The History Of MSN Live Search And Bing

MSN Live Search (Bing) is the branded name for Microsoft's web search engine. Currently, it is the third most used search engine in North America after Google™ and Yahoo! This is also virtually the case here in Australia with Google™ being the top dog for search engines. Originally called MSN Search, Live Search was launched in the fall of 1998.

At first, it used search results provided by Inktomi,a search engine that had been developed by professors at UC Berkley in the mid-1990's. Inktomi later went bankrupt in the 2000-2001 dot.com bust and was subsequently acquired by Yahoo!

In early 1999, a version of MSN Search was launched which displayed listings from Looksmart (a search advertising network and management solutions company based in San Francisco that provides search advertising products and services to text advertisers, as well as targeted pay-per-click search and contextual advertising) in combination with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista's search engine were used instead.

Subsequently however Microsoft upgraded MSN Search to provide its own Microsoft-built search engine results (list of web addresses with samples of content that meet a user's query), the index of which is updated on a regular basis.

The first beta version of Live Search to be released to the public debuted on March 8, 2006, with the final release on September 11, 2006 replacing MSN Search. On March 21, 2007, it was broadcast that Microsoft would separate its Live Search developments from the Windows Live services community.

Live Search was integrated into the Ad Platform headed by Satya Nadella, part of Microsoft's Platform and Systems division. As part of this integration, Live Search was consolidated with what you would know as Microsoft adCenter.

As part of the changeover from MSN Search to Live Search, Microsoft also started performing their own image search, using their own internal image search algorithms (this work had previously been outsourced).

Live Search offers users the ability to search for specific types of information using search tabs that include Web, news, images, music, desktop, local, and Microsoft Encarta (is a digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft). A configuration menu is also available to change the default search engine in Internet Explorer.

Features offered by Live Search (Bing) include the ability to view additional search results on the same web page (instead of needing to click through to subsequent search result pages) and the ability to dynamically adjust the amount of information displayed for each search-result you receive (meaning you will see just the title, a short summary or a longer summary).

It also allows the user to save their searches and see them updated automatically on Live.com.

Live Search is not limited to reporting back indexed pages that mach an ordinary search query. When typing in a search query using more than one word (keyword phrases) Live Search will search results trying to match all the keywords. It also has advanced search options available through an advanced link followed by drop down options, or directly via entering advanced options in the search query.

Since early 2009, Microsoft has been internally developing a new search engine that may eventually replace Live Search which is now known to everyone as Bing. This new engine, currently named Kumo, will be different from Google's search in that results are categorized, however like Google™, Kumo (Bing) will likely sell advertising space in the form of sponsored links displayed with each search.

For webmaster Bing also comes with a link so that you can add your websites called the webmaster center.

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