Working on Bing.com for the last 9 months or so has been exhilarating. Finally, we can show the world the great stuff we’ve been doing. Here is (I think) the first TV commercial about Bing.com, running as of today.

I kissed Google goodbye more than a year ago and haven’t looked back. I think once people start using Bing, they’re going to do the same.

I’ve been meaning to highlight a few of the cool things we’re doing in Live Search. I don’t have any direct involvement in the development of any of these—I just think they’re cool.

Answer Suggestions for IE8

IE8 is awesome, so go get it. Live Search has these things called Instant Answers where it can respond with succinct answers to your question, rather than just web pages that may have the answer. Good examples are weather and numeric conversions—you just want to know the answers, not necessarily follow links to find it.

You get normal search suggestions of course, but the cool thing is that the display of the instant answers is built right into IE8. You can type into the search box and have the answers returned right in the drop down as you type. Here are some samples:

Weather: Solve math equations:

There are a whole lot more kinds of answers. Maybe someday I’ll detail them.

Live Search Suggestions for Firefox

Firefox users haven’t been left out either. While there isn’t a full instant answers integration, Firefox does support search suggestions. You can download the plugin from the Firefox plugin directory.

Live Search for Windows Mobile

This is something I think really needs more publicity. I have a Samsung Saga i770, which I love. One of the first things I put on it was Live Search Mobile.

First of all, this thing has had speech recognition built-in since way before Google’s similar tools.

It can easily find directions, gas prices, movies, traffics, maps, local businesses (by categories), and general web info. I use this app all the time.

There is custom software you can install for both Windows Mobile and Blackberry. It will work on the web for any other mobile phone that can get on the Internet.

And, by the way, it supports auto-suggest as well.

On your phone, you can go to wls.live.com to get it.

Related links:

• Instant Answers in your IE8 Search box [Live Search blog]
• Live Search autosuggestions come to Firefox [Live Search blog]
• Live Search Mobile site

Live Search has recently released some great new features that I want to highlight. The first is from the Webmaster center, which is the team I was hired on.

With the new Webmaster Tools, you can now see which pages on your site are infected with malware (aka drive-by downloads). The links are clearly highlighted and disabled so that you won’t accidentally click on them.

Not only that, but you can also see what pages that your site links to are infected with malware. This is great if your site allows any user-generated content and it’s possible that some link spam has made it on.

In addition to these improvements in Webmaster Tools, the general Live Search engine is using the same malware detection to notify users of bad pages in the general search results. To see this, click on the link as if to visit it and you’ll get a pop-up instead.

If you run your own site, get signed up in Webmaster Tools and make sure you’re not contributing to the malware problem. If you do find that your site has malware on it, once you’ve removed it you can request that your site be reanalyzed.

For more info, check out these other blogs and articles:

• Live Search Webmaster Center Fall Update [Webmaster Center blog]
• Webmaster tools now sniffing for malware [Live Search blog]
• Microsoft’s Live launches malware detection service for webmasters [ZDNet blogs] (though the author incorrectly assumes that Live Search itself doesn’t offer this feature)
• Link to search results for articles about this