Behind the Bing Homepage

Recently, I was asked to give a presentation to some of my colleagues. My first thought was to talk about my current role and the projects I've been working on. But as I thought more about the opportunity, I was reminded of a Ted Talk I watched some time ago. The Ted Talk was called "What is the Internet, Really?" In this talk, Andrew Blum talks about how one day his internet stopped working so he called the internet company to come fix it. After struggling to figure it out, the cable man took Andrew outside and pointed to a bundle of cables sticking out of the side of his house. As he did this they saw a squirrel running along the wire and then the cable man said, "There's your problem. A squirrel is chewing on your internet." That was the first time he realized that the internet was more than a transcendent idea. He finally realized that the internet was tangible! So he spent a year or two documenting the people and the artifacts that make up the internet.

 

Ever since I saw that talk, I've been infatuated with learning how things work. So I decided I would learn about a Microsoft product or service and share my findings with my colleagues. I quickly went to Bing to search through all of Microsoft's products when it hit me - why don't I do it on the Bing homepage? I love the homepage and I use it every day. It made complete sense.

 

So I spent a couple of weeks speaking to many of the people working on this wonderful product. I condensed the process to tell the story in 15 minutes and created the following slideshow. Disclosure - I'm not representing Microsoft and none of the below is top secret, in fact I took out a bunch of stuff so I could share it here.

 

It all starts with a small team of 2-3 people called the image acquisition team. Their job is to work with dozens of stock image companies and collect the very best pictures they have. Then once a month there is an image review meeting where the content PM and her team decide which of these images is bing worthy or which images are beautiful, intriguing, and poetic. The way they describe it is they don’t want a picture that you would find on the back of a postcard. They want a picture with a new perspective – something that causes people to stop and ask what is that, where is that, what’s going on. And they have found that the more intriguing the picture is the more engagement there is from the user. As you can imagine, the conversations in this meeting can be quite interesting because beautiful is quite subjective. Since I’m from Idaho, if I were to see a picture of a potato being harvested I might start to cry because it’s so beautiful. But others will think I’m crazy. After they work out their differences and pick the pictures they essentially store them in a file. Every two weeks, the content PM opens up her calendar and starts to pick out the pictures that will be used each day. But it’s not as easy as randomly picking the pictures. They try to make sure that 30% of the pictures are relevant to that specific day – so for example holidays they pick a picture that represents that holiday, but they also celebrate other less known holidays too. I remember for the World Turtle Day they picked a “Green sea turtle being cleaned by reef fish off the Kona Coast, Big Island, Hawaii”.

 

Once the pictures are chosen a designer will take the pictures and touch them up a bit and make them look pretty. Because once in a while you are going to catch a cute groundhog right after it has finished it’s lunch and before he has had time clean itself up. We don’t want to embarrass the poor hog.

So after the touch ups you have this gorgeous picture ready for show.

The next thing the designer has to do is cut it up. She cuts it up 15 different ways.

 

Because the bing image has to be gorgeous on all devices and in all ways. This image is going to be used for the xbox so it has to be big enough to fit on big screen tvs, but it has to be small enough to be a tile on Windows. Then there is the Windows phone portrait and landscape and the laptops and bing is even on an iPhone.

 

 

So now that the picture is ready the next thing that the team works on is the hotspots. Hotspots are the four little squares that give you clues about what you are looking at and entice you to learn more. As we talked about in the beginning the picture if done right causes you to stop and wonder what you are looking at. Well the hotspots are supposed to further entice you.

 

 

The idea came from magazine covers. When I was talking to the PMs I kept hearing that the image is supposed to be like the magazine cover and the hotspots work in the same way they do for magazines. They are supposed to cause curiosity in the reader and get them to use the service. The one thing I want to point out is that each one of these hotspots are curated. They are hand-picked by an editor who spends on average one hour on each one of the hotspots. He usually tries to have three types of hotspots – a query, a video, and an image search.

 

After all of that is done they send it to the GeoPolitical team where they will make sure the content can be shown all over the world. They especially check that all the following adhere to strict policy - People, symbols, national symbols, flags, maps, and globes.

Once they pass they are finally ready to be uploaded! But it’s not that simple. This image shows that there are actually nine different teams handling the distribution of the bing image all over the world. And as you recall, a big part of their goal is to make the image relevant. So these teams ensure that the pictures are distributed at the right time. So for example on the day this image was distributed to the US it happened to be Canada day – so they did a special picture just for them.

Okay so we have the picture and the hotspots up and it looks lovely. Another big part of the site can’t be created beforehand but rather has to be created live – and that’s the Popular Now Carousel. Again, the big thing I want to point out here is that these are curated. The team that does this spends approximately 13 hours a day working on these. They have an editor who lives in New York and starts work 3 hours before us. Together they produce about 40 of these a day. They usually stick to news, sports, and entertainment. One of the hardest things they do is to cut down each story to 20 characters including spaces. 

But we aren’t done yet. Most of the people we have talked about have come from the content side meaning they have been editors and designers. But there is an entire engineering team made up of PMs, engineers, and testers dedicated to building the site and making sure it works properly and it is always improving. The PM is primarily focused on knowing the customer and articulating what the customer wants and to clearly communicate it out to his team. He learns what the customer wants through data, feedback and usability studies. Then he gets ideas of what features could make the site better. He writes down his ideas in specs and meets with his team to discuss. They are running agile so they meet for a scrum meeting Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday and the first thing they do is listen to the song of the day. I asked them what they had listened to that week and they said Paul Simon, Earth Wind and Fire, and Chicago. Then they talk about the progress they’ve made with the specs, what they are working on for the day and what is blocking their success. And then they go to work on these features. I wanted to give you an example really quickly of what this process looks like. This is what the Bing page looked like several months ago. At that time, a certain percent of Bing users came to Bing and did nothing, a certain percent searched, and a certain percent clicked on the Popular Now segments. Well, the PM noticed that the carousel used in the image search was liked and largely used. He wondered how it would do on the Bing Homepage so he wrote the specs and his team built it.

 

 

But instead of releasing the new feature to the entire population of users, they decided to run a flight, which basically means they were going to test the feature with a small group first.

 

If the flight succeeds with the small group of people, they would push it out to all users. And in this case it was well received since we all see the carousel. In fact, since the carousel was added there has been a certain amount increase in engagement, search and Popular Now clicks.

I hope you have enjoyed learning about the Bing Homepage as much as I did. I wanted to close with four learnings – First, it is a blast to learn how things work! There is a ton of information I didn’t have time to share with you today, but trust me there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes that we take for granted. I encourage you to be curious and take some time to learn how our products and services work. Number two, it is crucial to document the process and your learnings. If you just reach out and speak with someone, though it’s a great step, it won’t mean much if you don’t force yourself to write it down or draw it out. Putting this presentation together has forced me to think of the complete story from beginning to end and how all the pieces tie in together. I am committing to doing this again at least once a year. I will go and learn how something came about and put it to a presentation and share it with my colleagues. Number three, people are so excited to tell you what they do! So just reach out and ask. One of my mentors tells me that he tries to have lunch with someone outside of HR at least once a month and learn what they do. Lastly, Microsoft really cares about its consumers! They want each user to have an excellent experience! They put in a ton of time, money, people, and effort to give them the perfect experience.