and Microsoft decided that the name was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that it would function well as a URL around the world. The word would remind people of the sound made during "the moment of discovery and decision making." Microsoft was assisted by branding consultancy Interbrand in their search for the best name for the new search engine. The name also has strong similarity to the word 'bingo', which is used to mean that something sought has been found or realized, as is interjected when winning the game Bingo.

According to the Guardian "[Microsoft] hasn't confirmed that it stands recursively for Bing Is Not Google, but that's the sort of joke software engineers enjoy."

Qi Lu, president of Microsoft Online Services, also announced that Bing's official Chinese name is bì yìng (simplified Chinese: 必应; traditional Chinese: 必應), which literally means "very certain to respond" or "very certain to answer" in Chinese.

While being tested internally by Microsoft employees, Bing's codename was Kumo (くも), which came from the Japanese word for spider (蜘蛛; くも, kumo) as well as cloud (雲; くも, kumo), referring to the manner in which search engines "spider" Internet resources to add them to their database, as well as cloud computing.

Before the launch of Bing, the market share of Microsoft web search pages (MSN and Live search) had been small. While Google retains the largest portion, Bing's market share increased to overtake Yahoo!

Features

Interface features

• Daily changing of background image. The images are mostly of noteworthy places in the world, though it sometimes displays animals, people, and sports. The background image also contains information about the element(s) shown in the image
• Video homepage for HTML5 enabled browsers on occasional events, similar to the daily background images
• Images page shows the main picture from that day and four searches that refers to that image with three preview pictures per search term
• Left side navigation pane. Includes navigation and, on results pages, related searches and prior searches
• Right side extended preview which shows a bigger view of the page and gives URLs to links inside of the page
• Sublinks – On certain search results, the search result page also shows section links within the article (this is also done on other search engines, including Google)
• Enhanced view where third party site information can be viewed inside Bing
• On certain sites, search from within the website on the results page
• On certain sites, Bing will display the Customer Service number on the results page

Media features

• Video thumbnail Preview – where, by hovering over a video thumbnail, the video automatically starts playing
• Image search with continuous scrolling images results page that has adjustable settings for size, layout, color, style, and people
• Advanced filters or advanced (query) operators – allow users to refine search results based on properties such as image size, aspect ratio, color or black and white, photo or illustration, and facial features recognition
• Video search with adjustable setting for length, screen size, resolution, and source

Instant answers

• Sports – Bing can directly display scores from a specific day, recent scores from a league or scores and statistics on teams or players.
• Finance – When entering a company name or stock symbol and either stock or quote in the search box Bing will show direct stock information like a stockchart, price, volume, and p/e ratio in a webslice that users can subscribe to.
• Conversion of units (e.g., 1 oz in tbs, 1 cup in oz)
• Mathematical calculations – (e.g., 2 *pi *24). Users can enter mathematical expressions in the search box using a variety of operators and trigonometric functions and Bing will provide a direct calculation of the expression.
• Advanced computations – Using the Wolfram Alpha computational engine, Bing can also give results to advanced mathematical problems (e.g. "lim x/2x as x->2") and other Wolfram Alpha-related queries (e.g., asking the number of calories in a typical pizza).
• Package tracking and tracing – When a user types the name of the shipping company and the tracking number, Bing will provide direct tracking information
• Dictionary – When "define", "definition", or "what is" followed by a word is entered in the searchbox Bing will show a direct answer from the Oxford English Dictionary
• Spell check – Will change frequently misspelled search terms to the more commonly spelled alternative.
• Best match (plus similar sites)
• Product shopping and "Bing cashback"
• Health information
• Flight tracking
• Translate – Auto translation of certain search phrases, often with phrases including "translate" or "in English". For example, to translate me llamo from Spanish to English the user would simply type "translate me llamo in English" and he or she would be redirected to a search results page with Bing Translator with the translation from Spanish to EnglishTemplate:Disputed inline

Local info

• Current traffic information
• Business listing
• People listing
• Collections
• Localized searching for restaurants and services
• Localized searching for coupons and deals
• Restaurant reviews
• Movies played in an area – When a current movie title is entered in the search box Bing will provide listings of local theaters showing the movie. When a city is added to the search box, Bing provides the movie listings localized for that city.
• City hotel listings – When "hotels" and a city name is entered in the search box Bing can provide hotel listings with a map. The listing leads to a detail search page with the hotels listed that holds extended information on the hotels and contains links to reviews, directions reservations and bird-eye view of the hotel. On the page with the listings the list can be refined by settings on ratings, pricing, amenities, payment, and parking

International

Bing is available in many languages and has been localized for many countries. Even if the language of the search and of the results are the same, Bing delivers substantially different results for different parts of the world.

