Historically, Google hasn’t done a whole lot of television advertising, but that has changed recently, and from the looks of things, it’s working out pretty well for the company.
Ace Metrix put out lists of the most effective TV ads for websites, as well as the least effective, and Google accounts for five of the top ten most effective for the year.
“Google, who two years ago never advertised on television, has truly emerged as a major brand marketer this year, introducing high-impact spots delivered at low frequency that last longer than the average 30-second ad,” said Ace Metrix CEO Peter Daboll.
The good news for Google’s main search competitor is that Bing also had three in the top ten. The other two on the list came from Disney.com, and The Daily.
The least effective list is pretty interesting too. It includes Go Daddy, which is famous for its controversial commercials, and Groupon’ s controversial Super Bowl commercial with Timothy Hutton.
Bing also had a couple on this list. Google did not .
““The main differences between the dot.com ads that performed well and those that performed poorly is (1) testing—Google tests their ads on YouTube fairly extensively before buying TV air time, and (2) storytelling: Google creates ads that, first, tell a compelling story and, second, sell,” says Daboll. “Consumers respond to this.”
“The poor Super Bowl appearances by dot.coms show just how little testing is done, as well as a general lack of understanding of the impact of a poor spot,” he adds. “Go Daddy has perennially performed poorly with highly polarizing ads, and Groupon and Living Social also had major whiffs with viewers. The biggest mistake these companies make is in not testing the ads before they run during such a massively expensive and important media event.”
Ace Metrix measures the ads using its “Ace Score,” which it describes as being based on viewer reaction to national TV ads. Respondents are randomly selected and representative of the U.S. TV viewing audience, the firm says. Relevance, persuasion, watchability, information, and attention are among the attributes scored.
Bing announced the launch of Bing Central. The company calls this “one location for you to explore Bing services and features by completing fun missions, manage your Bing Rewards account, redeem great rewards in the redemption center and access account support as well as your profiles and preferences for Travel, Finance, and Shopping.”
Put more simply, “Bing Central gives you a hub to manage everything you do with Bing.”
That statement actually brings me to a whole separate point about Bing that I’ve been meaning to bring up in an article since I sat in on Bing’s Duane Forrester’s session at BlogWorld last week, so I’m just going to talk about it here.
In his discussion about search and social, he talked about search engines having trouble connecting your various web IDs together as you as a person. For example, I am Chris Crum. That’s my name, and it’s my identity on services like Google or Facebook, but on a lot of other services I use ccrum237 or other things.
In the Q&A portion of the session, I mentioned that Google Profiles allow you to connect these various accounts to you as a person. You can include these various links to your different accounts, and let Google know that these things are you.
I asked why Bing doesn’t allow for something like this, particularly since who you are is becoming such an important signal on the web, and many people have various accounts with different non-identifiable user names all over the web.
His response in a nutshell was that this isn’t one of the things users say they want. Bing asks what features users would like to see implemented, and they try to implement them as such, when feasible.
Another difference between Microsoft (which owns Bing obviously) and Google are the philosophies around their products. He referenced recent comments by Eric Schmidt, saying that Google is all one product. Microsoft, on the other hand is comprised of all kinds of different products, and that’s the way they view it. Google’s view (at least by my understanding) is that its various products are more like features of one greater product (which is actually how I’ve tended to look at it myself, which is why I consider Google+ to really be a lot bigger than people typically tend to view it as).
Forrester talked about how they could use things like Windows Live ID, but then there are potential legal issues that could come about when trying to use that stuff.
So, basically, what I took away from this conversation is that Google should theoretically be better at figuring out who you are (across the services you use). Granted, Forrester did not say that, but considering Google’s push for authorship markup, and the fact that that is tied to your Google profile, I’d say including more links to your various profiles around the web is a good way to give Google a better idea about who you are as a web personality, which could very well send signals about your credibility on certain topics, and show your various connections on the web.
Here’s an interview WebProNews did with Forrester at BlogWorld:
Consider this another victory for the advancement of HTML5, the latest mark-up language update which pushes the envelope of HTML capabilities. Microsoft has decided to use it to build their latest Bing for Mobile apps. What benefits will the language provide with the new apps?
First, the same experience will be nearly universal across various platforms and clients. If you’ve ever been frustrated at the version of your app being different than your friend’s, then you’ll enjoy these new versions. HTML5 will also make updating Bing apps much easier on Microsoft. Instead of worrying about different clients and languages, they can simply change the app and have it reflected across the board.
