Last week, Bing unveiled some new changes to its search interface, including greater social integration, and a social pane on the right-hand side, showing results from your Facebook friends and “people who know” from Twitter. Bing calls this pane “sidebar”.
There are other interesting features in this pane, such as the ability to share specific search results to your Facebook friends. For example, if you want to show your friends a certain band that you like, you can search for that band, and share all the links you from the search results you want to share, by clicking a link button that appears next to each result.
“With sidebar, Bing brings together the best of the web, with what experts and your friends know, giving you the confidence to act,” says Bing VP Derrick Connell. “This new way to search lets you share, discover, and interact with friends like you do in real life. If you’re on the go, you’ll notice we’ve optimized the layout and placement of the social results on the mobile device for smaller screen sizes and for touch input, so the user experience will be different than what people see on a PC.”
“You may not always see friends you expect to show up for a number of reasons,” Connell notes. “Bing uses public Facebook information and content you’ve given Bing permission to use, such as friends’ photos on Facebook. We won’t match friends based on other Facebook content such as status updates or check-ins. Bing also respects you and your friends’ privacy settings so you won’t see friends who have opted out of Facebook instant personalization or blocked the Bing app.”
Unfortunately, this functionality isn’t present on Bing’s image search results pages or its video search results pages. People like to share videos and images, so it seems like these would be good places for such functionality. Perhaps even more so than regular search results. I wouldn’t be surprised to see such feature appear in the future.
If you’re in the U.S., you can go to bing.com/new, and access the new Bing. You can also go to Bing.com, and you should see a notification about it, prompting you to check it out.
Bing does clearly have a major advantage on the social search side of things, with Facebook and Twitter integration, not present in Google’s offerings.
According to Experian Hitwise, Bing.com searches in the U.S. were up 6% in April month-over-month. They were up 16% year-over-year. Google was down 3% month-over-month and 5% year-over-year.
As Google’s Penguin update is having its fun, Bing has been relatively calm. There has not been a major update in a few months and everything seems perfect. Well, everything used to be perfect.
There’s a member on Webmaster World that noticed Bing was indexing fewer pages on his site. This wasn’t a small change either. Bing used to index 500,000 URLs on the site, but was now only indexing 350,000. That’s a worrying change. The question now is whether or not Bing pushed some kind of update or if its just not indexing like it used to.
Search Engine Roundtable jumped on the case. They began to look at their own indexed pages and found the numbers to be fairly consistent. There we no major drops. OK, so what about impressions and clicks? They found that those numbers had exponentially increased. The crawl rate seemed to be normal as well.
So what’s up with the guy who thinks Bing is not doing its fair share in indexing? We get a better idea by looking at the responses to his original post. Some Webmasters have shared in the original poster’s pain by saying their indexed pages have seen similar drops.
A later post sheds more light on the event though. They say that the people at Bing told them that all of their URLs are being indexed. It’s just a problem with those numbers not showing up in results. Even so, that’s a pretty serious problem if the Bing Webmaster Tools show sites being delisted or URLs no longer being indexed.
We’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment and we’ll update this story if we hear back.
Have you seen any changes in the amount of sites being indexed by Bing? I find it highly unlikely that Bing has rolled out an update, but the impending release of the new Bing may be having an effect on indexing for certain sites.
Earlier today, comScore numbers were leaked showing that both Google and Bing were rising slightly in market share at the combined expense of Yahoo! Now, Experian Marketing Services, a different digital information marketer, has released April search engine market share numbers that contradict that notion.
Experian has Google actually losing 3.4 % of the search market share over the course the past year. They put Google currently at 64.4% of the market. Bing and Yahoo!, on the other hand, have improved numbers over the comScore report, with a combined 30% market share as of April 2012. Bing is up 2% with a 14.3% market share and Yahoo! is up 1.1% with 15.7% of the search market.
It’s hard to know which report to trust in this situation. Both have year-long trends going in different directions, meaning either their data sets or their methods of parsing that data differ. Though the comScore report has not been officially released yet, the Experian data is based on a sample of 10 million U.S. internet users, and is for web searches only – meaning they are missing mobile searches, which have become a sizable chunk of Google’s searches. Also, the fact the Experian has Yahoo! with a higher individual share of searches than Bing is, intuitively, odd. Either way, it’s clear that Google has more than double Bing’s and Yahoo!’s market share combined. That means Bing is in for a long, hard battle if it hopes to take down Google with the new Bing layout it announced yesterday.
What do you think? Has Google sprung a leak or is Yahoo! sunk? Will the new Bing make a difference in the numbers this time next year? Leave a comment below and let us know.
The comScore search engine data for April isn’t out until tomorrow, but Search Engine Land has an unnamed source that has given them a rundown of the numbers. The story they tell is one we saw unfolding as far back as March. That is, both Google and Bing are rising in search market share, while search traffic for Yahoo! is decreasing.
In April 2012, Yahoo! had 13.5% of the search market pie, down from 15.9% in April 2011. That 2.4% loss went straight to Bing and Google. Bing is up 1.3% since last April and Google is up 1.1%. Though Yahoo! and Bing could be considered one search engine, since Bing now powers Yahoo! search, the sum of their shares doesn’t even add up to half of Google’s dominant 66.5% share of the market.
