It’s been a little over 9 months since Bing launched back in June 09.  In interweb years, that puts us at about 15, a raging teenager.  And do we have a crush on big bad Texas.  Dallas, you sure are a darling.  But OMG OMG Austin WE LOVE YOU too!!!

As such (in our usual calm, collected voice), the Bing team is excitedly packing for Austin to join in the annual tech pilgrimage that’s SXSW Interactive.  Our mission is simple – connect with you the community. 

We want to chat you up all you cool interesting people doing cool interesting things, get the scoop from you on all the bubbling tech hotness, and maybe even drop a Milli Vanilli number with you (you will be Milli) at TechKaraoke.  Where it’s at is where we’ll be at.  But come to us too!  Bing is hosting a number of cool & fun experiences throughout Interactive.  Here’s a snapshot of Bing activities. 

• 3/12 Friday 7-9PM:  TechSet Party (with Bing Photo for Good) at Speakeasy (412 Congress Avenue)
• 3/13 Sat 4-7PM:  Bing sponsored TWiST party (“This Week in Startup” the internet show hosted by Jason Calacanis of Mahalo)
• 3/14 Sun 9:30AM:  Bing sponsored session on “Augmenting Maps with Reality” (Moderator – Chris Pendleton from Bing Maps; Panelists – Flickr, Twitter, Foursquare, NAVTEQ)
• 3/14 Sun 4-7PM:  Bing Tweetup in Blogger’s Lounge (located in Austin Convention Center Room 19A)
• 3/16 Tue 12:30-1:30PM:  Deep Focus sponsored session “Microsoft Bing: Behind the Scenes of The Decision Engine” (Aaron Lilly, Microsoft, Lynn Girotto, Bing/Microsoft; Stefan Weitz, Bing/Microsoft; Ian Schafer, Deep Focus)
• Bing Photo for Good (located in Blogger’s Lounge in Austin Convention Center Room 19A. Open 9:30AM-6PM daily):   Everybody’s searching for something.  Share your query and Bing will help make a difference in a child’s life. Bing will donate towards “Save the Children” efforts on behalf of children in Haiti. 
• Bing and Windows Phones are partnering with Check-inforCharity who will donate to “Save the Children” when you check in at the 25 check-in locations across Austin. Do good and collect a special-edition Foursquare badge while you’re at it!
• Bing Demo Booth in SXSW Trade Show Hall (Sat 11AM-6PM; Sun 12-6 PM; Mon 12-4 PM):  Grab a plateful of Bing demo with a side of sweet swag.

 

Also, be sure to catch out friends at Foursquare who will be joining us at the Demo Booth and Bing Photo for Good to hand out killer stickers. 

See you there!

Aya Zook, Product Manager, Bing

The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms.  Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.

To share your thoughts on this latest update, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Dan Rampton
Program Manager, Yahoo! Search

Last week, we introduced you to some great search features to keep up with the 82nd Academy Awards. The coveted statuettes have been distributed and the post-show analysis is in full swing!

The buzziest acceptance speeches of the evening:  Sandra Bullock and  Mo’Nique – although the story behind Elinor Burkett and her so-called “hijacked” acceptance speech blazed a path through search logs on Monday.

Best Motion Picture contender that is the most anticipated DVD in search: The Blind Side, followed by Avatar, Precious, and The Hurt Locker.

The buzz, of course, is never simply about who won.  One of our favorite ways to explore major events is to check out the questions they inspired in search.  One standout: “Are the Oscars the same as the Academy Awards?”  (Why, yes!)

A sampling of notable Oscar 2010 search questions:

• Who won Best Actress? – the biggest award category in search questions
• Has Meryl Streep ever won an Oscar?
• What does Hurt Locker mean? – a big theme in search, coupled with “What is The Hurt Locker about?”
• How tall is Kathryn Bigelow?
• Are Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jake Gyllenhaal related?
• Who votes for the Oscars?

Check out The Buzz Log for more Oscar search trends and buzzing topics, courtesy of our friends at Yahoo! Buzz.

