BingTweets Goes down with a 404 Error on day of MicroHoo and Twitter homepage change

UPDATE: BingTweets just came back up around 3:30 PM EST. Wonder what happened?



Today was the day of the long awaited Microsoft-Yahoo deal materializing. It was also the day of Twitter's homepage change into a more search based page.

The headlines have already been made: Twitter goes Google, MicroHoo is a Done Deal, etc

But suddenly, BingTweets stopped working.

BingTweets was one of Microsoft's latest attempts to get an advantage over the search competition known as Google, by adding real time searching to Bing, albeit on another website: www.BingTweets.com

But what happened? This joint venture between Microsoft and Federated Media apparently no longer exists. Or at least, that's the error you'll get if you go to BingTweets.com

It was working fine only a few hours ago, so what happened?

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Bing overtakes Yahoo as new No.2 with 16% market share,new Bing-a-thon Campaign

According to recent statistics offered by StatCounter, Bing appears to have skyrocketed in market share to an incredible 16% in the US on Thursday June 4th, 2009.
This was just the day after Bing was officially released in the US along with a new TV commercial so it seems that it's really the hype that got Bing to this level. However, this kind of hype is exactly what Microsoft wants to achieve with Bing, and especially if they can keep this up with more advertising and other ways of generating hype.

It was on Thursday, the announcement of Bing that their old search engine Live Search also saw a spike up to 12%, but that was most likely because everyone wanted to try out Bing but didn't know where to go, so they wound up heading to the old Live Search.

If you head to GlobalStats Statcounter, you can see the latest daily statistics for the top search engines. The spike may be related to their ad campaign, but it may also have come as a result of the hype surrounding Bing. However, be careful when assessing that the "race is over", which I've noticed on multiple blogs/news sites. It is far from over yet, and if Microsoft cannot keep their customers coming back every time to Bing, then they'll just go to their old habits. We don't know yet whether Bing will true have the ability to intrigue customers and make them love it.

What we do know, is that Microsoft will not let Bing go down without a fight. Like I mentioned, they planned to spend $100 million with the release of Bing on advertising in various places. Today, we found out that they've decided to step up the advertising game with another set of ads to be released on Hulu and some TV shows.
A report by the New York Times says that their new ads will be in a "Bing-a-thon" format, and will be similar to a TV show, starring aJson Sudeikis, Olivia Munn and Fred Willard.

"The key will be whether we deliver a product and connect with people emotionally in the advertising. You have to do something a little bit more surprising. It's a very tall marketing challenge and a very tall product challenge."

That was a statement from Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president for the online services division of Microsoft. These ads will be integrated with TV shows and Hulu's shows, rather than standalone commercials like before.

It will surely be a challenge for Microsoft, but the innovations on Bing have paved the way for broader features on search engines and will eventually lead to a better overall experience for the users, as competitors and especially the market leader Google will have to respond to Bing's features.
Has Microsoft really shown that Bing will become the next No.2 Search Engine? That's something we can't say for sure yet, but perhaps we'll get a better picture of the situation after about 2 weeks, when the initial hype starts wearing off, and the tech crowd stops "trying it out" and decide whether they really like Bing or not.

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Bing Debuts, TV commercial puts Bing as Savior of economy

Though Bing was announced last week and a preview of Microsoft's new search engine came out on Monday at www.bing.com, today was the actual official release of Bing, with all of its features.
Today, the preview note below the icon Bing was removed, and now the Bing service is a full fledged search engine.

These 2 weeks, Microsoft has stirred up quite a bit of interest, in a lot of areas such as the ZuneHD, the announced release of Windows 7, the release of Silverlight 3, and also their revolutionary Xbox 360 no controller, full body motion detecting system called Project Natal, and of course the Bing search engine. However, they plan to stir up even more interest by spending $80-100 million on advertising for their new search engine, or rather, their "decision engine".

"While everyone was searching, there was bailing. While everyone was lost in the links, there was collapsing. We don't need queries and keywords if they bring back questions and confusion. From this moment on, search overload is officially over."

That was an excerpt from the new television commercial they rolled out today, along with the official release of their Bing decision engine. Their ad wants to portray Bing as the solution to the search engine market's woes. What do you think of this idea? This kind of a model has been known to have some effects on people by putting in parallel with some horrible situation of which their product or idea is a cure. But one thing's for sure, Microsoft will need more than that in order to gain serious market share on Google. However, the amount of interest shown and their dedication of large sums of money to the ad campaigns may just put a dent in that market share held by Yahoo and Google.

Check out the commercial:



The battle will be very interesting, but at least there's good competition going on.

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