Search products

In addition to its tool for searching web pages, Bing also provides the following search offerings:

Service	Description
Advertising	Formally known as adCenter, Bing Ads allows publishers to purchase pay per click advertising on Bing.
Dictionary	Bing Dictionary enables users to quickly search for definitions of English words. Bing Dictionary results are based on the Oxford English Dictionary.[citation needed] In addition, Bing Dictionary also provides an audio player for users to hear the pronunciation of the dictionary words.
Events	Bing Events allow users to search for upcoming events from Zvents, and displays the date and time, venue details, brief description, as well as method to purchase tickets for the events listed. Users can also filter the search results by date and categories.
Finance	Bing Finance enables users to search for exchange listed stocks and displays the relevant stock information, company profile and statistics, financial statements, stock ratings, analyst recommendations, as well as news related to the particular stock or company. Bing Finance also allow users to view the historical data of the particular stock, and allows comparison of the stock to major indices. In addition, Bing Finance also features a JavaScript-based Stock screener, allowing investors to quickly filter for value, contrarian, high-yield, and bargain investment strategies.
Health	Bing Health refines health searches using related medical concepts to get relevant health information and to allow users to navigate complex medical topics with inline article results from experts. This feature is based on the Medstory acquisition.
Images	Bing Images enables the user to quickly search and display most relevant photos and images of interest. The advance filters allow refining search results in terms of properties such as image size, aspect ratio, color or black and white, photo or illustration, and facial features recognition.
Local	Bing Local searches local business listings with business details and reviews, allowing users to make more informed decisions.
Maps	Bing Maps enables the user to search for businesses, addresses, landmarks and street names worldwide, and can select from a road-map style view, a satellite view or a hybrid of the two. Also available are "bird's-eye" images for many cities worldwide, and 3D maps which include virtual 3D navigation and to-scale terrain and 3D buildings. For business users it will be available as "Bing Maps For Enterprise".
News	Bing News is a news aggregator and provides news results relevant to the search query from a wide range of online news and information services.
Recipe	Bing Recipe allow users to search for cooking recipes sourced from Delish.com, MyRecipes.com, and Epicurious.com, and allow users to filter recipe results based on their ratings, cuisine, convenience, occasion, ingredient, course, cooking method, and recipe provider.
Reference	Bing Reference semantically indexes Wikipedia content and displays them in an enhanced view within Bing.[citation needed] It also allow users to input search queries that resembles full questions and highlights the answer within search results. This feature is based on the Powerset acquisition.
Social	Bing Social allow users to search for and retrieve real-time information from Twitter and Facebook services. Bing Social search also provides "best match" and "social captions" functionalities that prioritises results based on relevance and contexts. Only public feeds from the past 7 days will be displayed in Bing Social search results.
Translator	Bing Translator lets users translate texts or entire web pages into different languages.
University	Bing University allow users to search for and view detailed information about United States universities, including information such as admissions, cost, financial aid, student body, and graduation rate.
Videos	Bing Videos enables the user to quickly search and view videos online from various websites. The Smart Preview feature allows the user to instantly watch a short preview of an original video. Bing Videos also allow users to access editorial video contents from MSN Video.
Visual Search	Bing Visual Search (Announced Sept 2009, deprecated – July 2012) allowed users to refine their search queries for structured results through data-grouping image galleries that resembles "large online catalogues", powered by Silverlight
Weather	Bing Weather allow users to search for the local weather for cities around the world, displaying the current weather information and also extended weather forecasts for the next 10 days. Weather information are provided by Intellicast and Foreca.
Wolfram Alpha	Bing Wolfram Alpha allow users to directly enter factual queries within Bing and provides answers and relevant visualizations from a core knowledge base of curated, structured data provided by Wolfram Alpha. Bing Wolfram Alpha can also answer mathematical and algebraic questions.

Webmaster services

Bing allows webmasters to manage the web crawling status of their own websites through Bing Webmaster Center. Additionally, users may also submit contents to Bing via the Bing Local Listing Center, which allows businesses to add business listings onto Bing Maps and Bing Local.

Mobile services

Bing Mobile allow users to conduct search queries on their mobile devices, either via the mobile browser or a downloadable mobile application.

Search results

Live Search is not limited to reporting back indexed pages corresponding to a plain search query. When entering a search query using multiple words Live Search will search results trying to match all the keywords. However Live Search also contains advanced search options available through an advanced link and dropdown options, or directly via entering advanced options in the search query:

Advanced search options

In searches on Live search you can use operators to improve search results. Live Search recognizes the following operator symbols:

• +: Finds pages that contain ALL the terms preceded by the + symbol, and allows inclusion of terms that are usually ignored.
• ": Finds the exact words as quoted.
• (): Finds or excludes pages that contain a group of words
• AND or &: Finds pages that contain ALL the terms or phrases
• NOT or -: Excludes pages that contain a term or phrase
• OR or |: Finds pages that contain either of the terms or phrases

Advanced search keywords

A variety of advanced search operators can be used to perform more sophisticated queries. These are:

• filetype:<filetype>—restrict the results of the Live Search to a particular filetype extension e.g. .html, .txt, .pdf, .doc, .xls, and .ppt
• contains:<filetype>—returns the pages linking to the specified filetype.

• site: <URL>—restricts the returned hits to a specific website.
• link:<URL>—Finds sites that have links to the specified website or domain.
• linkdomain:<URL>—Finds sites that link to any page within the specified domain.
• linkfromdomain:<URL>—Finds sites that are linked from the specified domain
• url:<URL>—Checks whether the listed domain or web address is in the Live Search index
• ip:<ip-address>—Finds sites that are hosted by a specific IP address.