Not only will updating be simplified, but it will also enhance many features already present. Instead of relying simply on the app itself, HTML5 will allow it to gather information and conduct tasks from outside sources. The apps will also be able to utilize features on particular hardwares, including voice search and Bing Vision, which will
Stefan Weitz, senior director of Bing, said this of the upgrade, “We think it’s an interesting model to think about how to expose the things you can do with a product or service in ways that engines like Bing can consume them, so we can do a better job”
“That’s the idea, how can we begin to unlock the power of these applications so engines like Bing can use them to fulfill a request.”
Microsoft’s investment in HTML5 is a huge push towards the markup language upgrade becoming more universally accepted. If you’d like to learn more about the capabilities of HTML5, you can do so here.
At risk of sounding like a writer for ESPN’s First Take, there’s a search-related moustache story worth mentioning.
Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Duane Forrester will participate in the “Movember” initiative designed to raise awareness for men’s health. On the Bing Search Blog, Forrester writes:
It’s 2011, we’re an advanced, tech-savvy industry and we’ve just discovered a way to mix moustaches, money and your statements!
Starting on November 1st, join us as we raise money for Movember. That’s right. For the entire month, Matt Cutts and I (Duane Forrester) will do our best to grow impressive moustaches, rivaling the likes of Burt Reynolds and Tom Selleck. We’ll be trying to nudge both Nietzsche and Ned Flanders from your mind’s eye. We’ll even attempt to lay the smack-down on Salvador Dali and Yosemite Sam!
To be fair, we’ll actually be trying to simply not end up looking like a couple of teenagers trying to snag a dance on Friday night at the high school gym… 😉
Movember is the month formerly known as November, where men and women across the globe join together to raise awareness and funds for men’s health issues. Men grow a Mo (moustache) for 30 days to become a walking, talking billboards, for our men’s health causes – specifically cancers affecting men.
Men who support Movember, called Mo Bros, start by registering at Movember.com. Mo Bros start Movember 1st clean-shaven, then grow and groom their Mo, for the rest of the month, raising money along the way. Women who support Movember, called Mo Sistas, also start by registering at Movember.com. Mo Sistas champion the Mo by supporting their Mo Bros, organizing events, leading a team and spreading the important message of men’s health.
Hopefully, in addition to spreading the men’s health message, we’ll see some sweet pictures of the Google and Bing webmaster poster boys.
Microsoft and Mozilla have teamed up to include a new version of Firefox with Bing built in as the default search.
“Now Firefox users who are Bing enthusiasts can use Firefox with Bing to use the Web the way they want without having to take extra steps to navigate or customize their settings to Bing,” says Bing’s Tor Steiner.
I’d be curious to know what percentage of Firefox users are “Bing enthusiasts,” or for that matter, what percentage of Bing users prefer Firefox to Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer.
Still, any increase in default search experiences powered by Bing should help Bing to some extent. Firefox does control about 20% of the browser market (StatOwl).
“Firefox with Bing offers the latest version of Firefox with Bing set as your home page and the default setting in the search box and AwesomeBar (where you can also type in queries as well as Web addresses),” says Steiner. “If you already have the latest version of Firefox, then you just need to download the Bing Search for Firefox Add-on to set the same preferences.”
As a promotional contest designed to push Bing Shopping, Bing has launched a one-day sweepstakes that will give $100 Amazon gift cards to five lucky participants. And it’s all taking place on Twitter.
The contest involves tweeting your all-time best costume to Bing, and if Bing selects your idea and retweets it, you win the money.
With Halloween right around the corner, people are racking their brains to come up with creative costume ideas.
Well, we want to help those folks find some inspiration so we’re inviting you to share your best Halloween costumes with @Bing. Simply tell us your all-time best costume and we will give five lucky respondents a $100 Amazon gift card for sharing.
In order to enter, you must follow @Bing on Twitter. Then, you tweet your all-time best costume @Bing with the hashtag #BingHalloween. If yours is picked, you win.
The contest is running today, October 25th, from 10 am to 8 pm EST. The five winners will be selected throughout the day. Each Twitter handle only gets one entry.
What was the best Halloween costume you ever designed? Tell Bing and tell us in the comments.
Sunday night was the big premiere of season 2 of AMC’s hit zombie survival show The Walking Dead, based on the brilliant graphic series created by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore.
Although season 2 is already a wrap, it looks like you might have a chance to play a small role in season 3 – as a zombie.
AMC has teamed up with Bing for the Walking Dead Sweepstakes, a contest to give one lucky person a chance to test out their limb-dragging, entrails-eating, vacant-expression skills with a walk-on role. The prize includes a trip for two to the set of The Walking Dead season 3, roundtrip airfare, hotel accommodations, and $500 cash.
Only the winner (not the guest) will win the part on the show. He/she will be “transformed into the flesh-eating dead by Greg Nicotero’s creature team,” and if you’ve seen the show, you know what awesome zombie-creators those guys are.