Andrea Sandke

Yahoo! Search

A few months ago, we updated the email communication options in your AdSense account to give you more choices about the types of messages you'd like to receive from us. You can now pick the types of messages that interest you from five categories:

• Customized help and performance suggestions
  
• Newsletters
  
• Google market research
  
• Special offers
  
• Information about other Google products and services which may be of interest to you

If you'd like to receive emails with optimization tips that are targeted to your specific account settings and ad implementation, you'll need to choose the category Customized help and performance suggestions. You'll receive roughly one email per month from us with targeted performance suggestions, so you don't have to worry about your inbox overflowing with messages from us.


In case you aren’t currently opted into this category, we’d like to recommend that you update your preferences to be able to receive Customized help and performance suggestions going forward and not miss out on valuable information on how to optimize your AdSense performance.

Posted by Annette Vorstoffel - AdSense Optimisation team

On Friday at NCCE Seattle we announced that our next homepage photo contest will kickoff on March 29 and this time there’s a twist. We’re asking students in the United States to submit photos to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day and the winning photo will be displayed on the Bing homepage on April 22, Earth Day itself!

 Justin Kraemer, winner of the Bing Home Sweet Homepage Photo contest

In addition to the grand prize winner seeing their photo on Bing.com, we’ve pulled together some great prizes for both students and their schools. Winners across the four age groups (ages 5-10, 11-13, 14-17 and 18+) will win a trip for two to the Microsoft Campus to take part in a Bing editorial team meeting where we pick images for future homepages. Additionally, each winner will receive equipment from HP and Canon to help build digital photo resources at their school. Prizes for individual winners and their schools across the four age groups will total over $70,000.

· 1st place prizes: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Lab” for their school.

· 2nd place prizes: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Kit” for their school.

· 3rd place prizes: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Starter Set” for their school.

And here’s the “everyone wins” part. There’s a great opportunity to help other classrooms in need during the voting stage from April 13th to the 19th. Bing will give a $5.00 GivingCard for DonorsChoose.org to the first 20,000 people who vote each day. Voters can then decide what classroom projects (like math, science, art, reading) will benefit from Bing’s donation. If you do the math, we’re talking up to $100,000 a day to help schools across the country. Each day you can return to the site to cast another vote and have an opportunity to pick up another GivingCard.

Bing helps students explore the world with our rich homepage imagery every day, so we’re excited to see what the country’s students think we might all want to discover.

To find out more about the contest, including the submission and voting process and prizes for the finalists, visit http://earthdayphotocontest.com/. Teachers will be able to order free posters for their classrooms in the coming days, as well as take advantage of other contest resources on the site.

Liz Tassey Gerber, Bing

Other posts of interest:

Home Sweet Home Page Winning Photo

Home Sweet Homepage

Welcome home

The Eye of the Storm – Jeremy Somers

We had a great time at the SMX West conference this past week in Santa Clara, CA. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked things off with his keynote speech, where he addressed several questions on the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. Yahoo! participated in several different panels throughout the week, including Thursday’s keynote “The State off the Search Union” roundtable featuring David Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing. (You can check out the full recap of this at Search Engine Land’s live-blog post.)

One of the hot topics discussed was real-time search, and I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel about that subject, titled “Real Time Search & the Major Search Engines.” Among other things, we discussed the real-time features we’ve rolled out for Yahoo! Search, like tweets in Yahoo! search results and getting the freshest information on developing news as well as some of the challenges and opportunities in this space.

In our down time I visited Yahoo!’s popular booth on the show floor – everyone loved our free coffee! Check out some of the highlights in the video below.

SMX Highlights @ Yahoo! Video

Ivan Davtchev

Yahoo! Search

On Sunday night, I like many others will be glued to the television for those few hours to watch Hollywood honor the best of the best in the 82nd Annual Academy Awards show.  Some people watch for the awards, some for the fashion, and other watch for the pure entertainment of the presenters, and this year, with Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin hosting we are sure to have a very entertaining show.

