With the latest version of Messenger, you can now bring Bing into your conversations in a few exciting new ways.

The first way you will be able to do this is through contextual linking. When a term is recognized, a green dashed line appears under that term. When you click on that word, you are given links from Bing to websites, photos, and videos which you can add to your conversation.

Some of the categories of content that Messenger and Bing recognize include:

· Brands

· Bands and Singers

· Places

· Famous Movies

· Famous people

The other way is to use the information from Bing as a search and share experience.  You are able to add content that is indexed and searched by Bing directly into your conversation. Let’s say you want to share a video with a friend you are having a conversation with over IM, below are the steps to embed the video:

· From the IM toolbar you select: Share video from Bing.

· Enter your search term in the Bing search box

· Click the magnifying glass

· Pick the video you want to share

Now you can share information from Bing right inside your Messenger conversation. You can download the Messenger Beta for Windows 7 and Windows Vista here. So, give it a try and let us know what you think.

For more information on this and some of the other new Windows Live Messenger features make sure to check out their team blog post.

Kristin Meldahl - Bing

Over the last two years, the AdSense team has offered the powerful Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) product as an improvement over the original AdSense for search. After some recent improvements, we're now ready to retire the older version of AdSense for search. If the Google logo on your search results page reads "Powered by Google" instead of the newer "Google Custom Search" then you haven't yet upgraded to the newer version. The new AdSense for search with CSE is available in your account, and we encourage you to make the switch by updating your code as soon as possible.

AdSense for search with CSE gives you more control over your search results without changing how you earn money showing AdSense for search ads. For example, with the new version, you'll have access to advanced features like refinements and promotions. Our team has developed a number of updates and improvements during the past few months, and you can access more advanced features at www.google.com/cse.

Your existing AdSense for search box will continue to work normally for a few more months, and we'll be sure to update you when we retire this version. To take advantage of the benefits offered by the new version of AdSense for search and ensure you don't miss any revenue during the transition, we encourage you to update your code now. You'll just need to regenerate your AdSense for search code by signing in to your account and following these instructions:

1. Visit your "AdSense Setup" tab and select "AdSense for Search."
2. Select the sites you'd like your users to be able to search across (Learn More).
3. Customize the look and feel of your search engine results.
4. Update the code on your website.

For more information about AdSense for search with CSE, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

Last month, we had the pleasure of announcing that, in conjunction with Apple, Bing would be included as one of the search engine choices within Safari.

Today, we’d like to introduce our first extension for Safari: Bing Highlights.

Bing Highlights brings intelligent, contextually sensitive information to the web pages you’re reading. Using it is easy: just highlight text on a web page. Bing Highlights will recognize interesting information (or “entities” in information science-speak) and offer you some smart choices.

For example, here’s what may happen if you highlight a U.S. formatted address:

You can interact with the map in the pane, and get driving directions.

If you highlight some text in a foreign language, you can get translations. You can even hear the text spoken by clicking on the icons.

You can also get up-to-date flight status information by highlighting a flight number:

And, of course, you can easily get search results from Bing for any text that you select. This extension helps bring the power of Bing one step closer to your fingertips.

Click to download Bing Highlights from Apple’s Safari Extension Gallery. It works with Safari 5.0.1 or newer, for both Mac and PC.

Creating this extension was fun, and we are excited to continue working closely with Apple in bringing visually compelling Bing experiences to Safari.

On behalf of the entire Bing Highlights team, I hope you enjoy our product!

Dennis Cheung – Bing, Senior Program Manager Lead

What do pool sharks, fancy flowers, sassy hair do’s and spooky fish all have in common?

They’re all part of a stellar line up of new casual games that can be found on Bing – available right in the Bing entertainment browser! Earlier this summer Yusuf mentioned casual games were part of our new entertainment experience on Bing and these new games are just one more way we are continuing to expand and deepen your online gaming experience.

The search for free games is on with the addition of some of our favorites including Belle's Beauty Boutique, Carniball, Fishdom Spooky Splash, Jigsaw, 8 Ball Champion, Pyramid Solitaire and Gardenscapes. 

We love gaming with our friends on Bing.  It’s a fun and easy way to get the latest real-time Facebook feeds and compare gaming scores, all while playing the best free casual games!  Just search, click and play! 

