On Friday at NCCE Seattle we announced that our next homepage photo contest will kickoff on March 29 and this time there’s a twist. We’re asking students in the United States to submit photos to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day and the winning photo will be displayed on the Bing homepage on April 22, Earth Day itself!

 Justin Kraemer, winner of the Bing Home Sweet Homepage Photo contest

In addition to the grand prize winner seeing their photo on Bing.com, we’ve pulled together some great prizes for both students and their schools. Winners across the four age groups (ages 5-10, 11-13, 14-17 and 18+) will win a trip for two to the Microsoft Campus to take part in a Bing editorial team meeting where we pick images for future homepages. Additionally, each winner will receive equipment from HP and Canon to help build digital photo resources at their school. Prizes for individual winners and their schools across the four age groups will total over $70,000.

· 1^st place prizes: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Lab” for their school.

· 2^nd place prizes: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Kit” for their school.

· 3^rd place prizes: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Starter Set” for their school.

And here’s the “everyone wins” part. There’s a great opportunity to help other classrooms in need during the voting stage from April 13th to the 19^th. Bing will give a $5.00 GivingCard for DonorsChoose.org to the first 20,000 people who vote each day. Voters can then decide what classroom projects (like math, science, art, reading) will benefit from Bing’s donation. If you do the math, we’re talking up to $100,000 a day to help schools across the country. Each day you can return to the site to cast another vote and have an opportunity to pick up another GivingCard.

Bing helps students explore the world with our rich homepage imagery every day, so we’re excited to see what the country’s students think we might all want to discover.

To find out more about the contest, including the submission and voting process and prizes for the finalists, visit http://earthdayphotocontest.com/. Teachers will be able to order free posters for their classrooms in the coming days, as well as take advantage of other contest resources on the site.

Liz Tassey Gerber, Bing

Other posts of interest:

Home Sweet Home Page Winning Photo

Home Sweet Homepage

Welcome home

The Eye of the Storm – Jeremy Somers

On Sunday night, I like many others will be glued to the television for those few hours to watch Hollywood honor the best of the best in the 82^nd Annual Academy Awards show.  Some people watch for the awards, some for the fashion, and other watch for the pure entertainment of the presenters, and this year, with Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin hosting we are sure to have a very entertaining show.

As we have done in years past we are offering up instant answers in order to make it easier to navigate all the important information you might need to know about the show. Currently, you can get the Academy Award instant answer for the show itself, which includes information on the show, nominees and links to images and past show information. For those of you that miss the festivities, there will be a post-show instant answer with links to images and videos so be sure and check back for a quick look at the winners and other highlights from the show.

With ten nominees for best picture, I have a lot of catching up to do before Sunday. So while researching the picks, I found a few places very helpful. The first is www.bing.com/twitter where you can see all of the chatter on twitter that has to do with the Academy Awards, nominees, and the event parties. It is pretty interesting to see feedback and opinions about the show from people around the country in real time. The second is the Oscar Winning Actors Visual Search gallery. In this gallery, you can find information about who won in 2009 and who won the most awards overall. You should also visit MSN Award Buzz which pulls information from blogs, twitter and forums to create a fun graphic on each nominee and predicts the winner of each category based on public buzz. It is a must for those Oscar enthusiasts! Check out the MSN blog for all the details.

Since Stefan is off rubbing elbows in L.A. with the Hollywood elite for the Oscars and I am left here again to fend for myself, there will be no video or Fridays With Stefan. But we’ll still have Free T-shirt Friday and the theme for this week is “The Academy Awards” and all things related. To mix it up a little we want the entries to be RT’s (retweets) that you find on www.bing.com/twitter that have to do with the Academy Awards, add in your own commentary and tweet us at @bing make sure to include @bing and  #FTF. We will be looking at all of the entries at the beginning of next week so tweet us all weekend and through the show.

Have a great weekend and Stefan I hope you are having a GREAT time in La La land!

Kristin Meldahl – Bing

O.K. - pop quiz: which social media game boasts an active fan-base of roughly 31 million players every day?  Here’s a hint: it’s a happy place where you can plant virtual crops that can be harvested, or ask your neighbor to chase away raccoons. If you guessed Farmville, then you’re correct!    

Earlier this week, we began an advertising pilot with Zynga, the folks who brought you Farmville.  For a short time, we invited some people who were playing Farmville to join Bing’s Facebook community by becoming a fan of Bing.  We also encouraged them to tell their friends about it.  In exchange, we provided some farm dollars, which is the virtual currency used to buy things to build and maintain a farm.  Here is what the ad looked like, once a Farmville user clicked on it:

In a 24 hour promotion, we added 400,000 new fans to http://www.facebook.com/bing.  We were amazed by the response (and by how fast it went viral).  But we always have room for more folks in the Bing community, so stop on by and join the fun.

We are excited to have the opportunity to work with Zynga on this advertising promotion, as an interesting way of getting more people to experience Bing’s unique ability to help make decisions, whether in Farmville or outside in the real world.  We look forward to engaging more deeply with these users and helping them learn more about Bing.

Liz Tassey Gerber - Bing

Starting tomorrow, Bing will be participating in full force at what’s shaping up to be another stellar SMX West (March 2-4, Santa Clara CA).  Every SMX show is a special one for Bing.  But this one is super-duper special for one reason – we’re bringing Steve Ballmer!  This will be Steve’s first ever conversation with the search community at an industry event.  Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land and co-chair of SMX, sits down with Steve to discuss Microsoft’s commitment to search and how Bing is working to evolve the search experience. 