This is more bad news for Yahoo!, which has had quite a bit of bad news lately. With its CEO under fire for (whether he knew it or not) falsifying his resume, Yahoo! needs more than huge layoffs to begin to compete as more than an entertainment news page. As Google and Bing slowly eat away at the remnants of Yahoo!’s search share, it remains to be seen whether any other competitors, such as Facebook, can enter the market and make it more than a two-horse race. Perhaps Bing’s new search results system and layout will help entice those users leaving Yahoo! Microsoft is banking on improved social search to be the feature that differentiates it from Google.
What do you think? Should Yahoo! abandon search altogether? Will the new Bing have what it takes to make a dent in Google’s lead? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Yesterday, in what can only be described as a huge shot across Google’s bow, Microsoft unveiled “The New Bing,” a completely redesigned search interface designed to shorten the distance between searching and doing. Built on the premise that more and more people are using search to accomplish things and make decisions in the real world, Bing’s goal is to make it easier to actually do stuff with what you find in your search results.
To that end, they’ve redesigned the search results interface to include two new columns. In addition to the standard search results column we all know and… love?… there’s a snapshot column and a social column. The web results column is much the same. The snapshot and social columns are where the magic happens, as it were. These are the columns designed to provide users with a shortcut to whatever action they might want to take based on their search results, and they are where Bing has placed its answer to Google’s Search Plus Your World feature.
Column One: Search Results, “What the Web Knows”
At first glance, the search results column remains largely unchanged. Described as “what the web knows,” this is your standard “10 blue links” page, as Bing Senior Director Stefan Weitz called it. Yet even here, Bing has made some changes. Citing internal research, Bing notes that 68% of people “use search to try to get things done,” and 66% “feel that there is an overwhelming amount of data,” and 60% “wonder whether they have found the best information available for what they’re trying to do.”
Armed with those results, Bing engineers set out to streamline Bing’s search results by “removing unnecessary links and and simplifying the results to the core set of information users are looking for.” The idea is to present a cleaner, simpler set of search results more directly targeted to what users actually want to know. The goal, Weitz told Fast Company, is “to reinvent search.”
For Bing, the goal of the redesign is not simply to compete with Google, but to change the way search is done. The primary goal of the new Bing is not so much to provide a list of websites that might answer your questions. Instead, Bing wants to actually find the answers for you, and present them to you in a way that is streamlined and that makes it easy for you to do what you want to do with the information you need.
Part of this desire to streamline search results came after Bing, like Google, began integrating social media (like Twitter trends) into their search results. This, according to Bing’s Corporate Vice President Derrick Connell, “wasn’t that relevant and was overloading users with clutter.” The New Bing, with its additional columns, is designed to streamline the basic web search experience by shunting that “clutter” off to the side, where it can – Bing hopes – be more useful and less of an unnecessary distraction.
Column Two: Snapshot, “What Bing Knows”
The snapshot column is the first of the two new columns. This column provides a basic, well, snapshot of the information that’s most relevant to your search. This is also the column that provides the shortcuts that allow you to do things more quickly and easily. Certain queries get more out of the snapshot column than others. If you’re looking for information on hotels, movie showtimes, restaurants, and the like, then the snapshot column will be your friend. A widget will allow you to check hotel vacancies and make reservations, while integration with OpenTable does the same for restaurants. The snapshot column also provides you with basic information and reviews about what you’re searching for.
Eventually, improvements to snapshot will allow show you a variety of information and offer you a wider variety of actions to take. For now, though, the focus is on “searches where Bing can determine a clear customer intent” based on the search term. For example, suppose you’re curious about this obscure little movie that just came out called The Avengers. Do a Bing search for The Avengers, and the snapshot will give you showtimes and reviews for the movie. In addition to reviews, the new Bing will also tell you what your Facebook and Twitter friends are saying about The Avengers. More on that next.
Column Three: Sidebar, “What Your Friends May Know”
The final column is where Bing really has Google’s Search Plus Your World in its sights. This column integrates with a variety of social networks to show you what people you know – and people you don’t know – are saying about whatever you’re searching for. Bing searches through a variety of social networks to bring you this information, including Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Foursquare, and LinkedIn.
There are two kinds of people whose comments on your search topic will appear: your friends, and people who know about the topic. So if you have Facebook friends who have recently liked or posted about something related to your search topic, you’ll see that in the social sidebar. If you search for The Avengers, you’ll see your friends’ post about how awesome it was. If you search for local Mediterranean restaurants, you might see recommendations like “try the shawarma.”
The other kind of people whose posts you’ll see come from people who Bing believes might know something about your topic. So if you search for a restaurant, you might see tweets from a restaurant critic. If you search for the latest tech gadget, you might see tweets from a tech blogger or journalist who has recently reviewed it.
The social sidebar also allows you to ask your friends questions about your Bing searches, and the activity feed shows you live updates as your friends or those who Bing regards as knowledgable post about your search.
Interestingly, the social integration of the new Bing design appears to have been inspired in part by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. During a hackathon in February, Zuckerberg told a gathering of Facebook and Bing developers who were working on integrating Facebook with Bing’s search that the should not “try to do social by building social on the side.” Instead they should “build it into the experience.” In a slightly ironic turn of events, Bing engineers ultimately built social into the Bing experience by quite literally building it on the side.
In addition to its usefulness for the basic task of search, there’s also a chance that Bing’s new redesign will impact the way certain social media members are ranked. Bing’s social sidebar adds a dimension of authority to those social media accounts that are selected as being knowledgeable about a topic.
But Does It Work?
Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it? By and large, reviews from those who have gotten their hands on the new Bing have been pretty positive. Of course, the applicability and usefulness of the two new columns will vary based on what you’re actually searching for. If, for example, you’re looking for a hotel or a restaurant – the two examples used in yesterday’s announcement – then they’re likely to provide a lot of helpful info. On the other hand, if you’re searching for something a little more abstract, then they might not be quite so helpful. For example, Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand used the new Bing to do a search for information on Penguin, Google’s latest algorithm update. As you might expect, neither the snapshot nor the social sidebar returned much in the way of relevant results. Most of them related to actual penguins – the small, flightless Antarctic bird.
The Verge put together a video showing the New Bing in action. Check it out below:
The new Bing will begin rolling out in the next week or so, and should reach broad U.S. availability by early June. You can also sign up to be notified when the new Bing is ready.
When Microsoft unveiled the new Bing format yesterday, it became clear that the company is banking heavily on social search. The entire right column of Bing’s new three-column search results formant will be given up to social results. The column will feature results from both searcher’s social media connections and search-term-related “experts” on social media sites. Now, a new Microsoft patent found by SEO by the Sea is showing exactly how Microsoft intends to decide who an “expert” is.
The patent ranks social media authors along various dimensions using “a variety of statistical methods.” The abstract states that the methods will use usage metrics, social graphs, and topical graphs. The various dimensions by which authors are measured are outlined in a basic way:
Authors who link to content that becomes popular, and do so early on, will be considered more authoritative. The first person to post a link to a big story will receive a large “expertise” score, and subsequent linkers will receive exponentially less “expertise.” All authors are then ranked by expertise score.
Authors who post a lot of content based around a certain topic will be considered more authoritative for searches related to that topic. Microsoft’s method here is to associate keywords in social media posts with a certain topics, which are then associated with a search engine query.
Popular and influential members of social networks will also be ranked highly for authority. This is simply a factor of how many subscribers or followers an author has, or how many people link back to an author. Consider this the crowdsource factor in the rankings.
I, like most internet users, have been a huge fan of Google search for around a decade now. I have to admit, though, that these ideas and the new Bing design look very promising. Will the rollout of the new Bing finally bring about some real search engine competition? Will Microsoft’s close relationship with Facebook put them ahead of Google when it comes to social search? 2012 is shaping up to be an interesting year for the search engine market, and that means an interesting year for those sites trying to keep up with SEO.
What do you think? Has Bing, with its new design and improved social search, finally positioned itself on par with Google? Are you worried that your website might be caught in the crossfire, or lost in the crowded, noisey realm of social SEO? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Bing’s new design for search that incorporates a Facebook-driven social sidebar came by way of some pretty sagacious guidance from a man who’s made a career out of turning the internet into a more personal experience: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
According to CNET, during a hackathon in February that included ten developers apiece from Microsoft and Facebook who convened to work on a way to integrate Facebook with Bing’s search, Zuckerberg visited the team to share his vision of what the final product should be. According to Microsoft corporate vice president of search program management Derrick Connell, Zuckerberg addressed the developers and said, “Don’t try to do social by building social on the side. Build it into the experience.”
As simple as that statement is, it had a powerful effect on the engineers. Connell recalls that Zuckerberg repeated that statement several times and, as you can see from the new incarnation of Bing, the developers took his recommendation to heart. Social networking is not an auxiliary feature to search on Bing; it is search on Bing the way blue hyperlinks are search on Bing. Searching for local boutiques or reviews for movies is no longer relegated to websites where you have to discern whether or not you trust the reviewer’s opinion. The inclusion of social aspects to search are have moved beyond the linear and simple. Instead, the Bing/Facebook social search offers up a dynamic connection of any information shared by your Facebook friends that is related to your particular query so you get reviews from sources you’re familiar with and, more importantly, trust. In short, the Bing/Facebook search is the internet equivalent to asking your friend for a recommendation, except you don’t even really need to directly interact with your friend if they’ve already said something on Facebook related to your question.
Given how much disdain has been expressed lately about Facebook’s “walled garden,” the collaboration with Bing is perhaps the greatest demonstration yet that Facebook is willing to lower down the drawbridge and allow others to cross the moat and access the site’s colossal social network – Zuckerberg and company are just extraordinarily discerning about who gets to cross over. The partnership presents a new frontier in what social search can do for people and, perhaps more importantly, could signify the most legitimate threat yet to Google’s dominance of the search market.
Google’s been polishing up its Search Plus Your World social results for the better part of the year, but logistically there’s no way that it can really hold a candle to the social search feature that Bing now offers by way of Facebook. The numbers are just insurmountable for Google and its own social network, Google+.
Zuckerberg wasn’t the only Silicon Valley Sage to point to the direction Microsoft needed to go in with the new Bing. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates reiterated Zuckerberg’s suggestion, according to Connell, that a person’s friends are likely to be more helpful than some disembodied review from unfounded sources. Google+‘s 170 million users pales in comparison to the over 900 million that Facebook claims.
While the siege on Google’s search dominance is officially underway, Facebook is supposedly already working on its own search engine so the partnership with Bing in integrating the social information of Facebook users welcomes some perplexing speculation. A Facebook search engine is already expected to be a legitimate competitor to Google yet now it would have to distinguish itself from Bing so as to not appear redundant. Then again, Facebook may have agreed to partner with Bing already anticipating that its own search engine would be different than what Bing would become, thereby creating two irresistible challenges to Google instead of just one. Even if the two are somehow distinguishable from each other, you have to imagine that Facebook, with its notorious reputation of hoarding all its users information for itself, wouldn’t undermine its own source of wealth and power – user information – so easily, and much to Facebook’s own detriment.
