It’s a no-brainer that changes on your web pages influence the position of your website on search engines. However, it’s not so clear how search engines react to the changes on your site and what exactly causes the changes in the search results. A new search engine patent might have some answers.

Several search engine patents deal with the changes on your site

Google published a patent that described how the changes on your web pages influence the rankings of your site 6 years ago. Last month, Microsoft was granted another patent that discusses the influence of web page changes on search engine rankings.

This new patent shows which elements on your web pages might be monitored by search engines.

Which web page elements are monitored by search engines?

According to the new patent, changes of the following web page elements can influence the position of the page in the search results:
Keywords that are included in a web page.
Keywords that are associated with a web page
The anchor texts that are used in links on the page.
The colors and the sizes of images on the page.
The position of text or images on the page.
The frequency of document changes over time.
The amount of the web page content that has been changed.
Tags that are assigned to the page.
Search queries that are used to find the page.

How exactly do changes in these elements influence the rankings of a page?

According to the patent, searches are classified into the two categories “informational” and “navigational”. The effect of the web page changes depends on the category of a search query.

A navigational query is a query that is used to find a particular site. For example, a search for “ny times” will lead to the home page of the sites. Examples for information queries are “how do I fix a broken bicycle tire” or “who won the 2011 XYZ awards”?

If the searcher is looking for information about a recent event (2011 XYZ awards) then pages that recently added the keyword could be boosted in the search results.

For navigational queries, pages with static content might get a boost. This methods works fine with some type of sites but it could cause problems with home pages that update their contents regularly (for example nytimes.com).

What does this mean to your website?

This patent was granted to Microsoft but it’s likely that Google uses similar methods. Search engines don’t just look at the current version of your website.

They also remember how it was in the past. The changes on your website could indicate a change of ownership, they could indicate that you try to keep your website up-to-date, they could be a signal for spam and more.

When you change your web pages, consider which signal you might be sending to search engines.

When you optimize the pages of your website, do not optimize a page that already has high rankings for one of your keywords. Better optimize another page of your site for the new keyword.

The more pages of your website you optimize, the better. Optimize different pages of your website for different but related keywords to show search engines that your website is relevant to a particular topic.

Keep some of the pages fresh and leave others as they are to offer search engines different kind of pages for different search queries.

Ensure that your content is being seen in the right light! Or seen at all, as the case may be – search engine spiders aren’t your average user, and may get lost while trying to crawl your site.

Use the Search Engine Spider Simulator to prevent this from happening. Just enter your site’s URL, and the tool will show you everything through a spider’s eyes. If your text, links, meta keywords, and meta descriptions all display as they’re supposed to, consider yourself well on your way to search engine success.

Yahoo! kicked off the new decade in high gear and it’s been a big year for us, especially in Search. In 2010, we worked hard on innovating what we call the “front end” of our Search experiences to bring you more answers – not just those same old ten blue links you’ve been seeing on Search results pages for over a decade.

For example, we added features like apps, intelligent shortcuts, and Yahoo! Search Assist updates to help you save valuable time and keep you more entertained, informed and productive than ever. And, in parallel, we were hard at work weaving search throughout the Yahoo! network and transitioning certain parts of our back-end technology to the Microsoft search platform.

Here’s a recap of what we’ve been busy with this year:

Completed the first phase of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance transition in the U.S. and Canada.
Added richer shortcuts and suggestions to bring you more complete, faster answers that draw from our Web of Things, a powerful information system that acquires and enriches information available on the Web and unique to Yahoo!.
Brought Search to you in more places across Yahoo!, sometimes before you even knew what you were looking for – with new Search enhancements in Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Mail.
Innovated mobile search experiences with new apps, widgets, and HTML5-powered search for mobile browsers, since we know you’re on the go more than ever before.
Enhanced Yahoo! Search Assist to suggest locally relevant and more timely results based on when and where you actually are.
Showed you more of what’s hot with multimedia search so you can sit back and be entertained while finding what you’re looking for via Yahoo! Image and Video search.
· Delivered new types, and more relevant search advertisements for when you want them.
And (as you may have seen this week) launched even more Quick Apps so you can get stuff done while you’re searching, as well as a new beta called Yahoo! Clues for searching the searchers.

We have no intention of slowing down either. Last year at this time, we said the possibilities for search technology were limitless, and I think that’s more true today than ever before. You’ve seen just our first steps at re-imagining and fundamentally changing the face of Search as we know it today. Search is not just about meeting one need – we are focused on meeting all your searching needs, from finding all information across many sources about a particular topic, to making comparisons, to taking action and completing tasks in your day.

So stay tuned – 2011 is approaching fast and there’s much more still to come.

We’ve known that Ask has been working on a new version of Ask.com for months, but now it’s here. Ask is placing new emphasis on the Q&A side of search, and is injecting the Q&A experience directly into the main search experience, which is what SVP of Product Management Tony Gentile tells WebProNews, sets the new Ask apart from other Q&A sites.

