Microsoft Bing Tips and Tricks

The coverage of Microsoft’s new search engine Bing was quite extensive here on "Everything" but also on many other sites on the Internet. This is going to slow down in the future for sure, Today i am going to tell you 5 great tips that showcase some interesting features that Bing is offering but also should make working with the search engine more comfortable.

1. Remove the Bing background image
Many users think that the background image that is shown on the Bing homepage is more of a distraction than anything else. There is however a very easy way of removing the background image in the search engine to work with a barebone version without the background image. All that needs to be done is to open the Bing homepage with the following parameter:

http://www.bing.com/?rb=0

This will make the homepage show up without the background image which gets rid of the noise and can save some Kilobytes of data transfer as well.

2. Every search is available as an RSS feed

Every search on Bing is also available as an RSS feed which can be very interesting for webmasters who want to monitor their position in the search engine. The web feed will be updated whenever changes in website rankings occur. The feeds can be accessed from the web browser’s toolbars or by pointing a feed reader to the result url and appending

&format=rss

To the results. A search for Windows 7 would be available as an RSS feed from the following url

http://www.bing.com/search?q=windows+7&go=&qb=1&format=rss

3. IP Address lookup

Bing can lookup any IP address using an advanced parameter and display a list of domains that are hosted on that IP address. The parameter to do that is the following:

IP:[IP Address]

Substitute [IP Address] with a valid IP. The query IP:207.46.104.147 would for example display a list of domains hosted on that IP address.

4. Display only wallpaper images

Bing’s image search has already received some praise in the past days. One interesting feature is the ability to display only wallpaper images in the image search results. This is done by searching for a term in Bing image search and clicking on the Size category in the left sidebar. It will automatically display various size filters including one called wallpaper. This will display only images that have the exact size of the computer screen resolution.


















The parameters are available in the url which means users can change it to find wallpapers for other screen resolutions as well.

5. The contains parameter

The parameter contains will tell the search engine to only look for websites that contain that search term. This can lead to some interesting searches when combined with other search phrases, some examples are:

Windows 7 contains:torrent
Madonna contains:mp3
Google contains:pdf

6. To Ping Bing or Submit Site to Bing
If you have website which is not indexed by live.com – the former search engine from Microsoft – Now, you have to submit your site to Bing. Another scenario is that your site is already indexed and you have changed site’s content and want to ping bing.com
The format ping format is

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=[your site map link]

for example:- http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.technicalsea.com/sitemap.xml

If you follow the previous live.com ping format, it will redirect you to Bing!!!

If you know something else about bing, share with us by posting it in comments,

HappY SurfinG!!!:)