10 Questions to Bing

We asked an official spokesperson at Microsoft 10 questions about Bing and this is the response we got back.

1. The Cash back program is currently only available to U.S. users. When does Bing intend to introduce the Cash back program and other features to other countries?

We have no new country or feature news to announce at this time.

2. It has been reported that Microsoft has allocated up to $100 million for Bing’s rollout marketing budget. What is the general break down on how this money is planned to be spent?

Unfortunately we have nothing to share on this matter during this time.

3. We noticed Bing placing advertisements on The Daily Show with John Stewart & nytimes.com, what is the marketing strategy behind these decisions?

We are trying lots of things with the marketing campaign in both traditional and non-traditional vehicles to reach a wide variety of people to introduce Bing and hopefully drive trial.

4. In terms of search audience, what is the population demographic that Bing is trying to target?

We don’t disclose our specific demographic information, but suffices to say we’re targeting anyone who might turn to search to help them with a decision, specifically in the areas of shopping, travel, health or local.

5. How did the engineers at Microsoft come up with the user interface for Bing?

For context, please point to: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10250614-56.html

6. What are some of the major improvements that Microsoft is currently working on to enhance Bing?

We have nothing new to announce at this time.

7. Last week, Bing Travel service was briefly disrupted because of a fire in the Seattle Fisher’s Plaza. What are some of the measurements that will be implemented in the future to prevent similar service disruptions?

As part of the continued integration of Farecast (the company) into Microsoft, we have been (prior to this weekend’s incident) hard at work moving Bing Travel to the Microsoft Cloud Computing Platform. But again, given the complexity of this service and our desire to do this in a way that is invisible to customers, this process takes time and must be done carefully. We expect to have the move completed by early Fall.

8. Bing recently added Twitter search results, to provide users with up to date real time event results. What prompted this decision and what are Bing’s future plan for real time results.

This, like the many things the Bing team is deploying is an improvement in search results quality. We believe our users are either looking for this content or will be pleasantly surprised to discover something new. Our implementation is designed to show this when it will have a positive effect on search results quality. We have nothing more to share at this time.

9. On a global scale, Google is no doubt the monopoly in search engines, how does Bing intend to compete in a long term perspective.

Bing has been designed to meet the needs of today’s searchers who are using search for purposes beyond ten blue links on a page. We are focused on helping people complete tasks faster by presenting better organized and more relevant content, great tools to help users in their search experience, and services that can be found ONLY on Bing that help people save time and money in travel, shopping, local and health.

We believe there is much yet to accomplish as we begin to apply cool technology to the problems of search today. Bing is a first step on this journey of evolving search into a more refined tool to help customers cut through the Internet’s clutter to make faster, more informed decisions.

10. Any final thoughts that you might want to share about Bing?

Nothing more to share.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t get anything too juicy