As we have done in years past we are offering up instant answers in order to make it easier to navigate all the important information you might need to know about the show. Currently, you can get the Academy Award instant answer for the show itself, which includes information on the show, nominees and links to images and past show information. For those of you that miss the festivities, there will be a post-show instant answer with links to images and videos so be sure and check back for a quick look at the winners and other highlights from the show.

With ten nominees for best picture, I have a lot of catching up to do before Sunday. So while researching the picks, I found a few places very helpful. The first is www.bing.com/twitter where you can see all of the chatter on twitter that has to do with the Academy Awards, nominees, and the event parties. It is pretty interesting to see feedback and opinions about the show from people around the country in real time. The second is the Oscar Winning Actors Visual Search gallery. In this gallery, you can find information about who won in 2009 and who won the most awards overall. You should also visit MSN Award Buzz which pulls information from blogs, twitter and forums to create a fun graphic on each nominee and predicts the winner of each category based on public buzz. It is a must for those Oscar enthusiasts! Check out the MSN blog for all the details.

Since Stefan is off rubbing elbows in L.A. with the Hollywood elite for the Oscars and I am left here again to fend for myself, there will be no video or Fridays With Stefan. But we’ll still have Free T-shirt Friday and the theme for this week is “The Academy Awards” and all things related. To mix it up a little we want the entries to be RT’s (retweets) that you find on www.bing.com/twitter that have to do with the Academy Awards, add in your own commentary and tweet us at @bing make sure to include @bing and  #FTF. We will be looking at all of the entries at the beginning of next week so tweet us all weekend and through the show.

Have a great weekend and Stefan I hope you are having a GREAT time in La La land!

Kristin Meldahl – Bing

O.K. - pop quiz: which social media game boasts an active fan-base of roughly 31 million players every day?  Here’s a hint: it’s a happy place where you can plant virtual crops that can be harvested, or ask your neighbor to chase away raccoons. If you guessed Farmville, then you’re correct!    

Earlier this week, we began an advertising pilot with Zynga, the folks who brought you Farmville.  For a short time, we invited some people who were playing Farmville to join Bing’s Facebook community by becoming a fan of Bing.  We also encouraged them to tell their friends about it.  In exchange, we provided some farm dollars, which is the virtual currency used to buy things to build and maintain a farm.  Here is what the ad looked like, once a Farmville user clicked on it:

In a 24 hour promotion, we added 400,000 new fans to http://www.facebook.com/bing.  We were amazed by the response (and by how fast it went viral).  But we always have room for more folks in the Bing community, so stop on by and join the fun.

We are excited to have the opportunity to work with Zynga on this advertising promotion, as an interesting way of getting more people to experience Bing’s unique ability to help make decisions, whether in Farmville or outside in the real world.  We look forward to engaging more deeply with these users and helping them learn more about Bing.

Liz Tassey Gerber - Bing

We’re constantly focused on bringing new advertisers and more advertising spend to AdSense sites. One way to do so is to make it easier for brand advertisers to reach their goals on AdSense sites. Brand advertisers are focused on raising brand awareness and driving engagement, typically with display ads, for a product or service a person may buy in the future. Brand advertisers differ from direct response advertisers, who typically look for clicks and conversions from the campaigns they run on your site.

For example, an advertiser selling DVDs online may want users to click through and make purchases, while a brand advertiser for an upcoming summer blockbuster may want to generate awareness among users. Because of their campaign goals, brand advertisers tend to be more selective about the sites their ads run on, as well as where on the page their ads appear. We want to help these new advertisers compete for the portions of your ad space that are most attractive to them so that we can increase your earnings over time.

With that in mind, we're launching a new beta advertiser feature that we believe will help accomplish this goal. The new feature enables brand advertisers to target their ads to ad units that are immediately visible when a page is loaded -- in other words, the portions of the page a user can see without needing to scroll down. The ads that are immediately visible are called 'above the fold'; those that require a user to scroll down in order to be seen are called 'below the fold.'

