In this episode of the Inside Windows Phone show, Jared Brown ( Program Manager responsible for Search extras and Bing integration on WIndows Phone)  introduces the feature end-to-end, first with some demos and then with a walk through on how an application integrates with extras.

Relevant links:
MSDN documentation for search extras (has the doc mentioned in the video)
Code sample for a search extra - you can use this in emulator.  Do a search for electronic (e.g. HDTV 52 inch).
Jaime Rodriguez's blog

Whilst there are now a number of Windows 7 theme packs with collections of the Best of Bing images,  new this month is a Bing desktop gadget which combines the daily image with a search bar – so it’s even easier to search the web, and you don’t miss out on the image of the day.

There’s a great write up of the gadget over at My Microsoft Life, otherwise jump straight to the gadget over at the Windows 7 Desktop Gadget showcase. 

Of course, you don’t need a geek guide to search Bing – in fact, the whole point of Bing is getting you to your answers fast, no matter what query you enter. But for “advanced” geeks, like the folks over on Research Buzz, for example, the query syntax guide is downright exciting. (Heck, they even posted “SQUEEEE!” when sharing the news.)

If there’s nothing you like more than a good collection of query syntax data too, then you can check out the complete guide in either HTML format, PDF or CHM.  

To get started, all you need is the code (open sourced under the BSD license), an API key, and the API Docs (you’ll need an MSDN login to access them).

Then, you can follow along with this tutorial written by PHP guru Cal Evans where you can access sample code, too while learning more about Bing’s API. Stay tuned for follow up posts, as well, where he will talk about what possibilities this API access permits. 

This is pretty interesting stuff because it’s entirely unique – no other search engine gives you access to information like this via an API. Now go build something amazing with it!

Its columnar based interface lets you customize which services are displayed while trending topics appear at the top for one-click access. Also at the top is a search box that lets search across the services for the topic of your choosing.

International users will appreciate the service’s drop-down box that lets you choose from a number of languages. For added fun, you can also share the results of your search on Facebook or Twitter using the buttons provided.

This new search engine is a free, web-based application available now from search.sobees.com.

Now the right-hand side panel of Bing Reference pages has also been improved with a new search box, highlighter, and other features. The related images and videos have been integrated into this box instead of being links elsewhere on the page. You can also use the provided search box to search within the article or click on the “highlighter” button to highlight specific text. When finished highlighting, you can then copy and paste the text into another application like your email or IM program, for example.

The new sidebar panel also houses the article outline and, as before, it stays with you as you navigate up and down the page. Another new option, “locations,” pulls out the referenced locations found in the article and displays them as pushpins on the map. Below the map, you can see details about each location listed and can click “zoom here” to go directly to that city or locale. The locations are also hyperlinked to their own Wikipedia article, too, also hosted in Bing Reference.

The new sidebar isn’t showing on all Bing Reference pages yet, but it showed up on 9 of the 10 pages that I pulled up. LiveSide points to the page for São Paulo as an example, but you can likely use your own hometown to see the sidebar in action.

However, I’m wondering why the app doesn’t feature Bing’s background image as the previous screenshot showed - perhaps it took too much bandwidth? Also missing is the icon in the search box that seemed to hint at a voice search feature – another clue that makes me wonder if perhaps the interface we’re seeing now is some intermediate step between the old UI and the final, finished product we were shown earlier.

That’s not to say that the new mobile Bing site doesn’t have some great features – it’s now optimized for touch devices, for one. And the new “movies” feature lets you quickly find local theaters and browse current movie listings by flipping through movie poster thumbnails...even using your finger if on a touch device!

The blog post also highlights a couple of handy Bing features like the ability to check on flight status or look up an NFL player – but these aren’t necessarily new – you can do those things from the main page at www.bing.com, too. It's just that they've now been ported over to work on the mobile site. 

The updated version of Bing currently works on the iPhone, Zune HD, T-Mobile G1, Verizon Imagio, or Samsung Omnia. Future devices will be added in the next couple of months.

You can try the new mobile site now at m.bing.com.

The Twitter search vertical, already live at bing.com/twitter, allows for a real-time view of the activity on the popular micro-blogging site. For all those out there who still think Twitter is just a place where people tweet what they had for breakfast, think again. Through Bing’s new interface, complete with tag clouds for hot (trending) topics, you’ll be able to see the power of Twitter for revealing breaking news, online chatter and opinion on various subjects, and details on other major events. (Case in point: check out the Twitter results for “Windows 7” which launched today).

When searching tweets via Bing, the interface has an advantage over Twitter’s own engine at search.twitter.com. That’s because Bing’s Twitter search gives you the best of both worlds – Twitter results and web links – links which are parsed from the tweets themselves. Twitter, on the other hand, only returns the raw tweets.

