As we told you last month when discussing the program's early successes, Cashback works by giving users a certain amount of money back every time they search for an item and then buy it from a participating store. But some users have found the opposite to be true: Retailer cookies trigger jacked-up prices for some items, causing a phenomenon one man calls "negative cashback." How much do Bing users stand to lose? Read on, and brace yourselves.

Essentially, certain products from certain websites appear through a Cashback-enabled browser to be a certain price. Yet, if the same user visits the same site at the same time from a non-Cashback browser or machine (or if he deletes his cookies), the price is sometimes drastically different in a way that benefits the end user not a bit.

As one user very succinctly put it, "If I go directly to butterflyphoto.com, I pay $699 with 0% cashback. If I use Bing Cashback, I pay $758 with 2% cashback, or $742.84. Using Bing cashback has actually cost me $43.84, giving an effective cashback rate of -6.27%."

We did the same search, and we saw the same results. Here's our Bing Cashback screenshot from an Internet Explorer window:

And here's the same product on the same website in a Chrome tab:

As a side note, the blogger that alerted us to this issue had previously received a nastygram from Microsoft about his post on Bing Cashback technical issues.

So, what do we make of this issue? Is it a potentially scammy technical glitch? More importantly, how soon can it be fixed so innocent online shoppers aren't quietly swindled out of cash throughout the holiday season? Let us know what you think should be done in the comments - particularly if you've noticed this bug yourself.

JavaScript Performance

Today's presentation of IE9 was refreshing, as Sinofsky noted that IE8's JavaScript performance was clearly slower than that of its competitors. The current build of IE9, however, has already closed this gap significantly and the difference in performance compared to the latest builds of Chrome and Firefox were only minor. As Microsoft notes, given how fast modern JavaScript engines have become over the last year, improvements in the JavaScript engine don't influence real-world performance at this point and other browser sub-systems become the bottlenecks that impede improvements.

Hardware Acceleration and Font Smoothing

Microsoft also plans to make use of DirectX-based hardware accelerated graphics and text in IE9. In his demo, Sinofsky showed that Bing maps can render about 14 frames per second in IE8. With hardware acceleration in IE9 turned on, he got 60 frames per second. In addition, this technology will also increase font quality and readability in IE9.

Videos

Microsoft already published a number of videos with the engineers working on IE9 on Channel 9 (sorry, these are Silverlight only).

Earlier this year, Google also added data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Division to its search results page. The queries that Google showcases in today's blog post (gdp of a country, internet users in the US or energy use in Iceland) are exactly the kind of queries where Wolfram Alpha excels. Currently, Bing doesn't display this kind of data from Wolfram Alpha and just focuses on math and nutrition, but a deeper integration between the two is just a matter of time.

Wolfram Alpha uses curated data sets - just like the World Bank or Census Bureau data - to compute its results. Google's current use of this data is less ambitious. Google wants to make public data more accessible - Wolfram Alpha wants to be a 'computational knowledge engine' that can manipulate these data sets.

Google Wants Your Public Data

One interesting aspect of today's blog post is that Google points out that there are "still many other data sets and sources out there, and we're excited about the possibilities for the future." Google also asks data publishers who are interested in making their data discoverable in Google to contact the company.

In the current implementation, Google can display results for the following types of questions:

CO2 emissions per capita, Electricity consumption per capita, Energy use per capita, Exports as percentage of GDP, Fertility rate, GDP deflator change, GDP growth rate, GNI per capita in PPP dollars, Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Income in PPP dollars, Imports as percentage of GDP, Internet users as percentage of population, Life expectancy, Military expenditure as percentage of GDP, Mortality rate, under 5, Population, and Population growth rate.

Update: in our briefing and later emails with Microsoft, the company told us that the integration with Wolfram Alpha would only consist on exchanging data about nutrition and that was reflected in the first version of this post. In today's blog post, however, Microsoft also announced that it will display math results from Alpha. We have updated this post accordingly.

Bing tries to get users to the answers they are looking for faster than any other search engines and these new updates are all geared towards making things even easier for users.

Wolfram Alpha Integration: That's It?