In addition to Steve’s keynote chat, you’ll find Bing and Microsoft Advertising engaged with the community all across SMX in a number of ways.  Here’s a quick summary of where you can find us.

March 2^nd (TUE)

· 9:00am – 9:45am Keynote Conversation with Microsoft CES Steve Ballmer

· 10:45am – Noon Real Time Search & The Major Search Engines Sean Suchter, GM of Search Technology Center

· 10:45am – Noon Mobile Paid Search Ads: Real Opportunities Raj Kapoor, Global Director, Mobile Advertising

· 1:15pm – 2:30pm Bing: What’s Happening? Stefan Weitz, Director of Search, Bing; Q&A - Eric Gilmore, Group Product Manager, Bing

· Noon – 1:15pm Lunch Topic Table “Meet Microsoft Advertising” Aaron Lauper, AdCenter Search Account Manager

· 4:30pm – 5:45pm Ask The Local Search Engines Mikko Ollila, Senior Product Manager, Bing Local

March 3^rd (WED)

· 10:00am – 10:20am Simplify your Campaign Management! (in EXPO THEATRE) Aaron Lauper, AdCenter Search Account Manager

· 10:45am – Noon Bring In The Bling Via Bing Cashback Meagan Rochelle, Search Solutions Specialist

· Noon – 1:30pm Lunch Topic Table “Exploring Bing Captions” Mark Johnson, Senior Program Manager Lead, Bing

· 4:45pm – 6:00pm Ask The Paid Search Reps Aaron Lauper, AdCenter Search Account Manager

March 4^th (THU)

· 11:30am – 12:30pm Ask The Search Engines Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager, Bing

· 12:30pm – 1:30pm Lunch Topic Table “Talk to a Bing Engineer” Steve Macbeth, Principal Group Program Manager, Bing

Bing is also sponsoring the legendary SMX community event SMX After Dark on the night of March 2^nd starting at 9pm in the Santa Clara Hyatt pool side (better not rain!)

And if these weren’t enough, Ignite is coming to SMX West as part of Global Ignite Week!  Ignite is the fun, high-energy evening of a dozen or so “speed presentations” where each speaker has 5 minutes and 20 slides to talk about a topic.  The speaker lineup is an impressive who’s who from around the search industry.  If you’re in the area, come check it out by registering for FREE (an SMX badge will get you in too).  Free drinks and light food provided.  And if you can’t join us in person, be sure to catch the live stream.

Ignite SMX West is March 2^nd.  Doors open at 7:30 and presentations start at 8:00pm.  Full details: http://searchmarketingexpo.com/west/2010/ignite.   

Aya Zook, Product Manager, Bing

*Matt McGee from Search Engine Land live blogged Steve Ballmer's discussion with Danny Sullivan.

We’ve been working hard to help your complete your search tasks more quickly.  We’re happy to announce support for query history in Autosuggest today to help make that vision a reality.  Autosuggest now supports suggestions from your query history.  Many users search for a set of topics again and again.  It could be you searching on your favorite hobbies, doing online research, looking up local attractions or directions – the particular query subjects are very specific to you.  To make searching easier and reduce all those wasted clicks, many people found our history feature very useful to get them to where they’re going faster.  So we experimented with providing your prior searches in Autosuggest and found it’s even more useful in to helping find what you’re looking for faster!

Search history in Autosuggest can help you in other ways too.  Many search tasks span multiple search sessions even days or weeks.  In fact, 44% of non-navigational search sessions last longer than 1 week!  Perhaps you need to research the purchase of a new automobile.  You might use Bing to find a retail location and to further research online – over many days – to make the best decisions on your big ticket purchase.  With history support in Autosuggest, you can restart a previous search session by typing a few characters to see your previous queries and start researching right where you left off.  We know from our testing that this makes you more effective at your longer search tasks.

Previous search queries in Autosuggest show in a special color, purple, the same color your browser uses to display visited links.

You are in full control of your query history.  We know your privacy is very important to you.  You can turn History on or off at any time or selectively remove any portion of your search history using the Manage History option.    You will see both of these choices every time you use Autosuggest.

We hope you enjoy Autosuggest with History and that it saves you time and improves your search effectiveness. 

Use it and tell us what you think! 

Thank you!

Robert Williams and Todd Schwartz

It’s been an exciting 17 days! By the end of the day on Monday, we will have featured 50 homepage images, 200 hotspots, and athletes from all over the globe. You can relive the past 7 images (including hotspots) using the image viewer. Just click the arrows in the lower right side of the image:

If you want to see more, check out our Bing Photo Sharing app on Facebook.

And now that the games are officially done, we’re shifting back to our ‘normal’ programming. Starting Tuesday, we’ll bring you a different intriguing image each day to help you explore the world around you. Look for the hotspots to find out more about each image if you’ve got time; otherwise you can cheat and check the image caption.

If you’re new to the page and want a guided tour, see Welcome Home. Got an idea for an interesting Bing homepage? Send us a note in the comments – we’d love to hear from you!

Enjoy!

Stephanie Horstmanshof

Editorial lead

Stefan has been in the UK this week talking with the Bing UK team and he has sent us this week’s theme and video from across the water. The Bing UK team is doing some great work trying to raise money for Sport Relief, for more information and you are in the UK go to www.givewithbing.com for more information. So take a look and make sure you catch the theme for this week’s Free t-Shirt Friday at the end. Tweet us back at @bing with the #FTF for your chance to win a Bing t-shirt.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

The strange cut outs in the back are of a British Pop Group called The Saturday’s (just in case you were wondering)

Happy Friday!

Kristin Meldahl