Did you guys watch the season 3 premiere? What did you think? Personally, I thought that it was great, and definitely sets up the possibility for an incredible season (and this is coming from a guy who was disappointed by season 1). Will it fill the Breaking Bad-sized void in my life? That remains to be seen, but I’m undoubtedly impressed.
If you want to relive the key highlights from the season 2 premiere, check out this video below –
The latest report from Hitwise concerning search volume shows Google still dominates search. Surprise, surprise. In other news, water is still wet and grass is still green. Flippancy aside, Google is dominating search with such a lead, it’s akin to watching Usain Bolt race against people who have no legs.
So much for those “Bing is making inroads concerning Google’s search share,” right? Or are we still holding out hope that Bing, which powers Yahoo search as well, will be able to make up all that ground between it and Google’s dominant position? The reason I’m asking in such a manner is because every time a report comes out about Bing taking some of Google’s market share, people come out of the woodwork, proclaiming/hoping Google’s time at the top is over.
With that in mind, does Hitwise’s latest report, with its data taken from the month of September, 2011, mean that Google has effectively rebuffed the challenges from Bing and Yahoo? A look at the findings show just how dominant Google is terms of search volume:
As you can very well see, Google’s search volume is more than all of Bing’s efforts, which, in this report, includes Bing.com, Yahoo.com, and a combination of the two. Bing makes up 12.80 percent of the search volume, Yahoo is at 15.27 percent, which, when added together, gives us the 28.07 percent, representing the Bing-powered search total.
Meanwhile, Google’s search volume comes in at a dominant 66.12 percent, more than double all of Bing’s combined search engine efforts.
With that in mind, is it time to stop saying Bing is a threat to Google’s market share? While the Panda-fueled backlash against Google is understandable, ignoring the dominant search engine when conducting SEO/SEM tasks would be an exercise in foolishness. Unless, of course, you don’t like fishing where the fish are.
Bing is talking about some new features it has for Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango). This includes voice search, Shazam-like music search, and Google Goggles-like “Bing Vision”.
Voice search is pretty self-explanatory. Music search lets you find whatever song is playing by “letting your phone ‘listen’ to the music. It will then show you the name, artist and album, as well as where to hear or buy it.
The Bing Vision feature is essentially Bing’s answer to Google Goggles, which lets you search by taking a picture with your phone. “You can now use your phone’s camera to look up product information by bringing an object into view,” the Bing Team explains. “Bing will recognize text and present the option to select words for a search, and instantly return product results if the object has a barcode. Bing Vision can also detect product information from UPC codes, QR Codes and MS Tag as well as cover art for books, CD’s, DVD’s and video games.”
There is also a new “local scout” feature, which provides local search results, recommends restaurants /businesses nearby, etc. The results are arranged by highlights, eat/drink, see/do, and shopping (nearby stores).
Finally, there is a feature called “app connect,” which lets Bing search results return Windows PHone Marketplace app results when relevant. This is detailed more in the following video:
Earlier this year, Bing launched Bing Deals, a deals aggregation feature to surface deals from across the web in Bing. Today, Microsoft announced some new features to go along with that.
First off is the Deals hub. “Previously deals were surfaced within Local results so you didn’t have one place to go find deals in your area or a way to sort,” a representative tells WebProNews. “With the Bing Deals hub, there is a one stop shop for the more than 200,000 deals from across the web, local daily deals, and exclusive deals only found in Bing.”
“And those exclusive deals only found in Bing are also new,” he adds. “Deals on mobile via m.bing.com (RIM, iPhone, Android) have had a hub-like page since the launch in March, but with this update the new additions are the exclusive and local deals. Although not identical, Deals on mobile is optimized to surface local deals based on the person’s location – simply clicking on the ‘Locate Me’ button, people can find the best deals in their current location.”
Also new is a Punchcard loyalty program for advertisers. Raj Kapoor of Microsoft’s mobile advertising team talks about this on the Microsoft Advertising blog:
Today we are announcing the launch of Bing Deals Beta with loyalty program in 12 cities across the US in order to bring a new relationship-focused element to deals. Deals will no longer be a one-time engagement, but rather, the Microsoft Punchcard Program will integrate a loyalty program tied to the deal that gets better with more engagement. Businesses will have the opportunity of staying connected with their customers and offer programs that reward their customers for repeat business. Businesses will also have the opportunity to offer “accelerated deals” whereby the deal can become more valuable once the number of customers purchasing the deal crosses a defined threshold.
Furthermore, Bing Deals will enable giving back to the community by enabling local merchants to offer deals in partnership with local schools with a percentage of the proceeds going towards schools’ fund-raising efforts – continuing a long history of local businesses supporting local community initiatives.