We first learned about the integration with Alpha during a briefing with Stefan Weitz, Microsoft's Director of Bing, a few months ago. At that time, it was just a screenshot of Wolfram Alpha pasted onto the Bing interface. Rumors about this integration flared up in August, but anybody who expected a full integration between the two is bound to be disappointed by today's announcement.

We can't help but wonder if the two teams aren't working on a deeper integration, though. Getting better information about nutrition and solutions to math problems in Bing is nice, but this is only a minor part of Alpha's feature set. Microsoft's vision for Bing is compatible with Wolfram's idea of Alpha as a 'computational knowledge engine.' The improved hover previews that Microsoft announced today go into a similar direction and Microsoft could potentially use the real estate in these preview boxes to showcase other results from Alpha in the future.

Smarter Hover Previews

Hover previews are not new to Bing. In the current version, the little pop-ups that appear when a user hovers the mouse over the right-hand side of a search result only show a short excerpt from the page. The new previews use entity extraction to get information from the page that is related to the query. For businesses and restaurants, the new preview now also filters out information like street addresses, email addresses and phone numbers.

When a Facebook page appears in the search results, Bing will now show the person's picture and users can see their networks and send a message or friend request from the preview box.

The new preview box also shows a screenshot of the page and a list of popular links on that site. In addition, the preview now features another search box that allows users to quickly do a search within that particular site.

Better Weather

Bing now always displays weather information in the search results when it discovers a query for a town or city. Clicking on the link above the icon now takes users to a separate page with comprehensive weather information inside the Bing interface. The full page weather results show forecasts, satellite maps and historical averages.

But there is More...

This is clearly a busy week for Microsoft's Bing team and according to a Microsoft spokesperson, these are only some of the updates to Bing that Microsoft has planned for this week.

Earlier updates this week included a number of changes to Bing Reference, which uses the technology Microsoft acquired from Powerset to semantically index Wikipedia. This feature can be accessed from the 'references' tab in the sidebar. We also wrote about Microsoft's new interface and features from Bing Maps yesterday morning. Later in the day, Microsoft also updated its video search, which now uses embeds to show videos from a wide variety of sites like Hulu, ABC and YouTube right on the Bing search results page.

According to the latest data from Hitwise, Bing's market share in the US grew 7% last month and is now at 9.57%. While the current Wolfram Alpha integration won't bring new users to Bing, it does showcase that Microsoft is willing to try new things with Bing and we can only hope that this is just the beginning of a deeper integration between the two - though for the time being, this is a one-sided integration as Wolfram is still using Google as the fall-back search engine on Wolfram Alpha.

Draggable routes are nothing new, of course. Google Maps has offered this feature for quite a while. Compared to Google Maps, the Microsoft implementation of this feature is slightly more difficult to use. Google Maps always displays a little button on a route that moves relative to the user's cursor. On Bing Maps, users have to be more precise when it comes to grabbing a point on their route where they want to deviate from the computed route. Still, this is a welcome addition to Bing Maps.

Embeds

Embedding Bing Maps is now as easy as clicking one button and copying and pasting the embed code. The best feature here is the ability to customize these embeds. Users can select different sizes, whether to display a static or draggable map, as well as different map styles (road map vs. satellite imagery). Bing Maps also generates a link to the map that can be shared by email.

As Google continues to enhance its mapping products and now even produces its own map data in the US, Bing Maps and others will have to stay on their toes. This update to Bing Maps mostly brings Microsoft back on par with Google with regards to features.

Bing always offered a number of features that Google didn't offer, including high-resolution aerial photos, and a Google Earth-like 3D view with 3D models in the browser. Currently, however, Google is adding more features (like traffic for more roads) and improving its maps at a faster rate than anybody else and it will be interesting to see if Microsoft will be able to keep up with this pace.

The company plans to roll this redesign out slowly over the next few weeks - though all users will be able to switch to the new site through a link on the old homepage.

Fewer Links - Less Clutter

To make the site less busy, Microsoft has reduced the number of links by 50%. In the old design, the categories were organized in dozens of boxes. This gave the page a very busy look. Microsoft now uses tabs that give the site a more modern look and which also reduce clutter.