In order to determine which ads are above and below the fold, we've implemented a statistically-driven model. The model takes into account various user experiences and situations, including different web browsers, monitor sizes, and screen resolutions, and only considers ads above the fold if they are fully on-screen when the browser window loads.

If you've placed your ad units above the fold, advertisers using this feature will now be able to reach your site in a new way. If you haven't, placing new ad units above the fold will enable them to do so. We believe this feature will help attract new brand campaigns to AdSense sites, bringing more revenue to publishers over time.

Posted by Aaron Rothman - Product Manager

Once ads are displaying fine on your pages, your next concern may be your earnings. To make sure all your impressions and clicks are recorded correctly, check out the following notes and tips.

First, be aware that your AdSense reports are updated every 15 to 30 minutes, but can sometimes take up to 24 hours to update. So at times, if you don't see the numbers you expect in your reports, be sure to check again later once your reports have been updated.

• Do you use the Allowed Sites feature? Allowed sites are websites or URLs on which AdSense publishers allow or wish to have their Google ads displayed. If you use the allowed sites feature in your AdSense account, be sure to add all the websites you're displaying ads on, to the list of allowed sites. If you forget to add a sites where you're displaying ads, then impressions and clicks on the sites will be shown in your reports, but advertisers won't be charged and the clicks won't earn any revenue.

• Do you have channels set up to track your clicks and impressions?
  
  • If your channel reports show more data than your aggregate reports, it might be the case that your domains or ad units are being tracked simultaneously on multiple URL or custom channels. If that's the case, then to see your complete, accurate statistics, visit your Advanced Reports page. When you select the Aggregate Data radio button and click Display Report, you'll see all clicks, page impressions, and earnings from your account with no duplication of data.
    
    
  • Alternatively, you may see that your aggregate reports show more data than your channel reports, even if all your pages are tracked with channels. This can occur sometimes when your page is displayed within a frame; in this case data won't appear in your channel reports but will display in your aggregate reports.

Channel data can be a bit tricky, so make sure to pick distinctive names to differentiate between URL and custom channels -- that way, you'll know exactly what data you're viewing. We also recommend checking out our optimization tips for channels to help you determine which ad units and placements are performing well, and how you can use this information to earn more revenue.

• If you have ad placements, have you named them accurately? Once you create channels for your ad units or domains, you can turn your custom channels into ad placements that advertisers can specifically target their ads to, using placement targeting. When entering a description for your channels to appear as ad placements, be sure to enter something informative and accurate to represent your site well.

Also, we advise you to be careful when renaming the ad placement as you will lose existing advertiser bids.

Next week, we'll look at publisher controls and how to filter certain ads from appearing on your site.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

Continuing our celebration of the Academy Awards, we are rolling out a series of features that make it easier for you to follow coverage of the Oscars on Yahoo! Search.

On Yahoo! Image Search, just search for “Oscars 2010” and you’ll see our Oscars image carousel, with the latest image search results of the nominees and photos of the event. While counting down to the big night, you can easily search for snapshots from the film Inglourious Basterds or photos of nominees like Meryl Streep. You’ll see Oscars-related image results for these films and actors in the Oscars image refiner on the left hand side of the page. On Oscar night, use Yahoo! Image Search to see Penelope Cruz’s gown, George Clooney’s always-dapper suit, and other best- and worst-dressed celebs as they make their way down the red carpet.

This year, we are also giving you a quick and easy way to see the list of nominees and winners from the Web search results page. To see the nominees, just search for “Oscars” or “Academy Awards” on Yahoo! Search and you’ll see a list of nomination categories for the awards. Simply click any of the categories to see the full list of nominees.  We’ll be updating the results as soon as the winners are announced on Sunday night, so you can use the same queries and see the list of winners directly on the search results page.

Want more? We have video coverage of the Oscars too! If you didn’t catch the nominated flicks in the theater, check out the trailers of the nominated films on Yahoo! Video Search. Search for “Oscars” on Yahoo! Video Search and you’ll see that we’ve categorized the trailers on the left hand side of the page by award categories, actor interviews, speeches, and more. After the Oscars, search for the names of the winners to find updates results.

