Microsoft celebrates six months of Bing Chat with new features and third-party browser support

Microsoft to update Bing for Windows phone 7

Microsoft has announced that it will add several new features to its search engine 'Bing' for Windows phone 7, the new update will be available along with Mango update (next update of the OS).
The next update of Windows Phones 7, known as the 'Mango' update, will come along with an updated Bing search engine.

According to latest Windows Phone Developer Podcast, the updated search engine will have several additional features including the Bing Audio, which allows users to recognise songs (it will display the name of the title, artist etc) and will provide a link to the Zune store (Windows phone 7 applications market) for purchasing music.

Another feature called 'Bing Vision' allow phones' camera to read barcodes and perform OCR scans (read text written on a picture or document, like reading business cards etc), and provide support for augmented reality apps.

Bing Maps will also be updated, and will now feature turn-by-turn voice directions. A native podcast (similar to broadcast but delivered on phones and tablets or PC instead of TV) player is also said to be included, as well as a voice-to-text feature for texting while your hands are busy.

themobileindian.com

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Bing wins big in China, will serve results to 450 million users

With a total population of nearly 1.5 billion and an online population of around half a billion, there’s no denying China’s importance as a digital marketplace. It’s also one that has proven tricky for Western companies to operate in at times — like Google, whose famous struggle with the Chinese government over censorship issues ultimately led to the cessation of operations in China.

Microsoft, however, decided that Google’s departure was just the sort of opportunity it needed. After months of negotiations, the Redmond company has finally announced the signing of a deal with Chinese search giant Baidu that will see Bing provide English language results to its visitors. It’s a bit like the previous deal Microsoft scored with Yahoo! back in the summer of 2010.

As a result of that arrangement, Bing broke the 30% mark globally and supplanted Yahoo! as the number two search provider behind Google. Currently, Baidu maintains about an 84% share of China’s search market — which means this new deal should provide Bing with a sizable boost to its global market share.

While specific numbers aren’t given, a Baidu spokesperson said that daily English language requests numbered “in the millions” with the majority of those searches coming from municipalities looking for professionals and university graduates to add to their workforce.

While a few million searches per day won’t be enough to unseat Google as the grand poobah of search engines (it gets more than 400 million per day total), it’s still an important win for Bing. Every little bit counts, and Microsoft will happily continue inking deals like this one until it’s nipping at Google heels in the race to be number one.

More at Liveside and MSN China

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