The new MSN puts a lot of emphasis on search. The new homepage doesn't just feature a Bing search box on the top. The new MSN has another search box at the bottom of the page and Microsoft also integrated Bing shopping and travel search in other sections of the site.

MSN Users Don't Want Customization

When we talked to Lisa Gurry, Microsoft's senior director of MSN, she told us that only a very small number of MSN's users actually wanted to spend a lot of time customizing the site. Because of this, the MSN team decided to automate this customization as much as possible through a reverse IP lookup. Through this, the homepage automatically displays local news and weather reports based on a user's location. Those users who want to customize their MSN experience extensively can continue to use the MyMSN homepage.

Flawed Execution: Facebook and Twitter Integration

Microsoft also added some new social networking functionality to the MSN homepage. Users can now track updates from their friends on Twitter, Facebook and Windows Live. MSN's users can also send status updates right from the MSN homepage. According to Microsoft, 52% of MSN users are on Facebook and 14% are on Twitter.

A few key features are missing from the Twitter integration, though. There is no character count, for example, and no easy way to shrink URLs. There is also no way to see or send direct messages or @replies.

While the Facebook widget at least features a 'comment' link, users are still taken to Facebook's own site to write their comments.

Overall, the social network integration could be a lot more interesting if the MSN team just added a few features. MSN is obviously trying to attract mainstream users who don't follow thousands of Twitter users, but even the most mainstream Twitter user expects to see a reply button in a Twitter client. AOL's homepage allows users to reply right from the Twitter widget.

Local News

The new site now puts a lot of emphasis on local news. The new local edition features extended weather reports, movie times, concerts, restaurant reviews and information about local gas prices. For restaurant reviews, Microsoft takes users to Bing's local search.

Radical Change

The new design is a radical departure from the old MSN and some users who were accustomed to the old site will surely feel disoriented when they wake up to the new design.

Among the large homepages like Yahoo and AOL, the new MSN now sports the most modern look. This is not a highly customizable, Netvibes-style homepage, but MSN's users aren't asking for this.

The Bing team also added a few new features to the generic mobile search. Users can now search for NFL teams and players and get real-time updates about games, stats and scores while a game is on. This feature is only available in the U.S.

In addition, Bing has implemented a flight search feature. You can now type in the airline code and flight number and Bing will return the latest gate information and departure and arrival times.

But Will Anybody Use It?

The new mobile interface for the iPhone and similar devices looks a lot better than the earlier version and is also more usable. Given that users can only switch between Google and Yahoo as their default search providers on the iPhone, however, it's questionable how many iPhone users will actually use Bing's mobile search.

Yahoo Search continues its steady decline. Yahoo Search lost another 1% market share last month and has now lost a total of 5% since September 2008 when it still owned 18.8% of the market according to Compete. The total search volume on Yahoo was down 8% and Yahoo served 100 million less queries in September than August.

Google, Ask and AOL Hold Steady

Google's market share grew slightly from 72.3% to 72.6%, while Ask and AOL remained stable. Based on this data, Bing seems to be eating into Yahoo's market share, but isn't growing at Google's expense.

Searches Per Day

Compete's Marko Madjarac points out that Bing's numbers are even more impressive when we take into account that Bing's users tend to perform fewer searches on the service (5 searches per user per day) than Google's users (5.6 searches). Bing apparently lives up to its promise to get users to relevant answers faster than any other search engine. Yahoo users performed an average of 7.8 searches per day.

Rapleaf says that despite their collection methods, their findings can offer insight into these different userbases. To some extent, that may be true, but we're left wondering how different these findings would be if they hadn't relied on public social media data and rather went with a true random sample.

Gmail Skews Young, AOL Older

That being said, here's what Rapleaf came up with. In terms of age:

It's not all that surprising that Gmail users tend to be young. After all, the service was established years after AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. Some of those who already had webmail accounts on other services were hesitant to switch at first (and some still are) since the process of changing email accounts is never entirely painless and often leads to months of checking dual inboxes for emails that may have been missed. Instead, Google's growth likely came from more webmail first-timers looking to set up their brand-new online accounts in addition to the braver "email switchers," a group that also probably skews younger...especially since an effective switchover often requires a bit of technical savvy involving setting up forwarding, auto-responders, etc.

