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 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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