Then again, Zuckerberg didn’t get to where he is today by entering half-baked partnerships.
At any rate, Watch this space to see how the new Bing/Facebook search alliance shapes up over the next year or so.
Do you think Google can counter this new offensive from Facebook and Microsoft, or is it just going to be left out in the rain while Facebook forges ahead in the world of social search?
Have you seen the new Bing yet? We reported yesterday that Microsoft pretty much recreated Bing with the launch of its new format. The new format features three columns that display traditional search results, snapshot which provides the most relevant information to the user, and the social column that shows friends’ recommendations. Underneath this massive change is another new Bing that hopes to change the way we search.
Bing director Stefan Weitz spoke to Fast Company yesterday about the change. He says that yesterday’s change was in response to their need to “reinvent search.” Weitz says that Google’s method of “indexing” and “ranking” pages is no longer good enough. Their new method is focused on finding the answers in the search results themselves.
This new method of search is like bringing instant answers to the entire Web. Weitz says that their goal is to “model every object on the planet.” He further clarifies by saying that Bing no longer indexes text, but rather associates “data that exists on the Web in all forms with the physical object that spawned it in the fist place.” The hope is that they can create use this data to create apps that provide instant answers so that users won’t have to click through to a Web page to the find the information they’re looking for.
This method of search is way more ambitious than the current instant answer solutions on the Internet. Google’s instant answers currently extends to things like weather and sports. The only search engine that could be considered comparable is the open source search engine DuckDuckGo. Its new service, DuckDuckHack, allows users to build their own plugins that provide instant answers in the search results for things like Twitter handles and song lyrics.
Of course, as Fast Company points out, this change has the potential to shake the SEO industry to its very core. Google is issuing update after update to its algorithm and Webmasters are doing what they can to keep up. What happens when Google, Bing and the rest provide the answers you need right from the search results. People aren’t going to click through to the Web page anymore so normal search concepts just aren’t going to be as important anymore.
Bing’s redesign is just the first step towards this new method of search. It will still be a while before they start to offer an instant answer service that will make a lot of the normal tropes of search obsolete. Who knows? Maybe Google or the rumored Facebook search engine could come out first and beat Bing to the punch.
Do you think abandoning conventional search tactics is good for users and Webmasters? How will Webmasters adapt to the new rules of search? Will the new rules of search even catch on? Let us know in the comments.
Bing has unveiled a new redesigned interface for search results. The new interface is designed to be “natural, coherent, and useful,” according to Microsoft officials. The update uses a three-column format to provide users with more immediate access to necessary information, as well as social integration to help users see advice and recommendations from friends, as well as from experts.
The new interface constitutes Bing’s largest overhaul since Bing launched in in 2008. Microsoft says that the goal of the interface is to make Bing better at doing the kinds of things people use search engines for: finding information and getting things done in the real world quickly. Stefan Weitz, Bing’s Senior Director, noted that “people are using the Web to do things in the real world,” and Bing’s new interface is designed to facilitate that.
The new interface consists of three columns. First, on the left, is the improved web results column. This is where the kind of search results you’re used to seeing on Bing – the traditional “10 blue links,” as Weitz calls it – live. The second column is a called the snapshot. It consists of a selection of the most relevant information related to the user’s search, as well as offering action items through integration with services like OpenTable. The third column is the social sidebar. It includes recommendations by friends and experts related to the user’s search.
So, for example, if you do a search for restaurants in an area, the web results column will show your basic search results, the snapshot column will show a selection of restaurants and reviews, as well as the ability to make reservations through OpenTable, while the social column will include opinions and recommendations about local restaurants from your friends.
If you search for hotels, you’ll see a similar set of results. In this case, the snapshot columns allows you to check room rates and vacancies, and a link to make reservations.
The social column already includes Facebook and Twitter integration. Integration with other networks like Foursquare should be coming soon. “The New Bing” should be rolling out over the next few weeks, and will be widely available in the U.S. by June. In the meantime, check out a short video about it below, then let us know what you think in the comments.
Bing Maps has announced a host of image updates to both the Bird’s Eye feature and Streetside imagery that offer up some stunning resolution to the included locations.
Bird’s Eye offers a fully rotating view of select places giving not only a 45-degree view of an area but also in a remarkably high quality image. As of today’s update, there’s now 60TB of native Bird’s Eye imagery. To get an idea of what regions have been included in this most recent update, Bing Maps provided a map detailing what areas in the United States and Western Europe that have updates.
One of the areas in Europe that’s gotten an image update is London, which will be hosting the 2012 Summer Olympics later this year. Bing Maps updated the imagery to show the newly constructed Olympic Park in Bird’s Eye, which it provided a before and after comparison for.
After playing around with the Bird’s Eye feature, the quality of the images offered with this view is really something else. I keep looking at this angle of the Financial District in New York City trying to convince myself that this image was actually captured with a camera and not a very convincing and detailed digital model.
As mentioned, Bing Maps also unrolled an expanded group of places that got new and updated Streetside imagery. Several places both in the United States and Europe were included, such as Phoenix, AZ; New York, NY; as well as Paris and Marseille in France. An easy way to check out what parts of the world are now equipped with Streetside navigation, simply zoom out above the area you are curious about and click on the Streetside figure at the top of the map. For instance, here are all the regions in the United States that currently have Streetside support.
