bing

Microsoft has added yet another Facebook feature to its Bing search engine. Now you can tag up to five of your Facebook friends by typing their name in the sidebar on the right when sharing a search, in the hopes that they will give you input on your query.

Assuming you've given Bing permission to access your Facebook account, the question will be automatically posted on your Facebook Timeline. At the same time, your tagged Facebook friends will get a notification so that they can help you find what you're looking for.

Microsoft gives three example scenarios where … Read more

Google has added fresh high-resolution aerial and satellite imagery to its mapping services for 25 cities and 72 countries.

Among the imagery to get an update is the Olympic Park, London, where athletes around the world are currently vying for medals in the London 2012 games.

Google noted on its LatLong blog that the pictures show the "final construction touches" being added to the East London stadium, suggesting the images are no more than a month old.

More than 20 U.S. cities have been also updated with 45-degree imagery, which Google users to build its urban 3D … Read more

Thursday's top stories will fill you up on patent spats, better maps and creepy apps:

There's a laughable twist in the never-ending global patent battle between Apple and Samsung. A U.K. judge (the same judge that said Samsung's tablets were "not as cool" as the iPad) ruled that Samsung did not copy the iPad's design. But the judge also ordered Apple to publish a notice of this fact on its U.K. website and in British newspaper ads for six months. Awkward.

Nokia has promised "something amazing" to be announced Sept. … Read more

Microsoft has piled on another 215 terabytes of high-resolution imagery to Bing Maps, less than a month after it dished out a massive 165 terabyte cache of mapping data to the service.

Users will see updated high-resolution content across the U.S., and areas of Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Tokyo when viewing through the "Bird's Eye" looking-glass.

Bird's Eye imagery is collected at a 45-degree angle from low-flying aircraft, not from satellites, and offers greater depth and higher-resolution imagery of cities and major landmarks. Such imagery is available in most regions around the world, but … Read more

For the past few weeks, there've been some tweets showing up in my timeline from something called the Bing Fund.

ZDNet (and Techie-Buzz) blogger Manan Kakkar has noticed these, too. The tweets lead to a BingFund.com Web page that tease "We're working on something fun and will have more to share soon." (Kakkar noted in one tweet, there was an indication that Microsoft would peel back the covers on the Bing fund in mid-July.)

The head of the new Bing Fund is Rahul Sood, the founder of VoodooPC (purchased by HP), who most recently was … Read more

Bing is now offering 165 terabytes of new birds-eye-view satellite shots of locations all over the Earth, from the Moroccan Mountains to Egypt's pyramids of Giza to the Extraterrestrial Highway in the U.S.

This is Microsoft's mapping engine's largest satellite data release ever. Before today, Bing Map's total amount of data was 129TB. So, what can be seen on the search engine's maps has now more than doubled in size.

"This release features imagery over North America, South America, Africa, Australia, Europe and Asia," Bing wrote in a blog post today. "… Read more

Much ado has been made of Apple's decision to ditch Google's mapping technology in favor of an in-house solution for the Maps app in iOS 6. Yesterday's WWDC keynote failed to shed light on how Apple plans to accomplish that task, but an anonymous tipster leaked iOS 6 beta screenshots showing TomTom attribution information, later confirmed by CNET.

Also included in Apple's mapping initiative is OpenStreetMap and at least 15 other mapping data providers (AND, DigitalGlobe, Intermap, LeadDog, others).

While the attribution lists a number of map data providers, Microsoft is conspicuously missing. So how is … Read more

In the quest for knowledge, Microsoft's Bing announced a partnership with Encyclopedia Britannica today. Now, alongside all other results -- like Wikipedia and Web pages -- users will see a box of information with an image linking to results from Britannica's online encyclopedia.

"A core focus for us here at Bing has been about delivering relevant information in a more organized way to help you find what you need more quickly and get stuff done," Bing's principal development lead Franco Salvetti wrote in a blog post. "We're very excited to collaborate with Encyclopedia … Read more

Members of the Bing Mobile team at Microsoft's Israel R&D Center have launched a new beta app and Web site for remotely programming their phones.

The unusual element here? The app is for Android phones only (at least at this point). The stated reason? Android's "less strict security model" makes it more friendly to early-stage tech previews.

on{X} -- pronounced On-Ex -- is a new kind of app that is "orthogonal to the classic 'app from a marketplace' model we're all used to," said Eran Yariv Group manager at Bing … Read more