If you haven’t been living under a rock recently you are well aware of Microsoft’s latest foray into the search market with Bing. The latest buzz word in Web search is “real-time” lead by the constant flow of 140 character posts from the Twitter platform. Many companies have been attempting to harness this information in the form of real-time search engines. Some recent contenders include Topsy, OneRiot, CrowdEye, and now Bing.
Bing’s real-time search experiment as of right now is only indexing results for popular tweeters. It’s still unclear on how they plan on delivering these results as my own tests have been varied. For example if I search for “Al Gore” on Bing I do not see anything related to Twitter. If I search “Al Gore Twitter” I see some results at the bottom of the page. However if I search “@algore” the Twitter results are right at the top.
I tried a second test with “TechCrunch” and this time I do see tweets at the bottom of the page. “TechCrunch Twitter” delivers the results at the top of the page, as does “@techcrunch“.
Search heavyweight Google as of yet has not launched any products to index Twitter content (outside of user pages), but rumors of a Google microblogging search engine have been surfacing.
“Bing!” No I’m not mocking Matthew Perry’s fictional character Chandler Bing from the sitcom
Friends, but rather I’m mocking Microsoft’s latest attempt at a search engine,
Bing, which was unveiled Thursday at D7, the All Things Digital conference in San Diego. Actually, I’m not mocking anything, Bing actually looks impressive. The moment may have arrived where one can use ‘Microsoft’ and ’search engine’ in the same sentence without being ridiculed.
It’s been a long time coming that Microsoft roll out a search engine that people might actually take interest in. However, Microsoft touts Bing as much more than a search engine, rather a ‘decision engine’. The assertion is that while current search models do well at answering simple questions such as ”What’s the capital of Botswana?,” a decision engine helps solve problems like, ”Where should we go for dinner tonight?” Bing claims to help you “overcome search overload and find the best choice faster.”
Yesterday Facebook accepted a $200 million dollar offer from Russian Internet investment group Digital Sky Technologies. The deal values Facebook at $10 billion and gives Digital Sky about a 2% preferred stock stake in the company. Only a year and a half ago a funding round with Microsoft valued Facebook at $15 billion, which may have been the “absolute peak of the market,” according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Depressed economic conditions today are sure to play a role in the declining valuation.
This investment could bring additional value to the Facebook brand with the extensive knowledge that Digital Sky has of the Russian and Eastern European markets.
Early last week we reported that Facebook turned down a $200 million dollar offer with a valuation of $8 billion. The terms of that deal included a seat on the Facebook board of directors. Our sources did not state where the offer had come from, but this Tuesday’s acceptance by Facebook could very well be that same deal renegotiated.