Actually, since the Streetside’s only available in the U.S. and the Europe, I’ll go ahead and throw in the map for Europe, as well.
Here’s a problem that’s totally born of our modern age: at work I use Macs and at home I use a Windows-powered laptop. Every single day when I go home, I have to re-adjust my motions on the scroll pad of my laptop because it is inverse to the way you scroll with a Mac mouse. I do it literally every single day. A couple of times I thought the computer was frozen because I was doing the Mac directional scroll on the laptop’s touchpad and nothing was moving (because I was already at the top of the screen). It’s hardly a problem to write home about, to say nothing about writing about it in this blanks space, but it’s a minor vexation nonetheless that exemplifies one pervasive detail in technology: no two things work the same way.
Whether it’s programming the clock on your DVD player or trying to figure out the keyboard commands between Photoshop and GIMP, it’s surprising that the variance in technology commands haven’t imparted some pandemic of digital dyslexia among the developed world. In the pursuit to be original, the accessibility of electronic devices seems to diminish in importance.
Bing Director Stefan Weitz shared a lament over on Bing’s official blog today about this tragic condition of technology and how, as he says, devices are usually built with a technology-first slant. Instead, he proposes, every computer, remote, gadget, etc. should be designed with people as the foremost consideration.
To address this issue, Bing’s announced that its developing a “Humanizing Technology” series wherein the Bing team has invited some science and technology luminaries like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Peter Diamandis, and Jane McGonigal to return technology into a more “human-centric” field.
Perhaps more challenging but also more revolutionary, Weitz added that Bing will be hosting a Virtual Expo that will feature “companies, academics, and technologies that are building things to align with psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. For those to whom Psychology 101 is but a dusty memory, Maslow proposed a structure of needs that, as each of them are met, will eventually elevate a person into a state where their full potential is realized, i.e., or self-actualization.
What drastic and strangely fascinating developments could Bing produce when designing new technology from the perspective of humanistic psychology? I have no clue, but Bing will educate all of us at what Weitz is calling a “humanities fair” this summer in New York City.
Truly, it sounds almost like Bing is taking a TED-like approach to advanced technology by simplifying it and making it more applicable and accessible by more people. What do you think? Is technology development really too focused on being unique and not putting a person’s accessibility first? Do you like the lack of uniformity across devices? Let’s hear what you have to say about it.
Wikipedia, the juggernaut of the online information world. The site which spawned the idea of allowing internet users to update information regarding any topic has grown in such a way that only a handful of sites can be considered larger in scope. One of these sites, google.com, really likes Wikipedia when displaying queries to users utilizing their search engine. However, how much do they like Wikipedia? Also, do they like Wikipedia more than their rival, Bing?
“Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world, can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.” – Michael Scott (The Office)
A few months ago, Intelligent Positioning released a study which stated Wikipedia appeared on Google UK’s page one of their SERPs for 99% of noun related searches. This percentage was based around 1,000 unique searches, using a random noun generator, and the search settings at the standard ten per page. They also found of the 99%, 56% of the words displayed a Wikipedia link in the 1st position.
This study raised a red flag in the SEO community as “99%” is a staggering claim to make. Many experts questioned Intelligent Positioning’s methods, which led Conductor to release their own study, utilizing some stricter parameters. Here’s a few key takeaways from their study.
– Wikipedia appears on the first page of Google SERPs 60% of the time for informational queries, 34% for transactional, for a combined 46%.
– The longer a keyword string, the less likely the term will appear on the front page. As demonstrated by their graph below.
– For single word queries, 80% of the time Wikipedia will appear on the first page of Google’s SERPs.
These studies occurred in March, fast forwarding to May we find Conductor has released a follow-up study, comparing how Google treats Wikipedia with how Bing treats the website in terms of SERP presence. Below, you can see their graph indicating Google features Wikipedia on their first page 15% more than Bing.
Reading further into the study, the results become even more interesting. While Google features Wikipedia on their first page more often, Bing features Wikipedia in the top overall spot 18% more often when they’re on the first page.
Matt McGee of Search Engine Land made some interesting points, and had valid criticisms involving the studies surrounding Wikipedia and Google/Bing. First, it’s ironic he notes Matt Cutts has stated at different conferences that Wikipedia is featured more on Bing than Google. McGee also references yet another study, stating Bing actually favors Google more. This study was done at the same time as the Intelligent Positioning study, and the first Conductor study.
So, taking in all of the studies from – Intelligent Positioning, Conductor, Search Engine Watch, and Matt Cutts, two of them state Google favors Wikipedia more than Bing, and vice versa for the other two.
One point McGee makes in his article, which I’m going to unequivocally support and harp on is how none of these studies can truly say who features Wikipedia more. Search engines are continually changing their results, hourly, daily, monthly. So, how can any so-called study make empirical statements about how a search engine features Wikipedia more than the other?
If I search for Jeffrey Jones (the actor who played the principal in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), I’m going to get a specific set of searches based on the current state of a search engine’s algorithm. However, if Jeffrey Jones were to smoke meth, get in his car and crash into Harrison Ford’s front yard, the entire list of results on an engine’s SERPs is going to change. In a matter of hours, and in some cases, minutes. So, again, how can anyone be so certain who’s favoring Wikipedia more?
