Featured on Facebook Platform Showcase, Docs is still in Beta stage but it could be one of the most valuable Open Graph protocol integrations for productivity: You can create Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and share them with your Facebook friends without the need of an Office client installed on your computer.

Docs created on the cloud aren’t different from the ones created on desktop computers, and you can upload your Microsoft Office documents to Docs to view, edit and share them from anywhere, using a PC, Mac or mobile phone.

According to Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, Docs could drive more interest in Office software thanks to Facebook integration. Partnering with Facebook seems a smart move by Microsoft, that could compete more effectively with Google Apps.

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Speculations about the new device are driving Apple’s stock price higher and even the Financial Times blog is linking the rumor of Apple renting a stage for a big event in January with a major new product announcement.

Searching for “Apple” on Bing and Google Search brings interesting results. While Google.com shows the word tablet in its News box, there’s no mention of tablets in Bing.

All results on Google Search are informative pages from Apple’s official website, Wikipedia, geek news site Slashdot and Apple (United Kingdom), the UK region page of windows7xp.com.

It seems you don’t need to be extraordinarily creative to achieve a top 10 ranking in Google for “Apple”: Choose a domain name you like (don’t worry about keywords in your domain name because Google is clever enough to understand that Windows 7 and XP can run on Macs), clone Apple’s website and don’t even bother about backlinks, you don’t need them!

Bing shows Apple’s entity card as its first result, with useful information like Apple’s customer service telephone number and a site search box in case sitelinks can’t take you to the page you need.

There’s no mention of the tablet on Bing, unless you click on the small News link at the top of the page, because other related searches, like “Apple Monitor”, are more popular according to Bing.

Google Trends shows a different picture: Do you believe Google or Microsoft?

Who is telling the truth about Apple?

Google Search delivers fresh information on its News box, but in this case it seems more vulnerable to spam.

Bing’s algorithm gives more weight to keywords in domain names, but seems slower in reflecting changes in volume search, not contributing to the hype about Apple’s new computer (and Apple’s stock price rise).

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Today is Winter Solstice for us in the northern hemisphere, one of the coldest I can remember. Bing shows a beautiful picture of “snow covered trees and benches in Central Park, New York City” and hovering the mouse cursor on the image a few links to related searches appear.

The link shown in the image below takes to the Wikipedia entry for “Winter Solstice”, but the page is repackaged and published as a Bing Reference page: It’s not on Wikipedia’s site, but on Bing.

If Google Living Stories can be seen as a way of accessing newspaper websites without leaving Google, Bing Reference applies the same concept at Wikipedia pages.

Bing Image Search

Our favorite decision engine helps us in deciding what image to search for on this cold and snowy day, with a cool photo wall of Winter related images/searches: Snowman, Ice hotel, Ice skating and Icicle. Aren’t you tempted to click on the pictures? It makes you almost forget you were searching for snowflake images!

Here are two more features that set Bing Image Search apart: Image properties preview and infinite scrolling.

Hovering on a specific image result brings a bigger view of the image and information about image size and weight. You can scroll the mouse wheel or use the sidebar to see new results, without the need of loading new pages (you could have to wait for the small preview thumbnails to be loaded).

Google is testing the same infinite scroll nifty feature on its own image search.

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New features and tools powered by Silverlight make the experience visually impressive: Bing Maps Apps offer real-time geolocalised Twitter updates, traffic information, 3D photos of landmarks and monuments, local newspaper front pages, point of interest information (restaurants, hotels and local businesses with reviews) all integrated in a 3D modeled smooth Streetside (Bing’s equivalent of Google StreetView).

Check the unmerciful side by side comparison screenshot below, Google Maps is on the left, Bing Maps Beta on the right. Bing’s Bird Eye view is created from aerial photos taken from an angle that remind of old Sim City games.

Let’s be honest, Bing Maps is still in a Beta phase and it crashes quite often, but playing with it is really fun and the amount of information offered is overwhelming.

Not every location in the planet could offer so many businesses and points of interest as Times Square in Manhattan, New York. In the image above you can spot tweets marked by light blue pins (I would have preferred a different visualisation that showed the recency of the tweet), purple pins are restaurants, green pins are 3D Photosynth photos, grey bubbles show different kind of businesses and when an orange cross is next to them it means there are several businesses in the same location.

Bing Brother is coming

Microsoft’s technology allows automatic face blurring and high quality smooth image rotations and zooming. Check the people in the image below, it’s a street view (this is what happens when you get to choose the name first, good job Google) of the same area shown in the image above, but from a different angle.

One of the most innovative features of Bing Maps is Photosynth, a technology that allows creating a 3D environment by sticking multiple photos together. Probably the application needs some ironing and will run smoother in the future, but Photosynth images didn’t impress me much.

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You would expect to find more online pharmacy results, apart from the Official Tamiflu website, Roche’s Tamiflu page, a couple of Wikipedia results and relevant results from authoritative medicine websites.

Well, this will happen if you search on Google or Yahoo. When I typed “tamiflu” on my Bing search box on Internet Explorer, I got the results you can see in the image below.

You could get different results, depending on your country settings on Bing, but what seems out of place are the results in French and German on the Italian Red Hot Chili Peppers forum.

Bing SEO Tips

What can we understand about Bing’s algorithm by looking at these high ranking results?

• Bing’s algorithm gives more weight to country code top-level domains (.it) than to the language of the page content
• On-page strong spam signals like click here links to Viagra and Cialis pages aren’t taken into account and don’t help Bing in spotting a commercial intent on a University forum page
• Website’s main focus (Red Hot Chili Peppers, music) doesn’t matter when deciding whether an off-topic (medicine) page is relevant
• University (and RHCP!) forums are considered more relevant than Wikipedia pages or medicine websites
• It seems that Bing isn’t able to distinguish between weird user profile names and legitimate Page Titles about a medicine, even when folder names and parameters in URLs clearly show what a page is (/public/forum/index.php?/user/ and /forum/index.php?showuser)

I guess Bing assumed that my intent was transactional (hey Bing, I didn’t type “buy” or “cheap”!), but actually I have to admit I didn’t know what Tamiflu is, and after checking Google’s SERP I clicked on Wikipedia’s result.

If Bing gave high value to forum discussions or Yahoo Answers type results for informational queries, we couldn’t complain about the quality of the SERP, but what’s striking is that University websites and active forums virtually about any topic can dominate a Bing SERP with spammy off topic pages where user input is minimal (those are user profile pages, not forum discussions).

Black hat SEOs can exploit Bing’s weaknesses and place spammy links on forum user profile pages (having friends studying in Italian universities could help…). Evidence shows it can be effective and cheaper than bidding for those keywords on Google AdWords. However it can’t be considered a safe link building technique for legitimate websites, because Google would spot what Bing can’t, unless you find a way to show a different forum user profile page to Googlebot.

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