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Microsoft’s updated and renamed search engine Bing, formerly Live Search, is now accessible to the public at http://www.bing.com/. Microsoft has also begun to redirect live.com and searches from MSN to Bing. In addition to the more visible changes, which you can find out more about at http://www.discoverbing.com/, Microsoft has made changes behind the scenes. For example, previously the search engine did not handle 301 redirects set to deal with www. vs non-www. URL canonicalization for a website’s home page, while handling it for other pages on the same website. That has now been fixed.

Microsoft today announced the rebranding of and update to the Live Search search engine. The update has been in testing under the name codename Kumo since late last year. Live Search was given the new name Bing, in a post on Live Search blog Microsoft explains why Bing was chosen:

We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. It needed to be like the product — optimized for the Internet. A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world. We like Bing because it sounds off in our heads when we think about that moment of discovery and decision making — when you resolve those important tasks. And frankly, the name needed to clearly communicate that this is something new, to invite you to come back, to re-introduce you to our new and improved service and encourage you to give it a try.

As part of the rebranding is touting Bing as a “decision engine” as opposed to a search engine. Saying that Bing begins to move past experience of using a search engine to “a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions.” Microsoft says that it is four areas of focus for making better decisions will be “making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.”

The update introduces new features to the search results page interface. On left side of the page a pane will show options to refine searches, including switching between different types of searches and related searches. To try to help users find quickly find result their looking for there is Best Match where the best answer is “surfaced and called out”, Quick Preview which is an overlay “that expands over a search result caption to provide a better sense of the related site’s relevancy”, and Instant Answers that is “designed to provide the sought-after information within the body of the search results page”

According to Microsoft, Bing “will begin to roll out over the coming days and will be fully deployed worldwide on Wednesday, June 3.”

Microsoft will also be launching advertising campaign, reported to be around 100 million dollars, to promote the rebranding. Despite Microsoft’s lofty talk about the update and the advertising campaign, Microsoft does not expect much change in its share of searches any time soon. Steve Ballmer told the New York Times that he hoped that “over the next year we’ll see small results. Big as a percentage of our share, and small as a percentage maybe of Google’s share.” Microsoft search boss Satya Nadella told CNET that if Microsoft share “were to go from 9 percent share to 11 percent by next year, he would consider that a success.” For some time Microsoft’s share has fluctuated significantly, with it share being as high 14.1 percent and as low as 9.1 in the last year according to Nielsen Online.

The Bing rebranding will also occur for a number of related services, including the mapping service Virtual Earth being renamed Bing Maps for Enterprise. There will also be unspecified improvements to Live Search Webmaster Center as part of the rebranding. according to a post on the Live Search Webmaster Center Blog.

In a post on the Live Search Webmaster Central Blog it was announced that Microsoft has released a patch for their cloaking detector that “should significantly reduce the number of requests to a more acceptable rate.” The cloaking detector, which is an part of Live Search’s MSNBot crawler, checks to see if websites are providing different content to visitors than the provide to MSNBot to “weed out spammers”. The cloaking detector mimics a visitor coming to a webpage from the Live search engine. There has been a problem with detector causing it has been unnecessarily performing hundreds of checks a day on some websites, which uses server resources and fills website statistics with fake referrers. Due to similar problems Microsoft announced that it would make changes to the detector in December of 2007.

Microsoft also said the cloaking detector problem was “compounded by and also confused with” a new feed crawling function that was “overzealous in its attempt to crawl and provide up-to-the-minute results” and that a patch was released for the feed crawler. The new feed crawler is intended to “help provide fresh results” in Live Search. As part of the post Microsoft has asked webmasters to help them to discover content changes, saying:

You can do this via sitemaps and various meta properties per link or via RSS link to notify us about very important content. To prevent us from having to monitor lots of feeds often, we recommend aggregating content change onto a few feeds; adding the name, “Aggregate” somewhere in the feed name. We also suggest referring to them in robots.txt and your sitemap—both of which will help us detect them and their use.