As a SEO expert, webmaster, or anyone who has a disdain for Wikipedia, it can be irritating to always see the site featured above another for a specific keyword. Especially if it’s your website who’s having to sit below Wikipedia, even if your site is completely dedicated to the keyword. However, this shouldn’t lead you to simply believing a study that claims to have answers you’re seeking, because most likely someone else is claiming something entirely different.
In mid-April, Microsoft announced that the Microsoft-Yahoo Search Alliance was nearly final in the UK, Ireland and France, after announcing the expansion into these countries in February. The ad transition began on April 18.
Today, Microsoft announced that the transition is now complete in these countries.
“Yahoo! Search is really an important part of our business and we have invested a lot of time to make the transition as efficient and as seamless as possible for our advertisers and publishers” sid Jon Myers, Director, Account Management UK and Ireland “Now we can focus on delivering compelling content for our users and customers to build relevant online experiences.
“We’re delighted to successfully reach this important milestone in the UK, France and Ireland,” said Microsoft’s Mark Richardson. “As a result of this transition we believe Bing users will see more useful advertising while presenting advertisers with an increasingly compelling alternative in search advertising. We look forward to this rolling out across the next set of European markets.”
Microsoft has indicated that Germany, Austria and Switzerland would be the focal points for the Search Alliance, following the UK, Ireland and France. The transition on the paid search side has already been completed in North America and India. For organic search, it’s already been completed globally.
Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that it has rebranded its ads for SMBs as “Bing, powered by Bing and Yahoo! Search.”
BingBot is the cute name that Microsoft gives the bot that crawls the Web indexing the content is returned to users who use its search function. BingBot might start to index unwarranted content or it might index enough content sometimes. Microsoft has some tips to make your Web site BingBot friendly so that the right amount of content is always crawled.
I’m sure that any Webmaster worth their domain is aware of robots.txt files. It’s the file that one uses to control the behavior of Web crawlers. It essentially tells the bot what to crawl and what not to crawl.
It’s important to note that BingBot will look for the robots.txt file at each subdomain. Say that you have a Web site like http://us.contoso.com/products.htm, BingBot will look for the file at http://us.contoso.com/robots.txt. Note that this URL is for the U.S. subdomain. If you find yourself hosting multiple subdomains for multiple countries, you’re going to need a robots.txt file for each subdomain. If not, BingBot will just assume it’s invited in and start crawling all those cyberskeletons in your subdomain’s closet.
Even though it might start to dig around your domain looking for anything and everything, BingBot is not a rude guest. It will find what it came for and not be back for a few hours. After it’s been gone for a while, it will come back and see if the robots.txt file has changed since it last visited.
Of course, BingBot proves that it’s not the great neighbor that you previously thought because it will assume it can use the default set of directives if there is not one set. That’s why the Bing team suggests that Webmasters tell BingBot the “URL paths where you want them to crawl, and the URL paths you want them not to crawl.” They also suggest that you keep only one default set of directives to reduce the number of errors.
If after all the neighborly advances of BingBot has won you over, you have the option of only allowing BingBot into your Web site. You only have to change a few lines in the robots.txt file to allow BingBot into your Web site while keeping everybody else out. BingBot will still only follow one set of directives though so be sure to guide it to what you want it to see or else BingBot will revert to its default actions.
If you don’t want BingBot getting too deep into your Web site, it does honor the Crawl-delay directive that will limit the amount of pages it can crawl. It’s important to note that Crawl-delay only sets the amount of time that BingBot is allowed to crawl your pages. Set the delay to five seconds and BingBog will crawl your Web page in small five second windows. Subdomains play a role again in that each robots.txt file is going to need its own Crawl-delay directive or BingBot will just off acting on its own again.
As a final note, the Bing Webmaster Tools has a feature that allows you to control whenever BingBot is allowed to vist your site. It’s best to have the BingBot visit more frequently during off hours to prevent any interference from high traffic. This is all determined by a positive or negative factor that BingBot will apply to itself automatically. Be warned though – if you set a Crawl-delay in the robots.txt file, it will override the Bing Webmaster Tools setting.
As you can see, BingBot is a good neighbor, but only if you train it to be. The tools presented here should help you give BingBot the directives it needs to crawl only the important parts of your Web site. If not, it will just follow the default directive and stumble around your Web site crawling all over the place. You don’t want that, do you?
Microsoft announced that it is rebranding its advertising product for SMBs as “Bing, powered by Bing and Yahoo! Search”. The company says that this is to simplify the way small business search advertisers do business with Microsoft.
“By aligning with the Bing brand, SMBs will better understand that they are buying traffic on Bing and Yahoo! search,” a spokesperson for Microsoft tells WebProNews. “Many of our advertisers find us through the Bing homepage, where they click on ‘Advertise here.’ This shift helps those customers follow a more intuitive path to what they are looking for.”
The change is effective today.
“With one ad buy through Microsoft Advertising adCenter, search advertisers are able to reach 158 million unique searchers using Bing and Yahoo! Search (including Microsoft and Yahoo! Core Search sites), providing a sizable volume of 5.6 billion monthly searches and a 29% search share, which is nearly one-third of all queries in the US,” says Microsoft’s GM of SMB Advertising, Matt Lydon, citing comScore data.
“Our audience is significant in size and in online purchase activity,” he adds. “The unique searchers on Bing and Yahoo! Search (including Microsoft and Yahoo! Core Search sites) are likely to spend 26% more than the average searcher, and likely to spend 9% more than Google searchers in the U.S.”
