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Alongside the launch of the new search engine Bing, another free service called Bing 411 also debuted. As you may have guessed by its name, the service lets you call a phone number and get free 411 information (available in the U.S. only). Just like the standard, paid 411 service, you begin your call by saying your city and state and then you tell Bing 411 what business listing or other information you’re looking for. The service will attempt to locate the information and then it will connect you or you can choose to receive a text message instead.

Other information available via the service include traffic reports, movie showtimes, and weather.

To try Bing 411 yourself, call 1-800-Bing-411 (1-800-246-4411) for free.
Besides just finding local businesses’ phone numbers, you can also use Bing 411 to get text message links to maps, driving directions, and you can even narrow down business listings by name, type, city, neighborhood, or street.

Does Microsoft Bing change paid search and search engine marketing?

The StatCounter monitoring service just release statistics showing that Microsoft's new search site, Bing might have overtaken Yahoo! as the number two search engine in the U.S. Although it's too early to tell whether or not this is just a new launch blip or a long-term trend, the indications are that the search engine marketing game (paid search in particular) is changing.

Most companies and advertising agencies such as Domus spread their paid search budgets across the major search engines, generally proportioned according to their relative market shares. Now that Bing might be overtaking Yahoo!, agencies and other marketers need to take a close look at their allocations and resulting traffic to see if they should be adjusted.

Bing suffers from some handicaps, starting with one whose initials happen to spell out: “But It’s Not Google.” Yet it works fairly well as a general-purpose search engine, outperforms competitors in a couple of areas and makes a major contribution to mobile Web searching. There’s something to see here, and it’s not just the hype that $100 million or so of marketing can buy.

Searches on more generic terms, however, can leave Bing confused. When I looked up the company that placed an automated polling call to my home, Bing was lost unless I enclosed my query in quotes. Google’s results directed me to a report on its activities. Bing search results include a clever bonus: a preview of each page’s text that appears when you float the cursor to the right of each result. But if you position the cursor in the wrong place, you won’t even see the vertical line and orange circle that are meant to cue you about this feature’s existence.

In perhaps the most competitive niche in all Web technology, comScore is reporting in a follow-up study on the performance of Bing that the little decision engine increased its position in the search market during the second week of its public launch.

From the release: "Microsoft Sites saw its average daily searcher penetration and share of search result pages in the U.S. continue to climb during the second week of Bing’s introduction. Microsoft Sites’ average daily penetration among U.S. searchers reached 16.7 percent during the work week of June 8-12, up 3 percentage points from the May 25-29 work week prior to Bing’s introduction. Microsoft’s share of search result pages in the U.S., a proxy for overall search intensity, increased to 12.1 percent during the period of June 8-12, also climbing 3 percentage points from the pre-introduction work week of May 25-29."