Searching for restaurants in the new Bing. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Microsoft has taken the wraps off some new social features for its Bing search engine. The revamped Bing now uses a three-column layout and pulls in additional search results from your friends on Facebook.

A preview of the new version of Bing has been available for some time, but as of today the new layout and features are now available to everyone in the United States. So far there’s no word on when the same features might come to international users.

If social search features leave you feeling cold, fear not, the new Bing doesn’t follow Google’s lead and integrate social results right into the main search results. Instead Bing has completely overhauled its look and now sports a three-column layout. To go along with the new layout Bing has cut back on the chrome and other UI elements so even though there’s quite a bit more info on the page, it still feels relatively uncluttered.

The new look pairs the traditional search results — still on the left side of the page — with two new columns — a so-called snapshot column in the middle, and the new social results on the far right.

The most intriguing of the three is the snapshot info, which varies according to your search. The basic idea is to add extra, relevant information and services alongside your search results. For example, if you search for a restaurant Bing might provide a map or some reviews. Other searches will pull in relevant info for that search, with Bing doing a reasonable — though far from perfect — job of guessing what you might want to see.

The new social results require you to connect your Facebook account to Bing and will pull any relevant content from your friends into the far right column on Bing’s search page. There’s a new “Friends who might know” heading, where you’ll find a list of Facebook friends with any activity related to your search terms (including tagged photos). Unfortunately, in my testing not many queries brought up anything relevant from Facebook friends (which could say more about my friends than the new Bing, YMMV).

For more info on everything that’s new in the social revamp, be sure to read through the earlier announcement and check out the overview video from Microsoft Bing Director Stefan Weitz:

Mozilla has announced a new special release of Firefox that integrates Microsoft’s Bing search engine into the open source browser. The special Firefox build, dubbed Firefox with Bing, makes Bing the default search provider in both the search bar and Awesome bar, and makes Bing.com the default homepage.

If you’d like to try Firefox with Bing, head on over to the new firefoxwithbing.com and download a copy. If you’re already using the standard version of Firefox the site will instead offer to install the Bing Search for Firefox add-on, giving you the same Bing features without downloading a new browser.

Not a fan of Bing? There’s no need to panic, Mozilla isn’t replacing Google with Bing in the official version of Firefox. Rather Firefox with Bing is part of Mozilla’s growing number of partnerships designed to tailor Firefox to niche markets. Similar special releases exist for Twitter, Yahoo and others.

Of course there’s always the possibility that Mozilla’s partnership with Microsoft will grow into something more. Some news sites have been speculating that Firefox with Bing is a sign of things to come when Mozilla’s contract with Google ends in November. It’s certainly a possibility, but given Google’s contribution to Mozilla’s bottom line it seems unlikely that Mozilla will walk away from its Google deal any time soon.

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Microsoft has announced it will expand its effort to bring Facebook into Bing’s search results, displaying new annotations alongside any search result links your Facebook friends have liked. Bing first began integrating Facebook “likes” into its search results back in October 2010, but results from your friends were relegated to the bottom of the page. The new version promotes your friends up into the main search results listing.

Bing’s change mirrors a very similar announcement from Google earlier this month when the company announced it would add links, photos and relevant web pages from your friends to Google’s normal search results.

Microsoft’s Bing offering is roughly the same thing with one huge difference — Bing includes results from Facebook, Google does not.

That’s a huge blind spot for Google given that Bing now has some 500 million Facebook users to pull social data from. At the same time, Google is pulling data from your Twitter friends, which is something Bing does not, thus far, offer. However, given the relatively open nature of Twitter versus the closed nature of Facebook, it will likely be easier for Bing to add Twitter, than for Google to add Facebook.

The best search engine choice depends, for now, on which social networks you use. Facebook fans will find Bing a better match, while those using a wide variety of services will probably see more results from Google Social Search. For the new features to be useful you need a large social network, and your friends need to share your interests, otherwise the odds of your friends’ data showing up in either service are slim.

However, there’s a huge difference between liking something Facebook and posting a link to Twitter. Your friends may post a link to Twitter for just about any reason, perhaps even because the link leads to something so bad it’s funny. Liking something on Facebook is a more direct message: Your friends like it. That gives Microsoft’s social search effort a considerable advantage over Google’s, and much more valuable set of social data to fight off Google in the burgeoning social search war.

How much value Facebook’s status updates will add to Bing’s search results remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure, Bing is finally offering something Google doesn’t.

See Also:

• Google Taps Your Friends to Improve Search Results
• Bing Is in Your Facebook, Indexing Your Status
• Bing Maps Gets a Developer SDK
• Microsoft Taps HTML5 to Add Zing to Bing
• Firefox 4 Adds Bing to List of Search Engines

Mozilla has announced that Microsoft’s upstart Bing search engine will soon become a default part of Firefox’s search bar. When Firefox 4 arrives it will feature some slight changes to the list of included search engines, offering, in order: Google (default), Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, eBay and Wikipedia.