On top of all of that, there are some updates to the Bing Business Portal, which will let businesses better manage their presence, the company says. These include tools to offer detailed info about your business and other marketing tools.
Bing is using videos on its homepage now, in place of photos. Not always, but sometimes.
The Bing homepage and its generally striking photos is possibly one of the most pleasing features of the search engine, at least for those who appreciate photography. Judging from today’s, this will only be enhanced by the new addition of video.
It shows a nice view of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.
The first video is US-only, but Bing will be rolling out the video homepage in other markets in the next few months. It requires an HTML5-enabled browser.
In other search engine homepage news, Google took the big blue arrow pointing to Google+ off after a two-day run (at least in the US).
Conduit, if you don’t know, is the largest global network of browser and mobile app publishers (accounting for 260,000 members and their 250 million users), and now all of the apps in its network are discoverable in Bing.
“The move marks a major step towards solving app discoverability in the desktop browser. The feature will be rolled out to all members of the Conduit network over the next few weeks,” a spokesperson for Conduit tells WebProNews. “For example, when searching for ‘Groupon app,’ Bing returns organic and sponsored links to the Groupon site, as well as the official Groupon App powered by Conduit. Results will appear based on relevancy.”
Conduit entered a partnership with Microsoft back in December. As a result, Conduit publishers can provide their customers direct access to Bing. Now, the deal appears to be more beneficial to Conduit app publishers as well.
“Our relationship with Microsoft has enabled our publishers to offer an even greater experience to their customers and will add more fuel to the already impressive growth of Conduit’s massive network,” said Conduit President Adam Boyden. “The inclusion of Conduit-powered apps in Bing not only represents a step forward in app discoverability, but also an opportunity for any publisher who monetizes via content, traffic or engaging their users.”
“The inclusion of Conduit-powered apps in Bing search results is one more way that we are providing people with information to help make their everyday lives easier,” said Chris Nelson, Sr. Director, Strategic Partnerships for Bing.
Yesterday, Bing announced some new Action Buttons in search results, which allow users to take part in specific tasks on sites right from the search results page. This includes things like downloading software, renting a car, and checking a flight status.
Bing announced the release of “Action Buttons” in search results today. These are buttons on certain types of search results (including travel-related) that allow you to engage in specific actions related to that result.
Think about things like checking into a hotel or a flight, checking on a flight status, booking a flight, renting a car, etc.
“Now when you search across 7 popular categories – including airlines, couriers (e.g. FedEx), restaurants, banks, rental cars, software downloads and hotels – you will be presented with buttons for top actions on the site, that directly take you to the page where you can complete your task,” explains Bing Program Manager Deepak Vijaywargi.
“Based on how people search, our algorithms now determine top actions and corresponding links in the site for a given category with high precision,” says Vijaywargi. “For instance, with airlines the top 3 tasks are: check-in to a flight, check the status of a flight or book a flight. For software sites, if you are searching for a specific product you likely want to download it. For car rental agencies, you’d like to rent a car, find out locations or contact them.”
Bing pitches the feature as an extension of its deep link inclusion on search results, but I’d say this is probably one of the most interesting things Bing has done with its results in a while. Bing has always positioned itself as wanting to get you the answers and get things done as quickly as possible, and this should, in theory at least, help with that.
It will be interesting to see if Google borrow’s the idea.
Philip Su is a software engineer at Facebook who spent 12 years working at Microsoft. Now, he’s put out a scathing post about Bing, or more specifically, the people behind Bing.
“I was reminded of Bing today during a depressing conversation with a former coworker who soldiers on, nobly, in That Great Darkness,” he writes in the intro. “Though it’s been several years since I left, I still remember Bing as the time when I most despaired for Microsoft’s future.”
“Bing is a madhouse. The inmates are running the asylum, and it’s rotten to the core…” the post continues. “And I’m not talking about the product.” He then adds, “Bing is solid. But it doesn’t matter because nobody cares.”
He goes on to discuss company politics and how the Bing team is “filled with overly politicized people pursuing Machiavellian schemes to forward their career ambitions.”
And he does indeed go on about it.
In a status update on Facebook, Su said, “This blog post about Bing took me three years to write. Though I felt it needed to be said, loyalty to my past coworkers prevented me from speaking openly. Enough of those former coworkers have now been crushed by The Machine that I must speak out.”
While the whole thing is just the viewpoint of one engineer, he is getting a lot of feedback on the post. Interestingly, some of that feedback seems to reflect the sentiments expressed by Su. In a Facebook comment, Maria Sommerfield writes:
I called my girlfriend who works for MSFT in a different department to find out why exactly my husband could be so miserable at work at one point. OMG, Maria he is at Bing, she said. I hear it is a nightmare over there. Fortunately he is over at Google now. Being the nice guy he is he has never once said anything bad about those Bing drama, but I always got my man’s back and I remember. All’s well that ends well and he is loving working for Google.