He also notes that advertisers can reach 49 million unique searchers using Bing and Yahoo, that don’t use Google in the US.
Even though Google is arguably on top in terms of Webmaster tools, you can’t discount Bing. It’s the second most popular search engine now and plenty of people use it. The good thing is that you can apply tips from both Google and Bing to your Web site to make your site the most SEO-friendly Web site there is. Today’s tip comes from Bing on how to remove duplicate links from a Web crawler’s path.
The Bing team makes the claim that the Internet is infinite. While we know that the Internet is not literally infinite, new URLs are found everyday. A lot of these URLs are duplicates that make the finding of new relevant content a challenge since Bing has to sift through these relatively useless links.
One solution that Web sites implement to guide search engines around these useless links are canonical tags. Bing says that these tags are not the best solution by using an example that says canonical source URLs only waste crawling bandwidth. If you use canonical tags on your Web site, you’re essentially setting up your Web site to not be crawled for its most important content.
A much better solution according to Bing is to use URL Normalization. By using this tool, you can set up parameters that tell Bing not to crawl certain parts of your Web site. This will make it so that Bing will only target the important parts of your site that you want people to see during search. You can also implement URL Normalization right now from within the Bing Webmaster Tools so Webmasters don’t have to wait for their IT guys to fix the canonical tags.
Of course, you might be a Webmaster who doesn’t understand this kind of stuff. Bing has you covered there as well. Once you log-in to the Bing Webmaster Tools, you can set up URL Normalization with a few clicks. Bing will automatically detect the most common duplicates on your site and you just have to let it do its thing. Easy as pie and you get the added benefit of Bing only crawling the important stuff.
Some of you may be thinking that AJAX and Silverlight were just fine. Well, WPF control has some advantages that you would do well to take advantage of. The main advantage being that developers can now “build interactive tools for visualizing geographical data on the desktop.”
James McCaffrey, writing for Visual Studio Magazine, lays out a good argument as to why he thinks WPF control is the best way to develop for Bing Maps.
“The two main alternatives to Bing Maps with WPF are Bing Maps AJAX in a Web application and Bing Maps Silverlight. I’ve used — and like — all three approaches, but I really like Bing Maps with WPF. It gives you the combined power of Bing Maps and the WPF programming model, with the convenience of the C# language.
I’ve found Bing Maps with WPF especially useful when I have to deal with very large data sets. In those scenarios, Bing Maps with WPF was much faster than Web-based alternatives, and it allowed me to effectively handle SQL databases with millions of records, and to display thousands of data points in real time.”
McCaffrey then goes on to detail some of the ways people can use WPF control for Bing Maps. He details how developers can change map properties, place marker data, draw straight lines and curved lines, handle double-click events, display multiple data points, and work with large data sets.
All of the examples contain huge amounts of code for you to sift through. It should give you an idea of how to start developing for Bing Maps with the new WPF control system.
It should be noted that you’re going to need a version of Visual Studio that contains Microsoft’s .NET Framework 4 and the Windows SDK. You can get this by downloading the free edition of Visual Studio 2010 Express. You will also obviously need the WPF SDK as well which is available here.
Late last month we brought you news that Facebook was working on its own search engine. The project reportedly has 24 Facebook engineers working on it, and is headed by none other than Lars Rasmussen, a former Google employee.
Now, though, it looks like this isn’t Facebook’s first foray into the world of search. According to The New York Times, Microsoft actually tried to sell its own search engine, Bing, to Facebook early last year. While there were rumors at the time that they might do so, nothing was ever confirmed. Given that Bing has consistently lost money for Microsoft over the years, several Microsoft execs made overtures to Facebook, with which Microsoft has a remarkably friendly relationship, about taking the search engine off Microsoft’s hands. These overtures, which were not authorized by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, were rebuffed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg declined the offer, saying that Facebook had too much on its plate to worry about such a deal.
Microsoft and Facebook have been growing increasingly cozy with one another over the past few years, likely due to what both companies see as a common enemy: Google. The most recent example of how friendly the two have become is their deal to split the cost of Microsoft’s recent acquisition of AOL’s patents, as well as the patent portfolio itself.
Bing has been a troubled enterprise for Microsoft right from the start. With it, Microsoft aimed to create a serious challenger for Google, and to get itself a piece of the extremely lucrative advertising business that drives Google’s revenues. Unfortunately, Microsoft has consistently lost money on Bing, a fact that apparently doesn’t sit well with some of the company’s higher-ups.
Of course, the possibility of a Facebook search engine adds another interesting wrinkle to the story. Facebook is no doubt taking aim at Google with the project, but by creating its own search engine rather than buying Bing, Facebook could effectively double the amount of competition that Bing faces in the search market. If a Facebook search engine proves popular – and profitable – it could potentially put a strain on Facebook and Microsoft’s cozy friendship.
The same day that Google is releasing its new cloud storage service, complete with a search function, Bing is releasing its new Bing Desktop. The Bing Team at the Bing Community blog announced that the new service will put the Bing homepage right on user’s desktops. From the blog post:
Bing Desktop marries the beauty of Bing’s daily homepage with a quick and convenient search interface so you don’t have to open your browser to start a search session. Every day, your Windows Desktop Background will automatically refresh to a high resolution version of the day’s home page, drawn from the images we use around the world.
