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Back at MIX09 in March, we talked about our work with Careerbuilder.com, and today we are pleased to report that at the annual Society for Human Resource Management Conference, Careerbuilder.com announced the availability of Applicant Explorer, a new application built on the Bing API that helps recruiters find qualified candidates in the fraction of the time it once took. Rather than manually sorting through applicant resumes and then searching the web for additional information to fill out a candidate profile, Applicant Explorer uses the Bing API to supplement CareerBuilder’s resume database with online results from public sites including social networking sites, blogs, corporate websites and forums.

CareerBuilder selected the Bing API because it enabled the company to help recruiters customize their search criteria and dynamically sift through large amounts of data quickly, providing a more complete picture of an applicant. The end result is great news for recruiters: hundreds of data sources at their fingertips and the ability to do thorough comparisons more quickly and easily. Click here for a video overview of Applicant Explorer or to read the press release here.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, we want to make sure you know that the Bing API is free, with unlimited queries, as long as you meet our Terms of Use.

We encourage you to use our forums and our newly introduced Bing Toolbox to access tools and resources, and don’t forget to provide your feedback to help us keep improving. We look forward to hearing from you and seeing what you’re doing with Bing!

Cheers,

Angus Norton, Senior Director, Bing

It’s been just over a year since we introduced cashback and a lot has happened in that time. We’ve added offers, merchants, and even changed our name to Bing cashback (although some suggested “Bing Bling”). With all the activity this year, we thought it was a good time to revisit how Bing cashback works and provide an update on how the program is going.

Bing cashback is easy as 1, 2, 3: Search, Shop and Save. Within Bing’s product search results or sponsored listings, click on any product or ad with the Bing cashback gleam, shown here, purchase the product through the merchant’s site, and get cashback. In most cases, you will have to wait 60 days to get your cashback, but after that period, you can get your cashback via PayPal, direct deposit to your bank account or via check mailed to you.

Bing cashback always has hot deals on popular products such as laptops and electronics prominently displayed on the homepage, and we’re also regularly Tweeting out great deals to our followers of @bingcashback. Come follow us to make sure you don’t miss a deal!

For those loyal shoppers keeping track of how we’ve been doing, here’s an overview of the key metrics we use to measure success of the program.

1. Number of Offers: We now have more than 17 million offers, up from 10 million at launch on Bing cashback. More selection is great news for shoppers.

2. Advertiser ROI: Merchants participating in the program are loving it. We have two specific examples to share with you. First, since joining the program, eBay has seen a 10x increase in clicks to its site, a 7x increase in sales and 4x return when compared to its previous year’s performance with us. TigerDirect noticed its sales and order volumes nearly double, and both its conversion rates and order sizes increase significantly since joining the program. Thanks to a better ROI, advertisers have been able to increase their advertising spend with Bing and we, in turn, have passed more value to our customers through rebates. If you’re an advertiser and want to join the Bing cashback program, click here for more information.

3. Percentage of shopping queries: According to data from comScore, our numbers of absolute shopping queries in the past year are up by 57 percent in the U.S. In the overall search space, shopping queries were up only 42 percent, meaning we outperformed the U.S. market on shopping query growth. From a marketshare perspective in shopping queries, we’ve also grown year-over-year from 17.6 percent marketshare in April 08 to 19.4 percent at the end of April 2009.

Beyond these numbers, we have also seen some great anecdotal feedback from our loyal cashback shoppers. Some of these stories made us laugh, and many of them just warmed our hearts like this one from Jenny from our customer service team.

“Using cashback I bought my daughters’ first Halloween costume.. Winnie the Pooh bumblebee.. which she would only wear if she was holding a toothbrush in her hand and got most annoyed when we took it away.” (Here’s a picture of her in all her Halloween glory.)

Now it’s your turn. We want to hear about your experiences with cashback and what great products you have recently purchased. Fan us on Facebook and share your favorite cashback purchases.

As we move into year two of cashback, we are committed to Bing cashback as a key part of the overall Bing experience, and we will continue to work with merchants to offer great deals to keep you shoppers coming back for more. Thank you for helping us get off to a great start.

Raju Malhotra, Director of Product Management, Bing

A key goal for Bing is to deliver the very best search results. One of the ways Bing does this is through a new feature called “Best match”, which sets up the best result in a distinct, easily accessible space at the top of the page.

You may ask yourself: Why did we bother to do this? Don’t search engines deliver the best result at the top of the page anyway? Today, while search engines do a pretty good job at finding the best result for a simple query, they generally won’t tell you if the top result is the official one, nor will they help you navigate within that site. Nearly a third of queries fall into this “navigational” category – where you’re really only looking for one particular site. But today people often can’t immediately find what they are looking for on a results page – only 1 in 4 queries return a completely successful result.

Best match helps you to identify which result might be most useful, particularly when one link clearly provides the official or authoritative source of information. It displays the result in a clearly marked area at the top of the page, and includes deeplinks into the most helpful parts of the site right beneath the site description.

In addition, we decided to make Best match work even harder for certain sites by incorporating some of the key features of the official site right there on the search results page. Best match can include a “search within” bar that allows you to set up a query of the official site. Where appropriate, Best match also includes a customer service number at the top of the page – a feature that people told us was of particular interest. We didn’t stop there though. Site specific tools can also be incorporated on the page. For example, you can track your parcel en route within Best match for the query “UPS”.

Best match also shows similar or related sites to your search, to allow you to explore around the actual result to your query. We are also starting to pair up some of Bing’s instant answers content with Best match to extend the experience even further. For example, when the answer to your query has multiple local listings we include that along with the site information in the Best match.