Bing is a new option, though savvy users have long been able to install a Bing search plugin on their own. Now, it will be much easier to access by clicking on the drop-down list in the browser’s built-in search box.

Microsoft’s search engine continues to make inroads against Google, and while Microsoft has had a search product for years, it’s taken a long time to make its way onto Firefox’s short list. Mozilla vice president of products Jay Sullivan says Bing’s inclusion now is based on its “significant rise in popularity over the past year.”

Google’s engine will still be the default option for Firefox users. Google remains a primary source of income for the Mozilla — the two companies share the revenue generated by Google searches typed from within Firefox’s search box.

The new search engine default list removes the Answers.com and the Creative Commons search engine choices. Answers.com is disappearing because, according to Mozilla, “we have heard from our users that Wikipedia is more useful as an included reference search engine.”

The Creative Commons search engine is being removed because the search tool itself has changed from something that searches just CC licensed materials to a more general search engine that duplicates what’s found in Google, Yahoo and others. Mozilla is careful to point that the foundation “will continue to actively support [the Creative Commons] organization and mission through grants and joint programs,” but not, apparently, its search engine.

Of course users are still free to install any of the thousands of search plugins for the sites they’d like — we’re fans of the Flickr CC search plugin and the Speckly torrent search plugin — but making the default plugins list means more traffic for those lucky sites.

In Bing’s case it also means an important new avenue to perhaps pull a few users away from Google.

See also:

• Firefox 4 Beta 5 Adds Audio Tools, Hardware Acceleration
• Fourth Firefox 4 Beta Adds ‘Panorama,’ Hardware Acceleration
• New HTML5 Tools Make Your Browser Sing and Dance
• SamplePlayer Makes Your Browser Sing, Sans Flash

As part of the launch event to show off the new Internet Explorer 9 beta, Microsoft also demoed a new version of its Bing search engine that uses HTML5 and CSS 3 to spice up Bing’s homepage and search results.

During the demo, Bing developers showed off a version of the search engine that uses the HTML5′s video tag to take Bing’s well-known background images a step further, replacing the static image with a video of waves crashing on the beach. Another new feature, using the Canvas element, will allow you to zoom around a very large image.

The revamped version of Bing will launch in October. Microsoft is still tweaking some of the code, but its demo at the launch event was already complete enough to impress.

Other tricks up Bing’s sleeve include some fancy transitions between search types — nice sliding and fading transitions between tabs (presumably done using CSS 3 transitions) — and other visual touches, like animated backgrounds for weather forecasts and auto-expanding search results.

Some of Bing’s coming enhancements have been in the works for quite a while. Microsoft previously demoed some of the background effects and other visual touches at Apple’s WWDC in June 2010.

Beyond the eye candy, Bing also has one pretty cool new feature — the ability to see slideshows from image search results. And here’s the best part of the new slideshow: it replaces Bing’s current Silverlight-based slideshow with an HTML5/CSS3-based version. Yes, Microsoft has ditched its own proprietary technology for something using open, standards-based technology.

Some of what’s in the video can be a little confusing. For example, why Microsoft thinks it needs “HTML5″ to keep Bing’s tabs at the top of the screen when in fact the CSS rule position:fixed has been widely supported for nearly ten years now is unclear.

But despite the marketing-speak tendency to refer to everything in the new Bing as HTML5 — which Apple and Google are also both occasionally guilty of — both the Bing and IE9 teams seem genuinely enthused about the possibilities of HTML5.

In theory, all of Bing’s new features should work in any modern web browser, not just the coming Internet Explorer 9. However, given the continual references to “leveraging the power of IE 9′s hardware acceleration,” it’s highly possible the new Bing may be a bit slower in Safari and Chrome, which, thus far, lack the depth of hardware acceleration found in the Firefox 4 and IE9 beta releases.

Microsoft says to expect the Bing changes “in about a month.”

See Also:

• Microsoft Adds OpenStreetMap Layer to Bing Maps
• Bing Is in Your Facebook, Indexing Your Status
• Internet Explorer 9 Beta Drops. It’s Lean, Fast and Modern

You can now turn on a special layer in Bing Maps that displays maps from OpenStreetMap, Microsoft has announced.

OpenStreetMap is an open source mapping project that keeps an editable map of the entire globe. Anyone can make edits to the map — it’s been nicknamed the “Wikipedia of maps.” The open source model has proven especially effective in regions of the developing world where very little solid map data exists, and in areas where highly detailed, editable maps are critical for natural-disaster response efforts, like the recent Haiti earthquake.

Microsoft’s adoption of the open source mapping project follows a similar move by MapQuest, which began adding OSM layers last month.