Bing Desktop can be installed on PC’s running the U.S. English version of Windows 7. After installation, a Bing taskbar icon can be used to bring up a search bar on the desktop. Searches will open results in the computer’s default browser. The search bar can alternatively be pinned to the top of the screen, where it will slide out of view until a mouse-click at the top of the screen brings it back out. Also, the desktop image may not always match the Bing homepage image due to licensing issues.
If you use the Bing search engine and are a fan of their undeniably beautiful homepage images, Bing Desktop might be perfect for you. On the other hand, it doesn’t do much except put a search bar on your desktop and rotate your wallpaper. Google decided late last year that their Google Desktop application was no longer relevant, and promptly killed it. Google Desktop was similar to the Bing Desktop, with the addition of local file search. Google cited a shift toward cloud-based storage as the reason for no longer supporting Google Desktop, and obviously already had Google Drive in mind.
Do you use Bing regularly? Are you excited to download Bing Desktop and see a breathtaking new photo each morning? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Wajam has been available as a browser add on for quite some time. It’s been around far longer than Search Plus Your World, adding a personalized, social search experience across your favorite search engines, including Google. If you add it to your browser, you will find socially relevant search results for many of your web searches. However, it does not eliminate the Search Plus Your World experience Google offers, but only adds to it (with private results from your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ networks). And unlike Search Plus Your World, the results are all together in one place, and can be minimized when you don’t want them.
“We insert the Wajam dashboard above Google’s ‘Search Plus Your World’ results on the right,” explains Wong. “Our dashboard can be minimized or expanded, so it’s really an enhancement to what Google already shows. You get the best of both worlds.”
On what you can get from Wajam that you can’t get through Google’s own social search experience, Wong says, “Wajam adds private results from Facebook and Twitter, in addition to Google+. You can filter based on social platforms, as well as on type of result (link, photo, video). You can also select which friends you want to see results from by clicking on their profile picture.”
“Filtering/sorting capabilities are greater than Google’s at this point in time,” he adds.
“Social can be used for all kinds of web searches, but is most relevant when applied to recommendations,” says Wong. “For example, I enjoy watching the best swing dance videos on Youtube, and since I have a lot of dancer friends who share videos on Facebook, I use Wajam to discover and keep track of new and interesting swing videos that are uploaded.”
“Social results are useful when you want to find out what your friends think about a certain product, and it also helps you find out which people in your network use a product,” he adds. “By searching for an iPad 2, I can see which friends in my network own an iPad because they talk about it.”
“The quality of your network makes a big difference in the type of social results you get,” he continues. “If you do not have friends who have knowledge and share links on a topic, you won’t get good results. Which is why the new design can be ‘minimized’ and you can quickly glance to see if there are a lot of results, before opening up the Wajam dashboard.”
In the end, the strength of social search is in finding recommendations and opinions from your network, in order to get feedback from people you trust, Wong says. “And as we move forward, we’re going to continue exploring how we can better bubble up the most relevant results by analyzing the profile of your friends and what their interests are in order to rank the results.”
Wong tells us that Wajam is also bringing the new design to Bing and Yahoo this week, and more sites soon.
Chris Pendleton of the Bing Maps team deals with a lot of complaints that Bing Maps doesn’t make it easy to render “GIS stuff” via the Bing Maps API. Your calls have not gone unheeded as the team has made it much easier to render holes in polygons.
Pendleton says that there were community solutions to this particular problem, he felt that it was up to them to officially fix this issue for developers using the tool. It’s with that particular mindset that the team has created the Bing Maps Advanced Shapes Module. This tool allows developers to add a small module to the Bing Maps AJAX v7 Control implementation that allows for complex shape renders.
When the team says easy, boy, do they mean easy. With this release, you can easily add holes into the polygons by “simply passing in an arrays of latitude and longitude. The potential uses are numerous including putting polygons around areas of importance and holes around places where there is no access.
It’s not just about the polygons either. The modle adds in a few aesthetic changes to the mix including fill color, fill opacity, border color, border style (dash), border thickness, visibility and infoboxes for annotation. With these new tools, you’ll be able to create polygonal indicators of safehouses and other essential resources for a zombie invasion. I’m sure it will gain a few legitimate uses as well, but it’s always good to be prepared for potential invasions by zombies, vampires or nazi gerbils.
While the shapes rendering might be the hot ticket item for the release, the new AJAX Map Control release also features some other interesting developer tools. Here’s all the details:
Render complex shapes Create polygons with holes using the new Microsoft.Maps.AdvancedShapes module.
Use the latest Bing Maps design Load the Microsoft.Maps.Themes.BingTheme to provide your customers with the latest Bing Maps site look.
Search Geocode an address, reverse geocode to match a location to an address, and search nearby points of interest using the new Microsoft.Maps.Search module.
Calculate driving directions Use the new Microsoft.Maps.Directions module to easily calculate directions and display a route on your map.
Display a venue map Discover and display maps for nearby venues such as malls and shopping centers using the Microsoft.Maps.VenueMaps module.
Show current traffic Show or hide current traffic on the map using the Microsoft.Maps.Traffic module.
Use the new Bing Maps navigation control Load the Microsoft.Maps.Overlay.Styles module and then set the customizeOverlaysmap option to use the new Bing Maps navigation control on your map.
If you want to get into the nitty gritty of the new module, check out the documentation here. It has everything you need to get started on making shapes in Bing Maps.