Alejandro Cabrera – Group Manager of Social & Casual Games

Your opinion matters to us! So we’ve put together a short survey so you can tell us how we're doing, and what you'd like to see more of on the Inside Adsense blog. We hope you'll take the time to let us know what's on your mind -- click to give us your feedback.

If you’re keen on letting us know how you feel about our product and support, remember that you can opt-in to receive invitations to test new features, surveys about Google AdSense, and heads up about opportunities to provide feedback about your experiences by email. To do so, log-in to Google AdSense and visit the settings page under the 'My Account' tab, edit your 'Email Preference' by checking the box next to 'Google market research,' and click 'Save Changes.'

We look forward hearing from you!
Posted by Natalia Niznik - Inside AdSense Team

Comparison shopping has been around for ages and all of us do it. Whether checking different stores to compare prices or reading reviews on various products, there’s just something about getting the best deal on the best product that validates the entire shopping experience (or maybe that’s just me).  As more and more activities become mobile, comparison shopping is as well. In fact, research shows that 56% of iPhone users compare prices when shopping on their phone. With the recent update to the Bing iPhone app we’re excited to make comparison shopping with your phone even easier with the new camera scanning feature on the Bing for iPhone app. 

Haven’t tried it yet? Let’s walk through it.

1. From the homepage of Bing, click the camera icon to launch the feature. 

2. Point your camera over a barcode; and for books, music, movies, and video games, position the camera over cover art and tap to take a photo.

3. When Bing gets a match, you’ll see “1 result” in the lower corner. 

4. Click on that thumbnail to see product information like descriptions, reviews, prices, and links to merchant websites.  You can even click through to participating merchants to buy the item.

This new barcode scanning feature makes it easy to comparison shop for your favorite products while on the move.

 

With Bing on your iPhone, we save you time from typing, doing product searches and price comparisons and helps you make better informed shopping decisions.

Enjoy!

Andy Chu -  Bing for Mobile

In the last video of this series, Evanne, a member of the Partner Development team, talks about her favorite Google perk, her obsession with music, and an important tip she’d like to share with all of you.

We hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about what goes on behind the scenes in AdSense. If you have feedback on this series, or ideas for future series, we’d love to hear them so please leave us a comment!



Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

Fiction: AdSense disables accounts and issues warnings at random.

Fact: We rely upon a detailed set of guidelines when looking at policy violations, and these policies are published in our Help Center. Our intent is to keep Google's content and search networks safe and clean for our advertisers, users and publishers. We seek to be as transparent and consistent with our decision making.

Part of our job of monitoring the AdSense network involves working with publishers to identify and address potential issues. We understand that there are a lot of policies to take into account, and so for minor policy violations our first step will be to issue a warning. The reasons a publisher might receive a warning will vary, but in general they tend to be for violations that can be fixed fairly easily. Examples of these violations range from deceptively labeling ads “Today’s hot deals” to having a minimal amount of adult-content comment spam in a forum. Publishers, after receiving a warning, are given three days to fix their violations. If changes are not made in that time, ad serving will be disabled to the violating site.

There are some situations when we would need to disable ad serving to a site without first sending a warning. We usually reserve this action for egregious violations like adult content, copyright infringement, as well as cases of extreme violence and gore. We may also disable ads to a site when we find a violation that we’ve already contacted a publisher about in the past.

The final and most severe action that our teams can take is to close down an account completely. This normally only happens when we find that a publisher’s entire network consists of violating sites or for repeat policy offenders. If you have received a policy notification from the AdSense team, please visit this help center entry for additional information.

We want to point out that notifications that result from the previously mentioned policy violations are different from notifications sent because of issues with invalid click activity, which are monitored by Google's Ad Traffic Quality Team. Invalid click activity consists of any clicks or impressions that may artificially inflate an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings, and for which we decide not to charge the advertiser. For more information about invalid clicks and impressions, please refer to this page, which includes a link to our FAQ page for accounts disabled due to invalid activity.

Lastly, we highly recommend reviewing these guidelines to help avoid policy violations, and to help keep your AdSense account in good standing.

Posted by Andres Schabelman - AdSense Policy team

Fiction: Site maintenance periods and delays in my AdSense reports mean that data isn’t being recorded properly.

Fact: Although there can sometimes be delays in the stats pipeline, all data is still tracked accurately.

We call the process of tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings the “stats pipeline.” The stats pipeline runs continuously, reviewing the logs of activity written by our ad serving system, aggregating them, and updating the storage system. So that we can generate these statistics quickly and reliably, without losing any information, the process of aggregating your statistics spans several data centers.