Ramesh Vyaghrapuri commented:
I left the company way too late. All the way back in 2003, there were horror stories from all over the company (so I don’t think Bing was *special*) but most employees preferred complaining behind doors and letting it be.
The lack of transparency *is* the worst thing that can happen to a company. Now, there was no transparency even in 1997 and things worked fine. But lack of transparency makes it a *stable* setup that a few rotten apples can’t destroy all the good work done by people before them.
Microsoft employee Rangan Majumder wrote:
Very candid post, Philip. Most of the folks you speak of are gone from Bing for at least a year. Bing is not perfect but honestly it is the least politically driven team I’ve worked on in Microsoft. Bing has been about metrics and bottoms up decision making from the beginning. In fact, it has to be, otherwise it doesn’t scale and won’t succeed; doing the right thing for the user always takes first priority. Sure there are people who are ambitious career wise, but those who don’t do the right thing for the user don’t last. I know I have ex-coworkers from Bing who work in Facebook Seattle now with you; did they really feel this way about the team?
In the comments of the post itself, an anonymous poster writes, “Thanks for writing this. Along with most people in my group at Microsoft, I’m looking for a job. I can’t wait to write my version of this story. It’s not just Bing. The Microsoft I loved is gone.”
It’s worth noting that as Su is a software engineer at Facebook, Bing and Facebook have a pretty strong partnership.
Last week, Bing launched its version of personalized search in “Adaptive Search”. Watch our recent interview with Bing’s search director Stefan Weitz here.
Some more good videos for you today. We’ve scoured the web for you to put together the collection below. Go here for other recent daily video collections.
Mayweather vs. Ortiz wasn’t the only big fight. Below, you’ll find punches thrown by a Russian media mogul. There’s also some emmy-related humor and Taiwanese animation from NMA. It’s not all hilarity though. There is some good stuff for the tech enthusiasts and business folk too.
As you may have heard, nude photos of Scarlett Johansson were leaked this past week, and Next Media Animation, which parodies a lot of tech news with its signature Taiwanese animation style, took the story on in its latest video:
The Emmys are tonight. Here are some pre-Emmy fun videos (via Kara Swisher):
Bing Director of Search Stefan Weitz talks about the search engine’s new personalized search feature “Adaptive Search” with WebProNews:
Alexander Lebedev, who owns UK publications the Independent and Evening Standard, punched businessman Sergei Polonsky on Russian television:
Engadget shares a “hands on” with Toyota’s Prius plug-in hybrid from the Toyota Green Drive Expo:
Martin Bryant at TheNextWeb shares some highlights from the Picnic Festival in Amsterdam, which he refers to as “a geekier, more accessible version of the World Economic Forum.”
Last week, Bing unveiled a new feature in its continued effort to improve the search experience. The feature is called “Adaptive Search” and is designed to make search results more personally relevant to users.
Have you tried Bing’s Adaptive Search? Let us know.
As Stefan Weitz, a director with Bing, explained to us, the technology understands the intent and context of each query because it looks at the user’s search history. For example, if a user typically searches for films and entertainment pieces, when he searches for “Australia,” Bing understands that he is probably not searching for the country. As a result, it would rank the 2008 movie above general information on Australia on the results page.
Weitz told us that Bing is not approaching personalization as a feature of search. Instead, the search engine believes that it shouldn’t be an option since people expect search results to be targeted and personalized to their needs.
“You should just think about personalized search as search,” he said.
While Bing is trying to make results more personal, it also wants to make sure users aren’t locked into the recently controversial “filter bubble.” This concept is essentially the concern that personalization would only return results that a searcher is familiar with and agrees with, and therefore not provide any diversity.
Although Bing takes this concern seriously, Weitz told us that it believes Adaptive Search offers a well-balanced approach for users.
“You can have personalization and serendipity, which is what really the filter bubble is saying doesn’t exist because of the personalization,” he said.
He went to say that Jamie Teevan of Microsoft Research studied this area extensively and found that personalization could actually help serendipity in some cases. According to him, the personalization of Adaptive Search is one step toward developing a human-like connection that search engines need, but have not yet been able to do.
Speaking of other search engines, there have been some that have suggested that Bing’s new approach is similar to Google’s previous query feature. Although Weitz said he has not been able to look at it closely, he did say his understanding is that it is based more on back-to-back queries. For example, if a user searches for a digital camera and the very next query he or she searches for is for Amazon, it is his understanding that Google would return Amazon’s search results for digital cameras.
