Bing Excels At Extraordinary Rate

Microsoft Bing -- which some believe will begin to emerge from Google's shadow -- is on a roll, making changes to its search business at an extraordinary rate since handing its display advertising business to AOL in a 10-year deal. It may prove to be the best decision for the search engine.

Earlier this year, Microsoft said the traditional way of managing Bing Product Ads would sunset this fall. On Monday, Bing began rolling out Convert Product Ad campaigns, a tool to help marketers transition from Bing shopping campaigns to product ads.

"Once you have converted your Product Ad campaign, you cannot convert the same campaign again," Neha Mohan, program manager at Bing Shopping Campaigns, notes in a post. "Converting a Product Ad campaign will create a new Shopping campaign based on the existing data. It will not delete or pause the existing Product Ad campaign."

Bing and Yahoo combined accounted for 33.1% query volume market share in July, according to comScore. Google sits at 64%, flat from the prior quarter and down from 67.6% in the year-ago month. AOL will soon be a Bing-powered search property. Adding AOL's share of 1.2% in July 2015 would give Bing-powered searches more than 34% market share.

Last week, Bing beat Google to the punch with Shapshots on Tap, releasing it for Android. Bing on any Android device lets users with a long-tap on the Home button within any app receive an overlay of results from Bing to augment what the user sees on the mobile Web page.

The Bing app makes this possible by tapping into its knowledge and actions graph, a collection of more than one billion entities, more than 21 billion facts about them, and more than 5 billion relationships between them. 

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