Yes, more Bing. We didn’t want to keep this info from you.

Statistics

Did Bing just Leapfrog Yahoo Search? Data from monitoring service StatCounter suggests that Bing, Microsoft’s new decision engine, has overtaken Yahoo Search as the number two search service in the U.S. and worldwide in large part thanks to stealing market share from leader Google.

The company’s analysis for Thursday finds that in the U.S. Bing overtook Yahoo to take second place on 16.28%, with Yahoo Search currently at 10.22%.

API

Bing has an API. Like the Bing service itself, the API is a re-branded and enhanced version of the Microsoft’s Live Search API. Just days before the official Bing launch, the API was updated with many of the features of the new Bing service. That earlier announcement for Live Search 2.0 has the highlights:

• Developers can now request data in JSON and XML formats. The SOAP interface that the Live Search API required has also been retained.
• Requested data can be narrowed to one of the following source types: web, news, images, phonebook, spell-checker, related queries, and Encarta instant answer.
• It is now possible to send requests in OpenSearch-compliant RSS format for web, news, image and phonebook queries.
• Client applications will be able to combine any number of different data source types into a single request with a single query string.

The Bing API is part of a larger set of web application development services called “Project Silk Road.” In a world where APIs are often limited in many ways, it’s notable that in addition to these technical updates that Microsoft has removed the API usage quotas found in the Live Search API, with just the requirement that it be used for “user-facing applications” only. Note that the terms of use have also been loosed to allow more flexible presentation options such as no restrictions on ordering and blending search results.

More detailed information on features specific to the various data source types can be found at the MSDN website.

Source

Ringtones, ehh scuse me, Bingtones

If you love Bing, try downloading any of these official Bing ringtones to your mobile phone. Though Microsoft has provided these Bing ringtones for Windows Mobile devices, the files are in MP3 format and therefore should work just fine on other mobile phones as well. iPhone users may check this tutorial on making ringtones from MP3 files. You can listen to these tones here.

More Ringtones, not Bingtones? Long Zheng found ten soundclips which can be used as ringtones in Windows 7.

Links and more..

Microsoft Releases Free "Bing" Search Software & Resources (Accelerators, Web slices, Bing for Mobile etc. etc.), Bing, Bing Community, Bing Blogs, Bing Forums, Bing Media, Bing YouTube Channel, Bing on Facebook, Bing on Twitter, Bing Events

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