Sometimes in rare cases, the process for aggregating stats can be delayed for several hours. This can happen for a few possible reasons:

• We sometimes make updates to our datacenter to make use of the latest technologies. However, these don’t affect how your clicks are tracked or how much you earn. Depending on the time it takes for the updates to complete, you may notice that stats are delayed by several hours.
  
  
• We have scheduled database down-times, generally on Saturday mornings (Pacific Time). Since the process of aggregating your statistics depends on database data, any such downtime also leads to delay in statistics. I’d recommend reading this Inside AdSense post for more information about these downtimes.
  
  
• On rare occasions, data centers can have unforeseen problems, causing unplanned delay in updating statistics.

These downtimes only delay your statistics -- they don’t impact the actual tracking of your statistics. We make sure that all events are processed exactly once, and we have implemented a number of internally and externally audited verification procedures to ensure that this is the case. Also, events in the aggregation pipeline are processed in a way that’s not specific to a particular publisher, so all of you should get your stats updates at the same time.

When downtimes occur, we work to notify publishers in advance and as quickly as possible using this blog, the AdSense Help Forum, and our Known Issues page. We understand how important it is for you to have up-to-date statistics, and continue to work towards making sure that the delays are kept to a minimum.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense Team

Fiction: Google doesn’t support Electronic Funds Transfer in my country because they don’t like me!

Fact: There are many factors we have to consider when launching EFT in new countries. In the meantime, please know that we’re always working towards expanding our payment options for publishers in all regions.

Where we can provide in-country EFT depends on a number of factors. Whenever we launch Electronic Funds Transfer, our fastest payment method, in a new country, we hear a number of requests to launch it in even more countries. Don’t worry -- we hear you! We’d like to launch EFT in as many countries as possible, but there are many things that we need to take into consideration before launching it, including legal and banking restrictions.

We’re working constantly to overcome the hurdles to launch EFT in more countries, so thanks for being patient with us. We also know that you are the local experts -- if there are payment methods that we don’t offer, but would work well for you otherwise, please leave us a comment! We’d love to have good suggestions from those who know best.

Posted by Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Payments team

Fiction: Targetable placements are difficult to set up and don’t do anything for my site

Fact: It only takes seconds to convert your custom channels into targetable placements. This simple change can help increase your visibility to advertisers, and boost your revenue.

Advertisers already take advantage of contextual targeting to have their ads appear next to your content. They also have the option to selectively target sites they know are relevant to their ads -- when you’ve created targetable placements, advertisers can dig even deeper and find the most relevant sections of your site to place their ads.

If you’re not familiar with channels, check out our Help Center for steps on how to change your custom channels into targetable placements.

When writing the description of your channel, keep in mind things an advertiser might like to know. For example:

• What kind of content does this channel reflect?
  
• Is the channel on a specific section of your site (e.g. a forum section, blog section, etc.)?
  
• Are your ads above-the-fold (ATF)? In other words, can a user see them without needing to scroll down the page?
  
• Who is your target audience (gender, interests, income level, etc)?

Your description may resemble something along the lines of: “This is a 300x250 ATF ad unit on the football section of a sports blog. My audience is 75% male, age 18-35, earning between $50,000-$80,000 per year.”

To see the impact that placement targeting has on your site, check out this YouTube video on generating reports that break out your contextual and placement targeted revenue.

You can further increase your visibility to advertisers by taking full advantage of DoubleClick AdPlanner, a media planning tool that allowed advertisers to find their audiences across the web. Take a look at our earlier blog post to find out more.

With these small changes, you make it easier for advertisers to find your site, increase your placement targeting potential, and open the door to generating more revenue.