Based on this inference, he said that Adaptive Search is “much broader… more complex from a computer science standpoint, but more elegant from a user standpoint.”
It’s interesting that this Adaptive Search announcement comes just after Google releases its new travel search engine, which is also similar to Bing Travel. When asked about this coincidence, Weitz made a humorous reference to the incident earlier this year when Google accused Bing of stealing their results.
“I think they’re using the same algorithm to copy our features, I guess,” he said laughingly.
Putting the humor aside, Weitz did tell us that Bing was pleased with its recent gain in market share. According to him, Bing realizes that it’s a long-term game but will continue to illustrate its commitment through new features and innovation.
“We want people to expect more from search, and if they expect more from search… we think we can actually grow the overall pie of queries that are out there, and hopefully, because we are the first to market with a lot of these innovative features, we can attract more people to those features because they are only on Bing,” he said.
There have been a whole lot of announcements from the major search engines this week, that all webmasters should be aware of – especially from Google, because while its market share may have slipped slightly (while Bing-powered search has grown a bit), it’s still by far the most used search engine.
While not exactly an announcement, Google’s head of web spam Matt Cutts did post a video discussing reasons why Google Toolbar PageRank would drop. We talked about this a little bit more here, but you can hear exactly what he had to say in this video:
There is a part in there where he mentions that if you were caught selling links, but have stopped and want to earn Google’s trust back, you should submit a reconsideration request. On that note, Google announced that it is getting “more transparent” with its reconsideration requests.
Better Communication
“Now, if your site is affected by a manual spam action, we may let you know if we were able to revoke that manual action based on your reconsideration request,” explain Tiffany Oberoi and Michael Wyszomierski of Google’s Search Quality team in a joint blog post. “Or, we could tell you if your site is still in violation of our guidelines. This might be a discouraging thing to hear, but once you know that there is still a problem, it will help you diagnose the issue.”
“If your site is not actually affected by any manual action (this is the most common scenario), we may let you know that as well,” they add. “Perhaps your site isn’t being ranked highly by our algorithms, in which case our systems will respond to improvements on the site as changes are made, without your needing to submit a reconsideration request. Or maybe your site has access issues that are preventing Googlebot from crawling and indexing it.”
Google says it’s not able to reply to individual requests with specific feedback, but that now webmasters will be able to find out if their site has been affected by a manual action and will know the outcome of the reconsideration review.
Google Using Blocked Site Data in Algorithm
Earlier this year, Google announced some new domain blocking features, which included a browser extension, and a link next to search results, which allow users to block sites that they don’t like. This was part of Google’s big quality clean up initiative, which also includes the Panda update and the +1 button. Initially, the sites blocked were on a personalized basis, but that is no longer completely the case. Google search quality engineer Johannes Henkel is quoted as saying, “We’ve also started incorporating data about sites people have blocked into our general search ranking algorithms to help users find more high quality sites.”
Pagination and View-All in Search Results
Google is “making a larger effort” to return single-page versions of content in search results, when the content is broken up among multiple pages. Think multiple page articles and content slideshows. Google says users tend to prefer single page versions of content, but sometimes these can load slowly, so there are also times when the multiple pages work better.
“So while a view-all page is commonly desired, as a webmaster it’s important to balance this preference with the page’s load time and overall user experience,” Google indexing team software engineers Benjia Li & Joachim Kupke say in a joint blog post on the Webmaster Central blog.
You can read more about the technical specs here. They summarize it all nicely: “Because users generally prefer the view-all option in search results, we’re making more of an effort to properly detect and serve this version to searchers. If you have a series of content, there’s nothing more you need to do.”
To better optimize your view-all page, you can use rel=”canonical” from component pages to the single-page version; otherwise, if a view-all page doesn’t provide a good user experience for your site, you can use the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes as a strong hint for Google to identify the series of pages and still surface a component page in results.
They talk even more about the specs of using rel=”next” and rel=”rev” in this post.
Rich Snippets for Apps
Google is also showing rich snippets for apps in search results now. They’re getting info for these from various places including: Android Market, Apple iTunes and CNET.
“Before you install a software application, you may want to check out what others think about it and how much it costs,” says product manager Alejandro Goyen. “Starting today, you’ll be able to get information about the applications, including review and price information, right in your search results.”
That’s something to consider if your business has an app. It’s a reputation factor.
Editing in YouTube
This isn’t exactly a search feature, but when you consider how big a role video can play in search marketing and that YouTube is the second largest search engine, it’s certainly worth your attention. YouTube has launched new editing tools that allow you to easy edit videos right from YouTube itself.
This should help you improve your videos, which are not only searchable on the second largest search engine and embeddable across the web, but often appear right in the results of regular Google searches. This new editing functionality will make it easier to try new things with less successful videos and potentially make them more viral.