As for AOL being comprised of older users, that too, is relatively unsurprising. Where Google is the newest service, AOL is one of the oldest. Its core user base has aged with it over the years and those who haven't jumped shipped yet are bound to be the older members who don't stay as current with changing technology trends. Still, setting the bar for "old" at 36 is a little humbling - especially for those of us getting up in our years. (That's not old, is it?) It would be interesting to see further breakdowns of this demographic into age segments including 40+, 50+, and so on, but that data was not available.

Gmail Has More Females, Hotmail Has More Males

Perhaps more interesting is the gender variations between the services. Gmail, for instance, includes more females (53%) than males (47%). If those were election poll results, we would call it "too close to call," but in terms of tens of thousands of users, these percentage point differences have meaning.

Why would Gmail attract more females? And conversely, why does Hotmail have more males? (It's 57% male.) Is there something about the aesthetics, workflow or features in those services that appeal more to women than men or vice versa? And if so, what? Unfortunately, raw data can't provide these sorts of answers, but they're definitely intriguing to us. We would imagine they are intriguing to the user interface designers and engineers behind the products, too.

Do women like Gmail's drag-and-drop features or its themes? Do men prefer Hotmail's efficient "quick adds" which allow for one-click additions of Bing content to messages? We doubt those are the reasons for the discrepancy, but it makes us wonder what are. Try as we might, we can't come up with an easy theory to explain this. (If you can, please share in the comments.)

Future details about the study will focus on other data including online activity, friend counts, and social network memberships. Stay tuned to Rapleaf's site for more information.

Although still limited to users in the U.S. and Japan, participants in the Technical Preview are able to access the web versions of the Office programs through Windows Live SkyDrive, Microsoft's online cloud storage service and a part of their Windows Live suite of tools and services.

SkyDrive, which provides each user with 25 GB of online storage, is used to host the documents created using the Office Web Applications. For now, the service is entirely free. However, during our earlier interview with Takeshi Numoto, the corporate vice president of the Microsoft Office Product Management Group, we questioned him about future monetization plans for the online suite. He wouldn't confirm any details, only saying that Microsoft was "experimenting" with several options. To date, nothing has changed on that front.

At the moment, the Technical Preview is not offering full access to all the Office programs - only Word, Excel and PowerPoint are currently available. There is a placeholder for OneNote, but it displays a message reading "Still to come..." when clicked. We're told that OneNote support is due later this fall. That should be relatively soon, considering that it's already October.

The web version of Microsoft Word is also incomplete at this time, allowing you to view files but not create or edit them. Only Excel and PowerPoint allow for both read and write access at the moment.

According to Microsoft, the Technical Preview program is designed solely for the purpose of collecting user feedback prior to the broader beta release of the service. No date has been given for the beta launch as of yet but the online suite is due to ship next year alongside Office 2010, the next version of the company's desktop software suite.

How to Join

If you're interested in signing up for the Technical Preview, you'll need to establish a Windows Live ID if you have yet to do so. Hotmail and Windows Live Mail users should already have one - it's your @hotmail.com or @live.com email address. You can then sign up for the Technical Preview program via this link. As noted above, you will need to select either the United States or Japan during signup, as those are the only two countries supported at this time. After completing the sign up process and accepting the license agreement, your Windows Live ID will have access to the Web Applications by way of SkyDrive.

Says Microsoft Associate General Counsel Tim Cranton in a recent blog post, "Although we don't yet know the names of the specific individuals behind these acts, we are filing these cases to help uncover the people responsible and prevent them from continuing their exploits."Those involved in the current lawsuit include Soft Solutions, Direct Ad, qiweoqw, ITmeter INC, and ote2008.

In addition to this current civil suit, Microsoft is actively pursuing actions against a number of instant messaging spammers and bot-powered click frauders. It will be interesting to see if the public education campaigns for web security can keep up with the influx of ad delivered trojan horse viruses. The public is directed to the Microsoft Online Safety page for more information.