Posted by Rishan Mohamed - Inside AdSense team

This summer and fall, the AdSense team is coming to visit you! In an effort to work more closely with our publishers, we’ve launched the AdSense in Your City program. As part of the program, members of the AdSense team will be traveling to five cities this summer to hear directly from you, as well as to share best practices, top optimization tips, and new products.
Last month, we kicked off our first AdSense in Your City event in Mountain View, California. Sixty publishers came to Google to learn how to make more money with AdSense, to meet members of the AdSense team, and to get to know each other.
Today we’re heading to Santa Monica, and later this summer we’ll be visiting Chicago, New York, and Boston. While attendance is very limited due to space constraints, we have a few more spots in some cities. If you’d like to request an invitation to an event, please sign up here. Though invitations will be sent on a first-come, first-served basis, we’ll do our best to include as many of you as possible. We'll also be sure to make sessions available online early this fall.
Throughout the summer, look for updates on the blog from the AdSense team who will be traveling to these cities. We’ll also be tweeting live from the events (follow us at http://twitter.com/AdSense) and posting videos and publisher interviews.
And this is just the beginning. We’d like to expand this program to be able to travel to more cities around the United States and to meet with more of you face to face. Are you a publisher in Austin? Seattle? Orlando? Leave us a comment and let us know if we should bring AdSense in Your City to your city next!
Posted by Talia Brodecki - Product Marketing Manager

Over the last few months, we held a number of webinars to help you further optimize your site:

• Optimization Best Practices
• AdSense for Search
• AdSense Top Tech Tips

If you haven't seen one yet, you can view the recordings of these events whenever it's convenient for you!

Posted by Caroline Halpin - AdSense Optimization Team

In the next part of our video series, Alton, our Optimization specialist, shares with us his experience working with publishers, his favorite meal at Google, and some recommendations on summer reading.

For more videos, please visit our YouTube channel.



Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team

Continuing our Behind the Scenes video series is Alejo, our AdSense for video and AdSense for games specialist. Alejo tells us about his first job, which city he’d love to live in, and what he’d like every AdSense publisher to know.

For more videos, please visit our YouTube channel.



Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense Team

This week, Microsoft took the wraps off Windows Phone 7, as reviewers have begun publishing in-depth reviews of the new experience from Windows Phone (congratulations to our colleagues over in Windows Phone Team ). Like lots of others at Microsoft, we’re device geeks who couldn’t wait to get our hands on what is shaping up to be an elegant, intuitive experience spanning lots of the common things we all need to get done each day.

Not surprisingly, what excites us the most is what the team has done with Bing on the Windows Phone 7. There have been some very positive reviews of the experience as a whole and it’s great to see how the team’s work integrating a native Bing experience has been received. Here are a few highlights:

· “Bing Search is a beautiful experience on the Windows Phone 7 device with amazing background images, fun trivia associated with the images, and a powerful search/decision engine.” Matt Miller/ZDNet

· “Naturally, Bing and Bing Maps are built into the phone as the default search and maps services. They're nice, smartly contextual, and very location-oriented.” Matt Buchanan/Gizmodo

· “The Bing UI has been neatly brought in line with Microsoft’s Metro design language, and there are numerous neat animation touches.  Zooming out, for instance, eventually flips the map from normal to satellite view, while there’s similarly clever use of zooming to show your own location in relation to search results or destinations. Vincent Nguyen/Slashgear

Here are some screenshots that will give you a feel for Bing on Windows Phone 7.

First, the team delivered nice fidelity to the Bing homepage.

With some common tasks like weather, Windows Phone 7 provides a visually compelling view on weather data from Bing. Notice the beautiful Swiss-inspired typography.

The Windows Phone team included access to some very useful task completion features like flight status answers.

Mapping is well integrated, including elegant navigation for driving or walking.

Windows Phone 7 has a smart experience for finding local listings like restaurants and attractions.

And the team did a beautiful job bringing reviews into the business details.

As you can see, there is lots of cool stuff coming from our friends at Windows Phone. What we can’t show you here is the amazing impact that touch, animation and interaction have on all of these search experiences. Windows Phone 7 is a very different approach to elegant interaction design; it’s almost painful to flatten these designs into screenshots.

It’s great to experience Bing on Windows Phone 7. We can’t wait until these devices are in the market and see what you think.

Erik Jorgensen, Corporate Vice President, Online Services Division

 

Other posts of interest:

Windows Phone Blog

A Couple of Snacks to Finish the Week

One question that users often ask is how they can find past homepage images.  Sure those arrows let you revisit the last 7 days’ worth of homepages, but what about last month? Well, you asked and we answered.

Today we’re really excited to announce our Bing homepage Visual Search gallery! 

 Now you can go back through previous homepage images to see what you’ve missed or revisit old favorites. And you can sort by a variety of categories, including all the homepages featuring countries in Europe, or every homepage image from space.

 Click on the image you like, and you’ll be taken to a details page where you can learn more about the subject in the photo and see related images. And click “ZOOM IN” for an even larger view!