With these new ways of exploring the Academy Awards, we hope you enjoy your “front row” access to the Oscars coverage from beginning to end!

Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Image Search, and Yahoo! Video Search Teams

Starting tomorrow, Bing will be participating in full force at what’s shaping up to be another stellar SMX West (March 2-4, Santa Clara CA).  Every SMX show is a special one for Bing.  But this one is super-duper special for one reason – we’re bringing Steve Ballmer!  This will be Steve’s first ever conversation with the search community at an industry event.  Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land and co-chair of SMX, sits down with Steve to discuss Microsoft’s commitment to search and how Bing is working to evolve the search experience. 

In addition to Steve’s keynote chat, you’ll find Bing and Microsoft Advertising engaged with the community all across SMX in a number of ways.  Here’s a quick summary of where you can find us.

March 2nd (TUE)

· 9:00am – 9:45am Keynote Conversation with Microsoft CES Steve Ballmer

· 10:45am – Noon Real Time Search & The Major Search Engines Sean Suchter, GM of Search Technology Center

· 10:45am – Noon Mobile Paid Search Ads: Real Opportunities Raj Kapoor, Global Director, Mobile Advertising

· 1:15pm – 2:30pm Bing: What’s Happening? Stefan Weitz, Director of Search, Bing; Q&A - Eric Gilmore, Group Product Manager, Bing

· Noon – 1:15pm Lunch Topic Table “Meet Microsoft Advertising” Aaron Lauper, AdCenter Search Account Manager

· 4:30pm – 5:45pm Ask The Local Search Engines Mikko Ollila, Senior Product Manager, Bing Local

March 3rd (WED)

· 10:00am – 10:20am Simplify your Campaign Management! (in EXPO THEATRE) Aaron Lauper, AdCenter Search Account Manager

· 10:45am – Noon Bring In The Bling Via Bing Cashback Meagan Rochelle, Search Solutions Specialist

· Noon – 1:30pm Lunch Topic Table “Exploring Bing Captions” Mark Johnson, Senior Program Manager Lead, Bing

· 4:45pm – 6:00pm Ask The Paid Search Reps Aaron Lauper, AdCenter Search Account Manager

March 4th (THU)

· 11:30am – 12:30pm Ask The Search Engines Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager, Bing

· 12:30pm – 1:30pm Lunch Topic Table “Talk to a Bing Engineer” Steve Macbeth, Principal Group Program Manager, Bing

Bing is also sponsoring the legendary SMX community event SMX After Dark on the night of March 2nd starting at 9pm in the Santa Clara Hyatt pool side (better not rain!)

And if these weren’t enough, Ignite is coming to SMX West as part of Global Ignite Week!  Ignite is the fun, high-energy evening of a dozen or so “speed presentations” where each speaker has 5 minutes and 20 slides to talk about a topic.  The speaker lineup is an impressive who’s who from around the search industry.  If you’re in the area, come check it out by registering for FREE (an SMX badge will get you in too).  Free drinks and light food provided.  And if you can’t join us in person, be sure to catch the live stream.

Ignite SMX West is March 2nd.  Doors open at 7:30 and presentations start at 8:00pm.  Full details: http://searchmarketingexpo.com/west/2010/ignite.   

Aya Zook, Product Manager, Bing

*Matt McGee from Search Engine Land live blogged Steve Ballmer's discussion with Danny Sullivan.

This week, we'll be hosting two live webinars to help you discover how you can make the most of your AdSense account with a detailed understanding of DFP Small Business and AdSense for search.

The DFP Small Business (formerly Google Ad Manager) webinar will take place on Tuesday, March 2nd. This webinar will cover how you can:

• Use DFP Small Business to sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your direct-sold and network-based ad inventory (including AdSense)
  
• Have AdSense backfill your directly-sold inventory and compete with your other ad networks
  
• Optimize your AdSense placements

The AdSense for search webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 3rd. In this webinar, you'll learn how to:

• Optimize your AdSense for search performance
  
• Improve the relevance of your search results and ads using keywords

We encourage you to post your questions in advance of each webinar on our Google Moderator pages for DFP Small Business or AdSense for search.

