This week Rand and I had a chance to head over to Microsoft headquarters and sit down with Eric, Rajesh, and Alessandro from Bing, everyone's favorite new search upstart.  The guys were gracious enough to let us into their lair and share their insights on the search landscape and what we can expect from Bing in the future.  Tune in and watch the video to learn what the Bing team has to say about:

• How Bing's marketshare growth will impact search.
  
• What the potential Bing/Yahoo! partnership could mean for the competitive landscape.
  
• What webmasters need to do to optimize for Bing.
  
• How Bing's Webmaster Tools can help you identify links to bad neighborhoods.
  
• What Bing's domain and page scores mean and how you can use them.
  
• How Bing provides link data and whether or not it will still be available in the future.
  
• Requirements, features, and upcoming developments for Bing's amazing IIS Toolkit.

Yeah, seriously, these guys really opened up and let us know the inside scoop straight from the hallowed halls of Redmond.  They're an awesome group and they're working hard to create a level of transparency, openness, and community rarely seen from the engines. In fact, if you have product ideas, questions, or suggestions, just go to the Bing Forums and jump into the conversation, the Bing team avidly reads and responds to the forum feedback.

p.s. from Rand - Just wanted to update with a few important links from the discussions:

• Bing's Webmaster Blog
• The IIS SEO Toolkit
• Bing Webmaster Tools
• SEO Whitepaper from Bing
• The Bing Toolbox (includes APIs, Silverlight tools and more)

I'm looking forward to some future discussions around more specifics of SEO best practices with the Bing team - if you've got items you'd like me to ask them about, don't be shy! We're planning to have a few more meetings in the upcoming months. Oh - and since Eric was modest and didn't mention it in person - here's the latest on Bing's US market share increases.