Yet another Bing’s Best Theme for Windows 7

Not sure exactly when this was released, but the next Bing’s Best theme, not unwittingly called Bing’s Best 3, is now available from the Microsoft Personalization Gallery. I wrote about the Bing’s Best 2 a while back when Microsoft announced that, plus there’s also, obviously, Best of Bing 1.

Google offers secured search, still monitors search data though

An interesting tip that I received via Paul Thurrott’s WinSuperSite over this weekend was that Google has recently offered a new SSL secured beta version of their ever-so popular search engine.

Setting Bing as Default Search Engine in Firefox

One of my gripes with Mozilla Firefox is that users cannot set Bing as their default search engine without installing an add-on to Firefox. Firefox offers several different search engines options from the get-go, including Google, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Answers.com, Creative Commons, eBay, and Wikipedia.

Customize Windows 7 with Best of Bing 2

Back before Windows 7 even RTM’ed, Microsoft launched the Windows 7 version of its Personalization Gallery, in which users could download and install additional themepacks for their Windows 7 computers. This site is still alive going along very well, and lately they added a new theme, the Best of Bing 2. This new theme is a compilation of Bing.com’s background images that appear on the website every day. The theme comes with 21 pictures from Bing. It is also a continuation of Bing’s Best that Microsoft released a while back, and if you download both you can have a total of 40 different lively backgrounds. The only downside to these themes is you do have a Bing logo in the lower right corner of the screen, not too big of a deal, I think.

 

View Full Album

 

There are over 60 themes at the Microsoft Personalization Gallery that you can choose from. I’ve downloaded several of them and haven’t been unimpressed yet. Once you download the file you can simply double-click on it to open, it should automatically install itself. Additionally, you can only use themepacks with Windows 7, however, you can always extract the images from the themepack file by using a ZIP extraction utility, such as WinRAR or WinZIP, which then the images themselves can be used on any computer.

 

del.icio.us Tags: windows,bing,update,best of bing,windows 7,themes,background images,free,downloads

A Little Info on the Bing Spring Update

As catchy as this title sounds the update to Bing may even be catchier. As part of the development process for Bing, Microsoft is now rolling out their spring update. Albeit, very slowly at first.

Today marks the first day of this update, which will allow 5% of the market to see new benefits of the Bing ecosystem. (This number will slowly increase to 100% within the next few weeks). Microsoft currently does not know if this update will make it outside of the US, i.e. international segments. So, if you currently live outside of the US, you may not be able to get this update, sorry.

What does it entail?

Once again, this update is designed to further enhance the user’s search experience. Microsoft said in their official statement that they had found 42% of users still had to refine their search after the first time searching a particular topic. This update will hopefully reduce that percentage. Given some of the changes that Bing has done, it may just fix part of the problem.

Quick Tabs Bar. Nothing really new here, except Microsoft will be doing a couple of UI changes. Most notably, this will entail moving from its current position (upper-left corner of the screen) to just below the search bar. This will hopefully enable users to locate and use the bar more often.

More Real Time Results. Bing introduced real-time results using Twitter, and will further implement this feature with this update. Here’s a little information about this feature and what’s to come:

Last October, we shared our www.bing.com/twitter experience, and this week, we will test new experiences for real-time results. For example, when you search for a publication such as the New York Times, Bing not only gives you quick access to specific sections of the destination website, but also provides the most popular shared links from that publication.

Foursquare Everywhere. Alright, so not my favorite new feature, but for those who need to know where everyone is at all times, this will be a great feature (stalkers anyone?). Anyways, Foursquare will be a work-upon of Bing’s Map App, allowing users to view local information about the area and people. Here’s a little more of what’s to come:

The foursquare map app is a powerful combination of the spatial canvas that Bing Maps provides, combined with foursquare’s user reputation service ability to see who has unlocked specific badges, where and who has been crowned mayor of certain locations making it easier to explore any city in the world as if you were a local.

That’s about it for now. Look out in the coming weeks for this update to start appearing. The best way to do so is to set your home page to MSN or Bing.com. Of course, I’m not trying to sell you Bing, so you could just leave it as Google, or whatever you currently use. You can also read more information about the Bing Refresh to see what else is coming.

As always, you can contact me via Twitter @jctierney, or leave a comment below. Questions, comments, information, etc. are all welcome.

del.icio.us Tags: bing,refresh,spring,microsoft,search,decision