Sign up for these webinars here! We look forward to seeing you soon.

Posted by Caroline Halpin - AdSense Optimisation team

The 2010 SMX West conference kicks off this week in Santa Clara, Calif., and we’re excited to be there! Yahoos will be sitting on a handful of panels, so stop by and learn what we’re up to.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Time: 10:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.
Panel: Real Time Search & The Major Search Engines
Speaker: Ivan Davtchev, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Time: 1:30 p.m. – 2:45 p.m.
Panel: Search Meets Display, Display Meets Search
Speaker: David Oliveira, Regional Vice President Sales, Yahoo!

Time: 4:45 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Panel: Ask The Paid Search Reps
Speaker: Tomaso Pozzi, Product Manager, Yahoo!

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Time: 9 a.m. – 9:45 a.m.
Panel: Keynote – The State Of The Search Union
Speaker: David Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo! Inc.

Time: 10 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.
Panel: Bringing SEO In House: How To Be Successful!
Speaker: Laura Lippay, Director of Technical Marketing, Yahoo!

Time: 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Panel: Ask The Search Engines
Speaker: Arnab Bhattacharjee, Senior Director, Yahoo! Search Technology and Engineering, Yahoo!

We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Yahoo! Search Team

We’ve been working hard to help your complete your search tasks more quickly.  We’re happy to announce support for query history in Autosuggest today to help make that vision a reality.  Autosuggest now supports suggestions from your query history.  Many users search for a set of topics again and again.  It could be you searching on your favorite hobbies, doing online research, looking up local attractions or directions – the particular query subjects are very specific to you.  To make searching easier and reduce all those wasted clicks, many people found our history feature very useful to get them to where they’re going faster.  So we experimented with providing your prior searches in Autosuggest and found it’s even more useful in to helping find what you’re looking for faster!

Search history in Autosuggest can help you in other ways too.  Many search tasks span multiple search sessions even days or weeks.  In fact, 44% of non-navigational search sessions last longer than 1 week!  Perhaps you need to research the purchase of a new automobile.  You might use Bing to find a retail location and to further research online – over many days – to make the best decisions on your big ticket purchase.  With history support in Autosuggest, you can restart a previous search session by typing a few characters to see your previous queries and start researching right where you left off.  We know from our testing that this makes you more effective at your longer search tasks.

Previous search queries in Autosuggest show in a special color, purple, the same color your browser uses to display visited links.

You are in full control of your query history.  We know your privacy is very important to you.  You can turn History on or off at any time or selectively remove any portion of your search history using the Manage History option.    You will see both of these choices every time you use Autosuggest.

We hope you enjoy Autosuggest with History and that it saves you time and improves your search effectiveness. 

Use it and tell us what you think! 

Thank you!

Robert Williams and Todd Schwartz

It’s been an exciting 17 days! By the end of the day on Monday, we will have featured 50 homepage images, 200 hotspots, and athletes from all over the globe. You can relive the past 7 images (including hotspots) using the image viewer. Just click the arrows in the lower right side of the image:

If you want to see more, check out our Bing Photo Sharing app on Facebook.

And now that the games are officially done, we’re shifting back to our ‘normal’ programming. Starting Tuesday, we’ll bring you a different intriguing image each day to help you explore the world around you. Look for the hotspots to find out more about each image if you’ve got time; otherwise you can cheat and check the image caption.

If you’re new to the page and want a guided tour, see Welcome Home. Got an idea for an interesting Bing homepage? Send us a note in the comments – we’d love to hear from you!

Enjoy!

Stephanie Horstmanshof

Editorial lead

Stefan has been in the UK this week talking with the Bing UK team and he has sent us this week’s theme and video from across the water. The Bing UK team is doing some great work trying to raise money for Sport Relief, for more information and you are in the UK go to www.givewithbing.com for more information. So take a look and make sure you catch the theme for this week’s Free t-Shirt Friday at the end. Tweet us back at @bing with the #FTF for your chance to win a Bing t-shirt.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

The strange cut outs in the back are of a British Pop Group called The Saturday’s (just in case you were wondering)

Happy Friday!