Bing Adaptive Search
Ok, getting away from Google, Bing has launched adaptive search, which is essentially its version of personalized search. The company says it “helps decipher the intent and context of each search you conduct based on your search history.”
“The concept of personalized search is not a new idea, but Bing continues to focus on it and drive progress as the search space evolves,” a representative for Bing tells WebProNews. “In fact, Bing views personalized search as less of a ‘feature’ and more of what to expect from search.” “Ultimately, the goal is to reduce ambiguity and help people find what they’re looking for more quickly,” he adds. “The personalization can be pretty subtle to the naked eye, but the more Bing learns about your intent the more personal it will become. And Bing also wants to be sure a diverse set of results still show up so people aren’t locked in a ‘filter bubble’. We think this provides a good balance.”
You’ve been dealing with this kind of thing with Google for quite some time, but it does throw in another SEO factor to consider for Bing, which as previously mentioned continues to gain market share.
WebProNews is interviewing Bing’s Stefan Weitz as I write this, so check back at WebProNews for more on this soon.
“The Web Grepper searches for unique data information and trends that are embedded in code and cannot be found on any other search engine,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews. “For example, you could search to see how many pages request your user information when you visit, the types of targeting information the site collecting, or how many sites have ‘Like’ vs ‘+1′ buttons, etc.”
Users can submit questions to the tool and the Blekko community votes on a daily basis on which questions will be analyzed.
These aren’t the only things going on in search this week, but these are some of the more noteworthy things that are likely to have a bigger impact on most site owners, than say things like Flight Search and Baseball scores.
Bing is rolling out what it calls “Adaptive Search.” The company says it “helps decipher the intent and context of each search you conduct based on your search history.”
“The concept of personalized search is not a new idea, but Bing continues to focus on it and drive progress as the search space evolves,” a representative for Bing tells WebProNews. “In fact, Bing views personalized search as less of a ‘feature’ and more of what to expect from search.”
“Ultimately, the goal is to reduce ambiguity and help people find what they’re looking for more quickly,” he adds. “The personalization can be pretty subtle to the naked eye, but the more Bing learns about your intent the more personal it will become. And Bing also wants to be sure a diverse set of results still show up so people aren’t locked in a ‘filter bubble’. We think this provides a good balance.”
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the “filter bubble” it’s essentially the idea that content that we consume on the web is being filtered by the sites we use as a way of personalizing our experience and making it more relevant to us. It can reduce noise, but it also means we’re missing out on some things, and it is something of a controversial topic. We’ve discussed this more in depth in past articles, which you can find here.
Explaining how Adaptive Search works, the Bing representative tells us, “At the risk of generalizing, let’s say you’re a film fanatic and when you search for ‘Australia’ you aren’t likely searching for Australia the country. You’re probably searching for Australia the 2008 movie. Bing will take into account the fact you often search for movies and adapt the search page to show relevant movie results higher up on the page. This helps decrease your time spent searching and increases time spent buttering your popcorn.”
Here’s a video discussing Adaptive Search:
It’s rolling out over the next few days, but if you want to use it, you can just turn on your Search History and then search.
Twitter and Bing have renewed their search partnership, and announced it in a pretty interesting way: via a staged Twitter exchange.
If you can go to Bing and Twitter’s respective Twitter accounts, you can see the conversation between the two brands. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the deal was probably discussed a little bit more than this ahead of this Twitter exchange. Here’s how that exchange went:
@bing Bing@Twitter Been thinking about our last 2 yrs together. Instantly tapping into the wisdom of the Twitter community. Good times. ^bb15 hours ago via Sprinklr · powered by @socialditto
@twitter Twitter@bing Totally! Search w/o Twitter = old news. You & @MSN are amazing at using Tweets to make search better & help people stay in the know.15 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto
Microsoft has confirmed that the deal is in fact being extended, but has been stingy with the details. In addition to that, Twitter has said that there is no news about a possible Google deal, but “Search w/o Twitter = old news” could only be taken as a dig against Google, which lost Twitter data in July.
It doesn’t exactly look good for a Twitter/Google reunion. Meanwhile Bing is getting quite cozy with the social networks (including Facebook as well).
Google is of course building its own social network in Google+, and the company has indicated that Google+ content would be featured in there. At this point, however, there Twitter-like flow of content just isn’t there – not enough to add real value in realtime search.
Social is more important to search rankings than ever. There’s no doubt about that.
Should +1s and Facebook “likes” be used as significant ranking signals by search engines? Share your thoughts here.
In a recent article, we asked if Google’s +1 button is the new PageRank. As Google uses the data from the button as a ranking signal, +1’s will no doubt be coveted more and more by any site owner looking for increased search visibility and traffic.