 On Bing, we bring you a dazzling new homepage photo every day. If you’re new to the homepage, don’t forget to check out Welcome Home for a tour.

 Enjoy!

Stephanie Horstmanshof
Managing Editor

Follow the homepage team on Twitter
Find Bing on Facebook

One of the most significant things our search and advertising platform teams have been working on over the past several months is the preparation and engineering for our search alliance with Yahoo!

When we announced our intention to enter into a search and advertising relationship with Yahoo! almost a year ago, we began a journey that will help us build a scale search advertising marketplace and provide a real competitive alternative for consumers, publishers and advertisers.

Beginning just a few days ago, we began some important testing across both our systems designed to verify our joint work and make sure we are ready to deliver a quality transition for customers, which we are on track to complete in the US and Canada over the next few months. Yahoo has posted an update on this milestone on their blog.

We’ve got a couple of tests going on right now to test both our ability to deliver high performance, quality algorithmic results, as well as power search advertising for both companies. We are working closely with our counterparts at Yahoo! to make sure these tests go well and we learn what we need to ensure a seamless transition. Everything we are doing together is aimed at ensuring the quality of the experience for customers through this transition and into the future.

Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have been communicating with customers and training our respective sales and support organizations so they know what they need to do to prepare for the various transition milestones, including beginning to think about migrating their campaigns to adCenter.

For webmasters, it’s important to be familiar with how the Bing crawler interacts with your site. After the full algorithmic transition is complete, you only need to optimize for one crawler (Bing), as we will provide Yahoo! with results from our index.

During this testing phase, it’s important to look at how your site is showing up in search results on Yahoo! and Bing today, so you can assess if there are any tweaks you need to make or feedback you need to share with the team to make sure your site is accurately represented in Bing’s results.

In particular, now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition.

Remember to check out the Bing Webmaster Center for all the latest info, tips and tools, including some significant updates to Bing’s webmaster tools we are rolling out today.

Thanks for all your help as we enter this exciting time in our search alliance with Yahoo!, we’ll share more detail as we continue to progress through the transition.

Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Online Services Division

We’ve started testing organic (also referred to as algorithmic) and paid search listings from Microsoft for up to 25 percent of Yahoo! Search traffic in the U.S.  The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft. However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you’re used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing.

In this screenshot of our tests, the boxed areas of the search results page are coming from Microsoft’s platform, while the rest of the page is still powered by Yahoo! – as we described when our search alliance received clearance earlier this year.

In the coming months, we will also be integrating Microsoft’s mobile organic and paid search listings, so Yahoo! Mobile search fans in the U.S. and Canada will also eventually see Microsoft organic and paid search listings on their phones. And, as with all Yahoo! Search experiences, Yahoo! will continue to innovate and enhance the overall consumer experience around those core listings.

Pending the results of our current testing, we anticipate that our U.S. and Canada organic search listings in both desktop and mobile experiences will be fully powered by the Microsoft platform beginning in the August/September timeframe, and paid search in October.

For more details on the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, check out the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog.

Kartik Ramakrishnan

Vice President, Yahoo! Search Product Operations

Today the Microsoft Research team will be at SIGIR 2010 in Geneva, Switzerland discussing new updates to the Web N-gram service and participating in a number of other workshops as well as a Keynote.

Where you can Find Microsoft at SIGIR:

Keynote: Refactoring the Search Problem to Exploit Difference Between Clients and Servers
Dr. Gary Flake, Microsoft, Director of Live Labs

Workshops:

· Crowd Sourcing for Search Evaluation

· Understanding, Supporting, and Evaluating Personal Data Search

· Query Representation and Understanding

· Web N-gram

The Microsoft Web N-gram service has been in beta since April and researchers, worldwide, have been developing amazing applications using this service. Here is an example featuring Multiword tag clouds developed by Dr. Li Ding from RPI.

We sat down with Kuansan Wang, Principle Researcher from the Microsoft research team to discuss Web N-gram as well as some of the new announcements that are coming from SIGIR:

 

For more details you can visit the Microsoft External Research blog or visit the newly updated website. Please go and give it a try, and let them know what you think.

Kristin Meldahl – Bing

 

Other posts of interest:

The Microsoft Research Team + Bing = Endless Possibilities

Helping Researchers Uncover the Secrets of Search