As we wrap up the year, we wanted to take the opportunity to say thank you to everyone who uses Bing. 2013 has been a great year and for us that’s all due to you. Over the past twelve months, we have shipped thousands of changes to the search experience which are directly based on how you use Bing. From minor updates like downloadable homepage images to major changes like powering Smart Search in Windows 8.1 and voice search in Xbox One, none of this would have been possible without your engagement and feedback.
Over the next few days we’re going to highlight how the features and experiences we power have changed in 2013 but today we wanted to showcase some things you might find surprising about Bing. You can check out the full infographic here.
A New Homepage Image Every Day
The Best Video Selection on the Web
Because we know that video on the web is more than YouTube, Bing Video showcases leading web video services such as Vevo, Hulu, Daily Motion, CBS, MSN, MTV, Vimeo, and more (and yes, YouTube also!) Looks like you agree with us, as your activity on Bing Video more than doubled in 2013 year over year.
Now That’s A Lot of Data
If you were to line up pixels from all of the aerial imagery that make up Bing Maps, you could make four round trips to Venus with pixels to spare.
Drinking from the Social Fire Hose
For every search, we believe there’s someone out there who can help. So, whether you want to see what your colleagues Facebooked for lunch, or you need to know what Lady Gaga just tweeted, Bing indexes a half a billion tweets from Twitter and over 2 billion status updates from Facebook every single day in real time. That means, that in one week, we ingest more data into Bing than the number of webpages that existed in 2005.
People, Place and Things
In 2013 Bing has doubled the number of people, places, and things and the relationships between them in our index. That’s how we know that Brad Pitt is a person, who is a celebrity, has been in dozens of movies, and has hundreds of co-stars. In fact, Bing has indexed so many movies that it would take you 150 years to bing[e] watch the 800,000 films we track.
Say What?
Here at Microsoft, we made sure that Bing powers search in Windows, Windows Phone, Office, and Xbox to make our devices and services even more useful. But Bing also shows up in places you might not expect, like Facebook, Yahoo, Siri on the latest iPhones and iPads, and even Android devices like the Amazon Kindle Fire.
Four Years and Still Growing
Bing was the only major search engine to have more monthly searches now than it did in January – thank you!!
Thanks for a great 2013. Here’s to another great year.
- From all of us at Bing