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Bing Parody Ad

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To many in the Silicon Valley developer crowd, Bing stands for “But It’s Not Google”. Even at its very announcement, Bing was thunderously upstaged by Google Wave. Even the public equates search with Google, so much so that searching is “googling”. Despite Ballmer’s chair-throwing hatred of Eric Schmidt, Bing is still far from a challenge to Google.

College Humor rubs all of that in Microsoft’s face, with a parody ad that encourages you to google stuff on Bing.

Originally posted on July 3, 2009 @ 2:08 pm

Bing gains but still way too far to challenge Google

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Bing has increased Microsoft’s share of the search market by 1% in the US according to analysis for June conducted by StatCounter. Google, obviously, still dominates the US search market.

Microsoft (Bing, Live Search and MSN Search in total) had 8.23% market share in June, behind Yahoo! at 11.04% according to monthly analysis by StatCounter Global Stats. Google has fallen back slightly from 79.07% in April to 78.48% in June but maintains its strong foothold on the lead. Nothing to worry for Serge and Larry.

Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter, said:

“At first sight, a 1% increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing but the underlying trend appears positive. Steady if not spectacular might be the best way to describe performance to date.”

Data is based on an analysis of 1.316 billion search engine referring clicks (336 million from the US) which were collected from the StatCounter network of over three million websites.

Originally posted on July 2, 2009 @ 9:35 am

Microsoft enters energy management space with Microsoft Hohm

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Microsoft is reported to launch a new energy management service today, Microsoft Hohm. According to reports read, the service is a recommendation engine based on the user’s input. You can enter details about how you consume energy and Hohm will recommend you to close windows, turn the heating down or isolate the windows better. Right at the moment only a landing page is available with option to request access. The landing page information is also rather limited:

Microsoft Hohm is a free online beta application that helps you save energy and money. With Microsoft Hohm you can better understand your home energy usage, get recommendations to conserve energy and start saving. As with any recommendation engine, Hohm will provide increasingly more accurate and relevant suggestions for energy conservation as its users contribute home energy input and feedback. One of the objectives during our beta period is to refine our tool and further increase the value our product can offer to you.

A video posted on MSN doesn’t make us much wiser either. [Read more…]

Originally posted on June 24, 2009 @ 8:09 am