In the top part of the screen, a real-time view of tweets are presented and they will refresh on the screen as more come in. That’s also an improvement over Twitter’s search, which forces you to manually refresh the page yourself. However, you are able to turn this feature off temporarily thanks to an included “pause” button.

Below the actual tweets are links to web sites which the tweets contained. This is especially helpful for tracking hot topics as Twitter is more of a communications network where link exchanges comprise a majority of the online interaction. Beneath each web link provided, often pointing to a news article or blog post of some sort, the tweets from those who mentioned the link are provided. This makes it easy to engage in conversations with others who you may not even know about a subject you’re both interested in. That feature alone has a lot of promise since one of the hardest things about Twitter is finding like-minded users to friend and follow. Small “RT” (re-tweet) buttons are included next to these links to facilitate joining in the conversation.

As for the Facebook integrations, those have yet to launch but are said to include content from Facebook accounts marked as public. That’s not the default setting in Facebook, by the way, so you can breathe a sigh of relief – your profile and News Feed aren’t all of a sudden going to be indexed by the search engine. Instead, only those folks who have specifically set their profile to public will be indexed – a group that  likely contains public figures as well as those with fan pages. Facebook also plans on introducing additional controls that will allow those whose content was previously marked as public the ability to change that to private if they desire to keep it out of the search engine.

No details on how exactly the Facebook integration will work have been revealed, but we’ll keep you posted.

For more details on the Twitter integration, check out the Bing community blog post available here.

In addition, new enhancements have been added to the Cooliris Internet Explorer plugin to improve performance. According to the company, image searches’ performance have improved up to 30% with the updated plugin.

The company also reports that they will soon support Bing Video searches, too, but have not revealed an exact date yet.

To download Cooliris, visit the company homepage here: cooliris.com.

Currently, comScore qSearch is reporting that Microsoft sites picked up 0.4 percentage points in August 2009 at the expense of Google and AOL which translated to a 7% gain in searches. Nielsen Online agreed with comScore on some points, but put Bing’s search share a little higher than comScore’s 9.3% – they showed Bing at 10.7%. That represents an increase from 8.8% in June and 9% in July. The third firm to weigh in, Experian Hitwise, pegged Bing at 9.6% in the four weeks measured from August 9th through September 5th.

While clearly measuring search share isn’t an exact science, the overall growth trends look good for the new engine, which is decidedly being helped along thanks to the media campaign whose clever commercials feature “victims of search overload.”

James Colborn, director at Microsoft Advertising, also recently told MediaPost that, in addition to query share increases, the company was also seeing a nearly 40% increase in click-through rates on ads, another positive sign of growth.

If you haven’t already, try switching your browser’s default engine to Bing. Here’s how to do it in IE and here are steps for other browsers.

In the case of the Emmy Awards, the Instant Answer provides info about the show, links to nominees and celebrity reactions, photos, videos, and a 2008 fashion flashback. After the show ends, the Instant Answer will be updated to include links to the winners, photos, videos, and more.

(via the Bing Community blog)

Obviously, a visual search works better for some queries than for others. In the Bing blog post, for example, they showed examples of visual searches for products, books, and cars. But that’s only scratching the surface. You can visualize almost anything – from dog breeds to sports teams. In fact, there are over 100 visual categories already enabled for the new interface. The Visual Search homepage offers up a few “featured galleries” to get you started. 

As you re-sort and filter your results using the links provided on the left side of the results page, the images fly across the screen, moving into their new positions. It’s a beautiful example of what Silverlight technology is capable of doing.

Visual search engines have been around for some time, but never has a major search company integrated visual search like this into their own engine. Surprisingly, the end result isn’t just a page of visual eye candy, but an useful interface that actually makes finding what you needed quicker and easier than before.

First thing’s first – you have to click the above link to download the zip file. If you’re having trouble with the link (it was slow to load for me), you can grab Redmond Pie's pack or the Twitter Search Connector from this site, at the very least.

On the dialog box that appears, just click “Open.” The connector will be installed automatically.

Now – how do you use them? This actually is the easiest part. You can perform searches from within any open Explorer window – just use the search box in the upper-right corner. (You can also start a search from the Start Menu, but here you have to click the “See More Results” link to be taken to an Explorer window where you can begin to use the various connectors.)

Here’s an example of me searching all Twitter posts for the phrase “new Twitter app”:

Notice how my search terms have been highlighted in the results and the results themselves are sorted in chronological order with the newest posts first.

Now if I come across a post I want to see on the web, I simply double-click the entry. That takes me to the actual web page where I can read the original item.

