Bing’s Rich Mobile Makeover

    The mobile edition of Microsoft’s Bing search engine (m.bing.com) was updated recently with a bunch of new features borrowed from Bing’s desktop page and Google’s mobile search webapp including: Background image of the day with floating “Explore” menu Search suggestions appear as you type Location enabled on Android and iOS Image search results as a grid of thumbnails Tabbed results pages with tabs for All, Images, Shopping, Local etc. The new interface shows up on the iPhone and iPad … Continue reading

Microsoft – Yahoo: Bad News For Mobile Search

By now you’ve probably heard about the Microsoft – Yahoo deal. Yahoo will shutter their search engine and instead source search results from Microsoft’s Bing. There are lots of details about advertising revenue share that I won’t bore you with. If you are interested in that sort of thing, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land has a good summary. While probably necessary for Yahoo’s survival, I’m worried about the future of my favorite mobile search engine,  Yahoo’s oneSearch. What I … Continue reading

How to Use the Bing API to Search the Mobile Web

When Microsoft released the Bing API I speculated that it should be possible to use it to build a real Mobile Web search engine.  By “real” I mean one that would search exclusively for mobile optimized Websites.  I finally got around to trying it today, it was pretty easy, thanks to some some sample code I found on the Bing Developer Website, and it  works surprisingly well. I wrote my search engine in PHP5.  It uses Bing’s JSON API.  I … Continue reading

Bing Mobile Buries and Transcodes Mobile Web Sites

Microsoft unveiled their new search engine Bing, last week with considerable fanfare.  Thanks to Google’s Wave announcement the same day it probably didn’t get as much press coverage as it deserved. Bing replaces Live Search and MSN Search.  Initial reviews  have been quite positive. Billed as a “Decision Engine”, Bing on the desktop has some nice touches including auto completion of queries, a list of related searches  in the left sidebar and  infinitely scrolling results rather than pagination for  image … Continue reading