• language:<language code>—Returns web pages for a specific language.
• loc: or location:<language code>—Returns web pages from a specific country or region

• inanchor: or inbody: or intitle: or inurl:<searchphrase>—Returns pages that contain the specified term in the metadata
• prefer:<searchphrase>—Adds emphasis to a search term or another operator to help focus the search results.
• feed:<searchphrase>—Finds RSS or Atom feeds on a website for the terms you search for.
• hasfeed:<searchphrase>—Finds web pages that contain an RSS or Atom feed on a website for the terms you search for.

Sidebar gadgets

Live Search Gadget is for Windows Vista's Sidebar that uses Live Search to fetch the user's search results and render them directly in the gadget. The gadget allow users to configure up to two additional custom searches. Users can also search using Live Search Macros from this gadget by creating their own macros or find one in Windows Live Gallery.

Live Search Traffic Gadget displays real-time traffic conditions using Live Search Maps. The gadget provides shortcuts to driving directions, local search and full-screen traffic view. Currently only traffic data from 23 selected U.S. cities are supported, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Providence, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa, and Washington DC.

On October 30, 2007, both Live Search and Live Search Traffic gadgets were removed from Windows Live Gallery due to possible security concerns. However, as of January 24, 2008, the Live Search Traffic gadget is again available for download after the security concern has been addressed.

Reviews

Reviewers such as Greg R. Notess note the strength and weakness of Live Search as follows:

Strengths:

• Large, fresh, unique database
• Query building Advanced Search and full Boolean searching
• Cached copies of Web pages including date cached
• Automatic local search options.

Weaknesses:

• No truncation, stemming, or wild card word in a phrase
• Limited to 10 words in a query
• Advanced search not on front page, but available after running a search

UC Berkeley Library lists three recommended search engines. They are Google, Yahoo!Search, and Ask.com. Although, Live Search is the third for its popularity in the U.S., and the fourth in the world (Baidu, a Chinese search engine is the second), UC Berkeley ranks Ask.com over Live Search. Ask.com has subject-specific ranking and suggests narrower or broader terms on the result. For example, if a user search for "postmodernism," it presents as the sidebar options of narrowing to "definition of postmodernism," "history of postmodernism," "postmodernism and arts" and others. Neither Google nor Yahoo!Search do not have this function. Live Search does not have this function either. UC. Berkeley Library seems to value this feature of Ask.com over various other positive features of Live Search. Nevertheless, just like Google, Live Search is not simply a search engine but an integral part of comprehensive service which include instant messenger, email, file sharing, blog, and other kinds of web services. Integration of services to cellular phone is now becoming a trend. While dozens of search engines retired from the market over the decades, Live Search seems to keep its popularity due to Microsoft's continuous advancements in technology and market strategies.

Tie-ins and promotions

Since May 1, 2006, Live Search results have been syndicated on Amazon's A9 search service and the experimental Ms. Dewey interactive search site.

On January 17, 2007, Microsoft announced that all searches done from a special portal site would lead to a donation to the UNHCR's organization for refugee children, ninemillion.org. The amount to be donated is not readily available on Microsoft's sites, but Reuters AlertNet reports that the amount to be donated is $0.01 per search, with a minimum of $100,000 and a maximum of $250,000 (equivalent to 25 million searches).

In April 2007, Microsoft launched Live Search Club, where users can win prizes by playing word games that generate Live Search queries. In February 2008, Microsoft launched a similar service, called "Big Snap Search." Microsoft subsequently launched Live Search SearchPerks! on October 1, 2008, allowing users to redeem tickets for prizes while using Live Search.

See also

• Web search engine
• Microsoft

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• 2006. "REVIEWS & RANKINGS—Search Software—Microsoft Windows Live Search." PC World 24 (6): 72.
• 2006. "Search Software Microsoft Windows Live Search." PC WORLD 24 (6): 72-74.
• 2007. "NEWS—Microsoft Is Giving Some Corporate Users Financial Incentives to Use Its Live Search Engine and Trying to Entice Developers to Create Mashups for Live Search." Computerworld 41 (12): 6.
• 2007. "REVIEWS & RANKINGS—Web Service—Microsoft Windows Live Search." PC World 25 (2): 76.
• 2008. "Microsoft Pulls the Plug on Live Search Books." Smart Libraries 28 (7): 6.
• Foley, Mary Jo. Microsoft severs Live Search from the rest of the Windows Live family. Retrieved November 17, 2008.
• Hardy, Q., and V.M. Barret. 2006. "Google Vs. Microsoft: The Race to Rev Up the Search Engine." FORBES 178 (11): 44-49.
• Townsend, James J., Dmitri Riz, and Deon Schaffer. Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2004. ISBN 9780321159632.

External links

All links retrieved July 24, 2018.

• Nielsen NetRatings: August 2007 Search Share Puts Google On Top, Microsoft Holding Gains, SearchEngineLand, September 21, 2007.
• Bing
• Microsoft Unveils Live Search - Softpedia

Credits

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