Example - Checking out this tweet about Chirp, a new WPF-based Twitter app:

That’s it! Search connectors aren’t uber-geeky or hard to use at all. All you have to do is click and install them when you find someone who has them available for download on the net.

(Note: Chris Pirillo's pack contains a FriendFeed search connector – a must have for all us social media addicts!)

Recently, Chun-Kai Wang of Microsoft Research let us know that you can now use U Rank without first having to log in. (Previously you had to sign in with your Windows Live ID.) When using U Rank anonymously like this, your edits are only saved for that session. This actually makes it easier to use U Rank as an everyday engine for quick searches since it removes the extra steps involved with signing in. It also makes it easier for anyone who just wants to play with U Rank from time to time to give it a try. You can try the new U Rank homepage here: urank.viveri.com.

When you’re searching for something which has a Wikipedia entry, for example, you’ll notice a “one box” result for Wikipedia at the top of your search results page. The result provides a snippet of text from the Wikipedia article along with links to the article subsections, too. However, clicking the link “Enhanced View” actually takes you to a special kind of search result right within Bing.com – the Bing Reference result. Here’s an example of a search for “Albert Einstein:

When you click the “Enhanced View” link, you’ll end up on another Bing.com page which is actually just the Wikipedia page framed within Bing.com. You’ll still have Bing’s search box at the top of the page and the “Explore” sidebar to the left. However, the sidebar here may link to other verticals (like image search, for example) but also to related queries. To see an example of related queries, check out the Bing Reference page for “Facebook.” In the Explore sidebar there are links to applications, services, developer platform, proxy, and history. Click on any of those links to be immediately taken to a new set of search results for that term. 

So why are these Bing Reference pages better than simply hitting up the Wikipedia article itself? Well, for one thing, related searches as described above are only a click away. Or if you need to move on to a specific vertical like “news” or “videos” those links are not just up at the top of the page, but they’re pinned above the article itself:

Plus, the page displays the Wikipedia “Article Outline” in a box to the right of the content which stays with you even as you scroll up and down the page. That’s really handy! And it has a “top” button attached to it that moves you back up to the very top of the page whenever you’re done reading – quite helpful for when you’re navigating around a long article:

To search within the Bing Reference vertical directly, you must start your search from within one of these “enhanced” Wikipedia pages. But when you do, you’ll have another powerful feature at your disposal: highlighting. For example, look at this query for “who acquired Texaco” to see the highlighting turned on. Thanks to Powerset technology’s ability to understand natural language, Bing also knows that’s a much different query than say “who did Texaco acquire” even though other search engines would not.

I still wish there was a link to go to Bing Reference directly, like say Bing.com/reference, (hint, hint!), but overall, these features make for a much better way to research topics than doing a typical web search. Next time you need to quickly “look something up,” try Bing.com instead and see what you think. Or better yet, set Bing as your default search engine so you don’t even have to remember to make the switch.

To make the game fun, Page Hunt includes timed responses, score keeping, a top-scorers list, taboo queries, and bonus points…like those received for avoiding frequently-used categories.

Page Hunt was developed by Chris Quirk and Raman Chandrasekar at Microsoft along with colleagues from Georgia Tech and was debuted at the recent SIGIR09 conference in Boston. Their research paper describing the system can be found here.

Already, the researchers have discovered some interesting information from the data collected: the longer a web page’s URL, the harder it is for users to match the page to query words.

They don’t speculate as to why that happens, but it demonstrates how the game can provide data that will uncover interesting insights into how search works.

Canonical URL

The first is the concept of a canonical URL, as described here by Matt Cutts (his blog is a must read for anyone building public facing web sites); a link element that specifies what our definitive single URL should be for any given post.

Why does this matter? Well, on many web sites (including ours) there is more than one URL that will get you to the same piece of content. Consider the latest 'This Week On Channel 9' episode, it is available at:

1. http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/This+Week+On+Channel+9/This-Week-C9-Windows-7-RTMs-7-Sins-of-App-Compat--cool-Silverlight-apps/
2. http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/This+Week+On+Channel+9/This-Week-C9-Windows-7-RTMs-7-Sins-of-App-Compat--cool-Silverlight-apps/default.aspx
3. and nearly any variation of those URLs plus any random query string that you want to stick on the end

Assuming Google/Bing/Yahoo only found the post from links on the Channel 9 home page, it would always see the first one... and everything would be great. That isn't how search engines work though, they care about inbound links from many different sources, and it is possible that many different URLs are out there in the wild that really represent the same single piece of content. Each additional URL beyond the first looks like duplicate content and takes away from the search engine love that should be given to the first result. The standard way to avoid this in the past was to redirect every person coming in on anything but the link we want. That works, but forcing your user to go through an extra browser round trip for some obscure technical reason is less than ideal. Enter the idea of the canonical url. Add this to your page and no matter how the search engine finds the page, it knows what URL to associate it with in the system.