And the overall result of this for you? People tell us that it allows them to cut through the clutter of a search results page much more effectively. It reduces their time reviewing the page, and gets them to what they were looking for faster and more directly.

Now it’s your chance. Give it a go at Bing.com with some of the following queries, or try your own. And let us know what you think.

Try these for size:
Starbucks
MGM Grand
NBC
Delta Airlines

Martin Stoddart, Senior Product Manager, Bing

In our last post, we showed you a few ways to add Bing to your browser whether you are using the latest version of IE, Firefox or Chrome. Today, we want to demonstrate how Bing’s integration with both IE8 and Firefox provides quick access to information, to make your search easier.

Internet Explorer 8

When typing certain queries in the IE8 Search Box, Bing will return rich auto-suggestions, including Instant Answers, which provide you the information you’re looking for right from the search box.

These suggestions are available in English only in the markets designated below:

weather (e.g. Boston weather) available for the United States, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, India

stock quotes (e.g. msft), available for the United States, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom

show times (e.g. Angels and Demons) available for the United States

flight status (e.g. ua 820) available for the United States, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, India

definitions (e.g. define renaissance) available for the United States, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, India, New Zealand, Philippines, South Africa

conversions (e.g. 71 degrees F in C) available for the United States, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, India, New Zealand, Philippines, South Africa

equations (e.g. x*5 = 7) available for the United States, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, India, New Zealand, Philippines, South Africa

calculator (e.g. 2+2) available for the United States, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, India, New Zealand, Philippines, South Africa

Accelerators

Bing accelerators enable you to access your favorite online services no matter where you are on the web. From the IE Add-ons site, you can add Bing Translate, Maps, and Shop and Save with Bing Shopping accelerators. For instance, if you are in the market for a new cell phone, and you find the Samsung BD-P3600 on a website you can highlight “Samsung BD-P3600,” right click and select the Shop and Save with Bing Shopping accelerator from the pop-up menu. You can preview Bing Shopping cashback offers on the Samsung BD-P3600 or click any of the links in the preview window to see offers from specific merchants.

Web Slices

IE8 Web Slices enable you to monitor information that changes periodically. We have Web Slices available for you to track Weather, Finance and Traffic.

To find all Bing add-ons for IE8, just click here.

Mozilla Firefox

Bing provides auto-suggestions on Firefox. When you start to type a query in the Firefox search box, Bing will return a list of suggestions based on what you have entered, thus helping you find what is important to you faster and easier. Say you are a White Sox fan and you are looking for tickets. Enter “white sox” in the Search Box and you get back the list shown below…just pick “white sock tickets” and you are quickly on your way to being in the stands!

Bing is based on the Open Search standard and we use the JSON interface supported by Firefox to retrieve auto-suggestions.

As you can see, you can Bing & Decide in many ways!

Debapriya Ray, Beatrice Oltean, Alessandro Catorcini, Bill Pardi, Bing

One of our goals for Bing was to improve the way search results pages are organized. We wanted to help people get away from the “search overload” they often feel– that sinking feeling when confronted by millions of non-descript results.

The Explore Pane is one of the ways we are bringing more order to the page. It allows us to provide a set of helpful tools in a consistent location across the Bing experience that enable you to more easily navigate various categories of results relevant to your query, including web, video, image, news, local, shopping, and more.

We conducted extensive research in planning Bing. One of the things people told us was that search results pages could be organized more effectively. We found that 66% of people are using search more frequently to help them make decisions. However, they are spending much more time on those decision-oriented sessions – averaging around 9 minutes per session. With that insight, we realized improving page organization to help get users to what they are looking for faster could have a big impact.

What’s in the Explore Pane?

The Explore Pane can contain three sets of tools – Quick Tabs, Related Searches and Search History.

• Quick Tabs provide a set of 1-click links to help you narrow in on more specific sub-categories for your initial search term. Think of them as a set of most likely next steps in the search process. These Quick Tabs are generated algorithmically based on common refinements for a given query type. As such you’ll see similar Quick Tabs within the categories for a given topic area, such as cars, but differences among categories. For example, the selection of Quick Tabs would be different for a celebrity or movie search.
• Related Searches provide a list of other related or exploratory searches you might want to try, based on the query itself. Related searches can be helpful for finding other related topics. Whereas Quick Tabs are helpful in narrowing a search, Related Searches help you explore tangential topics that might be of interest.
• Search History provides you direct access to recent searches that you’ve performed in a given search session. You can revisit earlier queries and even share search results via email, IM or Facebook through a simple click.

For certain queries that are very specific (such as your name or other “tail” queries), Quick Tabs and Related Searches may not appear every time. However for what we call “head” queries which are broader terms that often require refinement in the search process, Quick Tabs and Related Searches are presented to help you more easily navigate the volumes of content that exist on your given search term.

Where can I find it?

The Explore Pane is always present in the left hand pane on the page as a permanent companion while using Bing. We did extensive user testing with early concepts and concluded two things:

i) The feature was sufficiently helpful to present as a permanent feature on the page.

ii) The left hand pane was the best location – being highly accessible from the main set of results, without being too distracting.

How dynamic is it? 

The contents of the Explore Pane are highly dynamic. The presence or content of Quick Tabs and Related Searches vary for every different query that you type, while the Search History tool is unique to you as a user.

We believe that the Explore Pane is an important component of a more structured, helpful and well-organized results page. In the near future we’ll follow up with more detailed postings on both the Quick Tabs and Search History features.

Martin Stoddart, Senior Product Manager, Bing