Kristin Meldahl

Where would we be if people like Columbus or Einstein hadn’t taken a risk on an idea or notion or if people like Jane Goodall or even Dr. Bing hadn’t followed their passions?  As a global community, we have benefited from discoveries in science and technology, exploration and the arts in ways we don’t always recognize day to day.  But without these advances and explorations, our lives would be dramatically different.

Since the launch of Bing we have partnered on projects that we believe support this idea. Through projects like 10,000 Rockets and our work with the Pacific Science Center on the Facing Mars exhibit we try to encourage kids of all ages to learn and discover through science and technology. Our latest partnership with explorer Eric Larsen is something that we hope will keep that interest and importance top of mind.

Eric leaves today from Ottawa on his journey for the North Pole which begins the second leg of his Save the Poles Expedition in an effort to raise awareness and tell his story about the climate change in these areas. He recently returned from his first leg to the South Pole and will be attempting to summit Mount Everest in the fall reaching what Eric calls the “Three Poles”.  Accomplishing all three of these adventures in one year is something that has never been done before. Ever.

It is our hope that you will follow Eric’s progress with us and get the opportunity to learn and discover what it takes to follow one’s passions, to take risks and to make the difficult decisions designed to increase the world’s knowledge and make life better for everyone. We will be tracking Eric’s progress and creating a forum for you to get to know Eric and learn more about his trek.

You can find information on Eric and his quest at www.ericlarsenexplore.com, read the latest news and discussions about his expeditions on Newsvine, engage with the community on Bing and even track his progress through Twitter.

We hope that like Eric, you are encouraged to learn, explore and follow your passion.

Kristin Meldahl – Bing

Already, tens of thousands of AdSense publishers have used Google Ad Planner to share information about their website with advertisers. We are continuing to invest in the product in order to provide the deepest, most accurate data possible. To that end, we have improved how we calculate site traffic by over 10%, upgraded the way we publish opt-in Google Analytics data from publishers, and renamed the product to DoubleClick Ad Planner. Visit the DoubleClick blog to read more about the new product features and new name.

As always, anyone can use the newly renamed DoubleClick Ad Planner whether or not they are a DoubleClick customer. The product remains free and open for everyone. The URL for publishers to update their profile remains the same: www.google.com/adplanner/publisher.

If you are new to Ad Planner, we invite you to learn more about claiming your site.

Posted by Wayne Lin - Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Planner

The little bird is right. Yahoo! is partnering with Twitter, making it possible to integrate real-time content into social experiences on Yahoo! Starting today, you’ll be able to see more fascinating and news-worthy tweets when you search on Yahoo!

Last year we integrated Twitter results in the Yahoo! News Shortcut and for other buzzing topics. With today’s partnership, we have access to the full public feed of Twitter content. We’ve built a real-time index of this feed so you can see what people are tweeting about the topics you’re looking for.

Go on, give it a test flight: Go to Yahoo! and search for “Obama Twitter” or “iPad” to check out how we’re working to help you stay in touch with the people and things you care about most – across the entire Web.

If you are as big a fan of curling as we are, here is an example of what you could see on Yahoo! Search:

Real-time search involves striking a balance between showing the very latest content and showing slightly older content that may be more interesting or authoritative. In the coming weeks, we will be experimenting along these lines and upgrading tons of stuff to provide better, quicker, and more relevant Twitter results on Yahoo! Search result pages.

You can learn more about this partnership in today’s Yodel Anecdotal post by Bryan Lamkin, Yahoo! SVP of Consumer Products Group, to get his take on how Yahoo! and Twitter have just made your Web world smaller, yet larger at the same time.

We want to know what you think! Drop us a tweet with your comments at @yahoosearch.

Ivan Davtchev, Shiv Ramamurthi, Saurabh Pathak

Yahoo! Search