To run layers in Bing Maps, you’ll need the latest version of Microsoft Silverlight and a supported browser. It doesn’t work properly in Google Chrome (at least on the Mac), but IE8, Firefox and Safari had no problems. If you’re using the Ajax controls to view Bing Maps (instead of Silverlight), then you won’t be able to see the OpenStreetMaps layer, but Microsoft says this is something that may make its way into the non-Silverlight version eventually.

Use the map view switcher at the bottom to change layers.

To add OpenStreetMaps to your Bing, go to the App Gallery. Look for the new OpenStreetMaps app in the gallery. Click on it, and your alternative OpenStreetMaps view should launch within Bing Maps.

You can switch back to any of the other standard views in Bing Maps by clicking on the layer control at the bottom of the map window. You’ll notice Bing Maps is using the Mapnik build of OpenStreetMaps for its map layer. You can switch back and forth between the OSM layer and any of the other standard Bing maps layers using the same control.

Microsoft has been quickly adding some innovative features to Bing, especially on its Maps website. In June, Bing Maps added the ability to browse parts of the world in 3-D, and in February it demonstrated indoor panorama views and location-specific videos that are accessible within Bing’s street-side imagery.

Microsoft also ran its King of Bing maps challenge for developers last month, asking them to create innovative apps for the mapping platform. For the contest, a developer named Ricky Brundritt built an app for Bing Maps that estimates your taxi fare within most major U.S. cities.

However, Bing’s reliance on Microsoft’s proprietary Silverlight technology to power these innovations is seen by some as an alienating factor — and an unnecessary one at that, since other mapping platforms like Google Maps accomplish much of the same functionality using JavaScript and other web standards. This is especially important on mobile devices, where the most popular browsers don’t allow for plug-ins like SIlverlight.

Still, it’s heartening to see Bing adding to the momentum OpenStreetMaps is currently enjoying. Anyone can edit the OSM maps, and now that the project is getting some attention — thanks mostly to its efforts in Haiti — edits are coming in more quickly.

According to the latest stats, the project has over a quarter of a million participants and over 1.8 billion uploaded GPS points. Dedicated users are getting creative and finding ways to add even more detail to the existing maps by doing offbeat things like tagging wheelchair ramps, mailboxes and trees in their neighborhoods.

Taxi Fare Calculator link courtesy Mashable

See Also:

• MapQuest U.K Teams Up With OpenStreetMap
• Google Maps Adds More Detail, Takes a Cue From OpenStreetMap
• Disaster Relief 2.0: Tech Tools Help Focus Haiti Resources
• Bing Maps Takes Panoramas Indoors

Microsoft may be a few lengths back in the race to win the online mapping prize, but you can never count Redmond out. The company released an SDK for Bing Maps on Monday, allowing developers to create their own Map Apps for submission into Bing Map Apps gallery (Silverlight is required for that link).

When Microsoft first launched the Bing Map Apps gallery (say that three times fast) a few months ago, it featured interesting geodata mashups from partners like Foursquare, Twitter, Weather.com and TrafficLand.com. These maps provide one or more data layers over whatever map you’re currently looking at, so you can see things like restaurant reviews, geo-tagged tweets, weather camera images and temperature readings or traffic cams. My favorite is the Urban Graffiti tracker from virtualglobetrotting.com which pinpoints places where you can see some cool street art.

Now, anyone can make one of these apps. With the new SDK, developers can create their own geodata overlays using any data set they can get their hands on, then submit their creations to the Map Apps gallery. Microsoft will feature the best submissions and present them to everyone using the Bing search tool. The company says it will also allow advertising in the Map Apps and split the revenue with the creators. There’s a testing tool included in the launch.

The goal of Monday’s release appears to be two-fold: increase interest in Bing Maps, and speed adoption of Silverlight 4, the latest version of Microsoft’s rich media and streaming video platform, and it’s alternative to Adobe Flash.

Everything built with this SDK needs to be done in Silverlight 4. You’ll also need the Silverlight plug-in to view any of Bing’s mapping features — at least version 3 is required for the bing.com/maps website.

It’s a bit of a shame that Microsoft has so deeply baked Silverlight into the Bing maps experience while others — most notably, Google and OpenStreetMap — have managed to create rich, interactive maps using HTML, JavaScript and CSS. But one can’t blame Microsoft for trying to popularize Silverlight at a time when the web is starting to move away from Flash as the de facto standard for presenting rich content in the browser. Even though most of the momentum is going into HTML5, CSS 3 and other open standards, Silverlight stands a chance to win some ground.

Silverlight is currently installed on around 60-65 percent of internet-enabled PCs. Around half of Silverlight’s users are running version 3, with around seven percent running version 4, according to riastats.com.

See Also:

• Smokescreen Project Promises ‘Flash Without the Plug-in’
• Who Needs Flash?
• Microsoft’s ‘Bing’ Search Engine Debuts, But It’s No Google