Photo Credit: Dirk Heuer

Filters

This visualization, while visually quite stunning, wouldn't be very interesting though, if Microsoft hadn't also added the ability to quickly narrow searches by relevant categories. If you search for 'digital cameras,' for example, you get the option to narrow your search by number of megapixels, optical zoom, or brand. Baseball players can be organized by position, team, or salary, and criminals on the FBI's 'Most Wanted' list can be organized by reward, citizenship, or the crime they are wanted for.

Overall, these visual elements can really make some searches a lot easier, especially if you are starting out with a broad category and you are trying to narrow your search down (try 'yoga poses,' for example).

As Stefan Weitz, Microsoft's Director of Bing, told us last month, for some queries, visual results are simply much easier to scan for users than simple lists of texts. At the end of your work with the visual search interface, however, you are still taken back to a regular Bing search.

Silverlight Only

Microsoft decided to use Silverlight as the one and only way to access the visual search feature. At this point, Weitz argued when we asked him about this choice, Silverlight is already widely installed on millions of computers and Microsoft decided that the experience will not degrade gracefully if you don't have Silverlight installed.

Useful or Just a Gimmick?

While Visual Search might look like a gimmick at first (and it definitely is an interesting visual feature), it actually turns out to be a very usual feature for most of the searches that currently support it. The range of searches that allow you to visualize the results is still somewhat limited, though Microsoft will surely add on to this list over time. If anything, this is yet another feature in Bing that Google doesn't offer yet. As Bing tries to position itself as a 'decision engine' and not just as a search engine, this is also another feature that will help Microsoft to make this distinction. Instead of a list of links, Bing can now offer a set of faster and more visually pleasing search results

Topics

Here is a list of current topics that will pop up Visual Search as an option:

• 100 heroes and villains
• Billboard's past albums
• Billboard's past songs
• Film legends
• Greatest movies
• Movies in theaters
• Popular books
• Popular celebrities
• Popular DVDs
• Popular TV shows
• Pulitzer winning fiction
• Top albums
• Top songs
• Famous People
• FBI's most wanted
• Popular celebrities
• US politicians
• US presidents
• US vice presidents
• World leaders

Reference

• Dog breeds
• Periodic table
• Travel destinations
• US politicians
• US presidents
• US states
• US vice presidents
• World leaders
• Yoga poses

Shopping

• Cell phones
• Digital cameras
• Handbags
• HDTVs
• New cars
• Popular books
• Popular DVDs
• Portable GPS
• Pulitzer winning fiction
• Top albums
• Top iPhone apps

Sports

• MLB players
• MLB teams
• NASCAR drivers
• NBA players
• NBA teams
• NFL players
• NFL teams
• NHL players
• NHL teams
• UFC fighters

Microsoft Folder-based Sites:: Education Labs also announced plans to roll out a website creator in mid-October. With this tool, teachers will be able to convert Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents into html files. From here the files can be shared with students as web pages and all the files are hosted at no cost through Microsoft. The group is currently testing different admin rights in order to allow for student uploads.

Flash Cards: This product allows you to create and browse flash card decks and create favorites with your Windows Live ID. Teachers create decks by adding images, text and sound to their cards. From here students flip through the decks in Silverlight 3. One interesting part of this project is that as students answer questions, the software remembers incorrect answers and prompts those problem cards more frequently. This project is due before 2010.

For more information on these projects, visit Educationlabs.com or check out the 30 minute demo video at the bottom of the Math Generator page.

While the in-home kick-off concept is an interesting launch tactic, we have difficulty believing that the people in the campaign's imagery are actually huddled around the computer enthralled by the Windows 7 experience. Are you sure this isn't a YouTube party? Balloons, shrimp cocktail AND models? If it's going to be this kind of a party, let's just hope no one does any keg stands over your keyboard. To register as a party host visit the house party page.

On Competition and Procedural Obstacles

Of course, these questions are only valid to a potential market leader like Microsoft - a company with the manpower, resources and intention to actually develop its ideas.

On Innovation and Employment

Next Steps: WIPO Symposium