Gizmodo Australia » microsoft bing

Mark Cuban’s Plan To Choke Google’s Super Powers

Danny Allen — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:58:19 +0000

Musing on his blog, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks has thrown out a crazy idea for Microsoft. Instead of spending billions promoting Bing, what if they paid the top 1000 sites a million bucks to de-list from Google?

Is there anything more fun than sitting around, growing your hair, drinking a Bud while listening to Jethro Tull and pondering how to change the balance of power in the search world and unseat Google?

Would the top 1k most visited sites take a cool $US1mm each, plus a commitment from Microsoft or Yahoo to drive traffic through their search engines to more than make up for the lost Google Traffic.

Given the increasing power that Google wields, it’s an interesting thought. But that upfront bill that wouldn’t get past Microsoft’s stock holders, let alone the US government’s anti-competition watchdogs. Nice pot-stirring though, Mark. [Mark Cuban via The Register]

Bing Visual Search Could Be A Great Tool, Maybe, Someday

John Herrman — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:39:48 +0000

Oh, what a romantic vision Microsoft has here, with Visual Search: Imagine a search engine that served up results in images instead of text, and had easily-recognisable pictures, organised by topics and other parameters, which you could narrow down until you found what you were looking for. That dude, with the hair, in that movie? Done. The camera, with the stumpy lens and retro body? Found. That girl, in that band, with that smile, and that voice? Binged.

Except Visual search can’t really do anything of these things yet, because it’s just a small collection of search-tied photo albums, at least for now. Oh well! Give it a try anyway, right here. (Warning: You must be Silverlit). [Microsoft]

Bing: The Fastest Way To Google

Adam Frucci — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Have you guys heard about Bing? It makes Googling stuff super easy.

[CollegeHumor]

Microsoft Bing Porn Content Gets Its Own Domain

Jesus Diaz — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:50:00 +0000

Bing is so good at finding porn and displaying it that Microsoft will serve all the adult-oriented content from a specific domain. That way, according to their blog, it will be a lot easier to filter:

First, potentially explicit images and video content will now be coming from a separate single domain, explicit.bing.net. This is invisible to the end customer, but allows for filtering of that content by domain which makes it much easier for customers at all levels to block this content regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be. This makes it much easier for filtering software to block unwanted content if SafeSearch has been turned off.

In addition, we will begin returning source url information in the query string for images and video content so that companies who already use this method of filtering will be able to catch explicit content on Bing along with everything else they are already blocking for their customers.

So no, it won’t affect your ability to get some bada-bing in the privacy of your own home, but your company or school will be able to filter all of it easily. Kudos for Microsoft to think about those who care about these things without affecting those who don’t care. [Bing]