As discussed in that article, just as you’ve seen plenty trying to boost their PageRank through black hat tactics, it seems highly likely that these same people will try to exploit the +1 button. Google’s main weapon agains this appears to be tying the +1s to your actual identity, by using a strict profile naming policy.
Google wants to know who is doing this +1ing, which should help cut down on abuse.
Bing’s Duane Forrester wrote a blog post this week talking about a similar topic in the realm of abusing the social signals that search engines use to try and determine what results to show users. Forrester’s focus was on the concept of the “like” farm – basically the social equivalent of the link farm.
Amazingly, though, people think this approach works,” says Forrester. “The rationale being that social signals matter to search, they can ramp up the volume of the ‘like’ signal in Facebook, causing a related boost in rankings. The logic may seem fine, but when you recall that we can see sudden explosions of links as spammy, it’s easy to understand how we can see sudden explosions of likes as spammy as well. To be fair, there’s more to it than that.”
“Anyone could suddenly ‘go viral’ and accumulate a lot of likes very quickly, so we look beyond just like/time to find patterns,” he explains. “And if there is one thing a search engine is good at, it’s seeing patterns online. Like farms tend to be built around a core network of accounts. You pay someone to like your site, content or whatever, and they go out across their network and like you. It’s artificial and we know it. Organic likes rarely follow obvious patterns. In fact, if there’s a pattern to organic liking, it’s one built around chaos. Like farms, however, no matter their size, end up looking obvious by comparison. In the image below, you can see what an accumulation of likes look like to us when graphed.”
He shares the following graph depicting like activity with the red dots representing a like’s origin and the blue dots representing friends liking the same item. He says the differences between like farm activity and organic activity are “very obvious”.
“In most cases, if we spot like farm activity, we simply ignore the signal,” says Forrester. “Again, you may have paid for a service which is bringing you no value in boosting your search results. This also points out why it is so important that you manage your social media program. At the very least, if you are outsourcing the management of your social program, you need to keep an eye on things. Short cuts can add up eroding any value you were trying to achieve.”
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that it is impossible to game the search engines using social media. Black hatters will always look for (and probably find) new ways to exploit the system for their gain, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.
Interestingly, a report out from BrightEdge finds that about half of the largest 10,000 sites on the web don’t even display any kind of social sharing link or buttons at all. This is very surprising. As one WebProNews reader commented, “I find that unbelievable! The search engines have flat out admitted that social signals are a ranking factors. Why would a site owner not want to include social share buttons? Let your readers do some of the heavy lifting and get your content promoted in their social networks!”
I would strongly advise making the buttons accessible. Just have the content to give users a reason to click them. Then maybe you won’t have to worry about trying to game the system.
Do you think Google and Bing can keep social button abuse at bay? Tell us what you think.
That Atlantic ocean side of the United States is in the middle of its hurricane season–June 1st through November 30th–and there’s a storm of interest heading towards the Floridan coast called Hurricane Irene. While she hasn’t hit landfall in the United States, Irene has been picking up strength, and has, in fact, already struck Puerto Rico as she heads towards the eastern seaboard.
While there are an awful lot of ways to follow the progress of Hurricane Irene–the National Hurricane Center, NASA–Twitter has proven to be quite reliable when it comes to potentially disastrous natural phenomenon, and with Hurricane Irene, it’s no different. Currently, the king tweet of the Irene trend–at least in regards to being the top promoted tweet–belongs to the MyWeather.com feed, with the following:
And thus, we see the effectiveness of the promoted tweets advertising campaign. It’s great for getting you to the top of various trends lists, and in this particular case, the information is indeed pertinent, if not self-serving. MyWeather REALLY wants us to see their Bing-powered hurricane tracker.
@MyWeather MyWeather.comHurricane Irene could be the first hurricane to make landfall in the U.S since Ike in 2008. View Irene’s predicted path http://t.co/1lDtLG02 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto
Granted, that tweet got much more reception than the first one that was embedded. Meanwhile, the latest promoted tweet has only one retweet, even thought it has more relevant information than the “check out our map” tweet, but digression is the best policy here.
While Florida is a primary concern of many on Twitter:
@Willo_Keays Jaci WilloughbyDear @OfficialSanta – all I want for Un-Christmas this week is for Hurricane Irene to keep moving more East, and not hit FL. TYVM.6 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto
Perhaps the Bahamas and Cuba should be included as well, especially when you consider Irene’s path:
While there may be a certain level of “only if it’s happening to me is it important” that goes on at Twitter, once you can separate the wheat from the chaff, Twitter once again proves its value. It will also do a good job–provided people are paying attention to the trends–of serving as an early warning system for those who may otherwise be unaware.