If you check any of those links above and view source, you'll find the same thing on each and every one:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/This+Week+On+Channel+9/This-Week-C9-Windows-7-RTMs-7-Sins-of-App-Compat--cool-Silverlight-apps/" />

A fair number of other sites implement this as well, check out Ars Technica for example, and I'm sure more will follow. Should you implement this on your site? Well, first think about how many duplicate URLs will work on your content (if you are running a site that supports both www.sitename.com and sitename.com, that's one ... then if you can optionally have a filename like default.php or index.html... then that is already two duplicates for every URL) and then think about whether or not your position in search engine rankings is important... odds are you should look at adding support for this link tag on your pages.

ShortUrl

A lot has been written about how services like TinyURL, is.gd and other URL shortening services are bad for the internet, and we completely agree. They remove meaning from the link you are about to click (including the source of the content, which is an important issue for trust and security), and they are dependent on the reliability of some unknown third party that might just go away at some point in the future. One solution, that sites like C9, Amazon and others have decided to go with is to implement their own URL shortening. Yes, much of the meaning is lost, but at least they have control over that URL namespace and can make sure it is always available and always points at the intended content. Now that we have such a service though, what's to stop people from just taking our original URLs and using any one of the free URL shortening services? Well, nothing at the moment, but a movement is underway to allow content owners to specify a pre-existing short URL if they have one. The hope is that once this concept catches on, then URL shortening service or client applications (like twitter clients) will try to look up a site's short url before calling out to a 3rd party service to create one. We don't know if this will catch on, but we like the idea so we've gone ahead and added the appropriate link tag and populated it with our special r.ch9.ms short url. Once again, if you view source on that TWOC9 episode from above, you'll find this:

<link rel="shorturl" href="http://ch9.ms/AAPV" />

More to come...
If you went and viewed the source of those pages, you would have seen a ton of other <link> tags, and many different <meta> tags as well. Each of those does serve a purpose, and I'll dig into the rest of them in upcoming posts.

Note: For those of you who have the immediate response of 'aghhh... so much wasted bandwidth for meta tags!', I know what you mean... and I also know that some sites choose to only render those tags out when a search crawler hits them. That practice is a bit sneaky though, in general you should avoid alterting the content you serve up to search engines... although it is probably only an issue if you change the actual content of the page in an attempt to deceive the search engine.

The other contest, which just launched, aims to help parents and kids with their back-to-school needs. Thanks to Bing Cashback, seven lucky winners will receive a Bing-branded backpack that includes a $500 Visa cash card which can be used for new school clothes, supplies, or anything else you want. This contest, which begins on July 23rd, is being held exclusively on Twitter. The @bingcashback Twitter account will tweet a Bing-related trivia question daily for a week and everyone who answers correctly via an @reply will become eligible to win. All the correct answers are easy to find using Bing, specifically Bing Shopping and Bing Cashback. To participate, follow @bingcashback on Twitter.

Instead of cluttering up the results with every webpage that mentions FedEx, there’s just the one result (to see other web results you can click a link below this). Within the search result itself are deep links to main pages of the FedEx website (rates, contact us, careers, etc.). There’s also the FedEx customer service number – often the very thing you were searching for in the first place.

But in this case, it was package tracking I was after, so imagine my surprise to find the package tracker right there on Bing.com. (Hey, Google doesn’t do that!) That was certainly convenient. I wonder what other little tricks like this Bing has hiding up its sleeve?

However, Bing isn’t indexing all of Twitter at this time. Instead, they’ve identified some of the “more prominent and prolific Twitterers” - only a few thousand people to begin with, actually.

When you search for one of these folks in relation to Twitter, you’ll see their latest tweets appear in the Bing results. For example, search for “Kara Swisher Twitter,” “Kara Swisher Tweets,” or even “@karaswisher”  and you’ll see something like this:

Only adding a small group of users to the index may be disappointing to some, but the Bing team says it’s just the first step toward using Twitter’s public API to bring tweets into search. They’re now looking for feedback as to how they should proceed in the future.

Here’s my suggestion: index it all! If someone actually takes the time to search for @sarahintampa using Bing, why not reveal my tweets? I also wouldn’t mind seeing a new vertical added to the top navigation specifically for Twitter…that would be really helpful when tracking a breaking story, for instance. But those are just my ideas. What are yours? Tell the Bing team here.