He says they’ve taken a hybrid approach, utilizing existing partnerships and new technology that’s been refined over the last six to nine months, to build a new social Q&A experience that’s built directly into Ask’s search capabilities. When Ask doesn’t immediately give you an answer (or the right answer), you can simply ask “the community.”
We asked Gentile to tell us a little about who this community is. Initially, he says, they are using their existing employee base across IAC companies in a private beta. These employees are encouraged to invite their own families and friends to participate. Some journalists have been invited as well. Eventually this will expand. He says they will also implement technologies like Facebook Connect, Twitter, LinkedIn, OAuth, etc. to get users to bring in people from their own networks.

Also as a result of the social media aspect, he says profiles can lend credibility to answers. For example, if you answer a question and your LinkedIn profile is attached to it, that can show your experience in a field related to a question you have answered.

This is where the new Ask.com comes in as a potentially useful tool for businesses. Businesses may want to answer questions about products, and even create relationships with potential customers. An interesting nugget Gentile shared is that in analyzing the questions Ask receives, the majority of them are either related to “how do I spend my time?” or “how do I spend my money?”

Ask has the ability to work at the local level, as well. Gentile says they have the ability to analyze questions of both an implicit and an explicit local nature. For example, if someone asks, “what’s the best burrito shop in San Francisco?”, that’s clearly a local question, and they can route it accordingly to people in and who have visited San Francisco.

Another type of local question, however, is something like “who’s a babysitter I can trust?” That’s also a local question, but it doesn’t name a specific city. Ask says it has the ability to figure it out, and again, route accordingly. It calls upon signals in the user profiles. If a user gives permission, they will use location.

Here are the main features of the new Ask.com (as described by the company):

- Proprietary semantic search technologies: Finds the most relevant, quality answers across the Web, and displays them at the top of the page. No click-throughs required.

- The largest Q&A database on the Web: More than 500 million questions and answers indexed, and the ability to quickly extract Q&A pairs from hundreds of thousands of sources.

- Ask.com community: Leverages proprietary search categorization to route questions and solicit high-quality answers from community members based on their interests and areas of knowledge.

- New user interface: Improved UI makes it easy to ask and answer questions, highlights advancing and trending questions from the Ask community throughout the site.

For the past few weeks I’ve been tasked with reviewing a few different sites that have seen a loss in traffic – their owners hoped to find out why. I love these kinds of reviews because it’s like solving a mystery or figuring out a puzzle. While it’s not always possible to determine the exact cause for the traffic loss, I can usually make some educated guesses based on what I dig up in Google Analytics.

Here are 9 steps you can take to diagnose the cause of lost search engine traffic:

1. Determine what type of traffic loss you’re dealing with. Many people look at Google’s overview page, see a loss of overall traffic to their website, and assume that they must have lost their rankings in Google and the targetéd traffic that comes with it. This may or may not be the case. Be sure to check for search engine traffic, and even more specifically Google non-paid traffic.

2. Look at the extent of the traffic loss. Your research will be very different depending on whether there was a gradual decline in traffic or a sudden, drastic drop. I reviewed a site last week that lost all of their Google unpaid traffic overnight! This sort of loss is typically a technical issue such as a robots.txt file or a nofollow directive that keeps search engine spiders from indexing your pages. Sometimes it’s not actually a loss of traffic at all – your analytics code could have been inadvertently removed from all or most of the pages, making it appear like a traffic loss. I have seen all of the above more times than I can count in just the last couple of months!

3. Compare apples to apples. Many businesses are cyclical or seasonal. A gift site may see huge spikes in traffic the months leading up to Christmas or the weeks before other holidays. This means that comparing any month to the previous month may not tell you the whole story. A drop in traffic in January is probably fairly normal for a gift site. If you’ve got more than a year’s worth of data, you’ll want to compare this month’s traffic to the same month in previous years. Ideally, you’d of course want to see a growth in traffic. And if you don’t, then you may very well have a problem on your hands. If you don’t have data that goes back that far, you can compare month to month, but be sure to take the data with a grain of salt.

4. Review and filter out “brand” traffic. Most websites get a lot of Google traffic from people who’ve typed some version of the name of their company as their search query. You’ll want to note whether those visitors have significantly increased or decreased. If you receive fewer visitors for your brand, this could be caused by a decrease in marketing and advertising. Once you make note of the brand traffic, you’ll want to filter it out so you can study actual keyword traffic, which is what real SEO traffic consists of.

5. Analyze which keyword phrases have had a significant decrease in visitors. Now that you’ve filtered out the brand traffic, you should be able to see the keyword phrases that are bringing you the most traffic. If you have lots, you may want to view 100 phrases at a time rather than the default of just 10. Are there lots of keyword phrases that seem to bring far fewer visitors over the last few months as compared to last year at the same time? You may also notice some that are bringing significantly more visitors.

6. Do a quick Google search for the phrases. If you’re not seeing any pages from your site on the first page in Google, it may or may not be a clue (given the fact that everybody sees different search results) but it is definitely a cause to investigate further. If a page from your site does show up fairly high in the líst, it could just be that fewer people are searching for that phrase now as compared to before. Or it could be that your listing isn’t quite what the searcher is looking for based on your title and descriptive snippet. There might also be other results for the keyword phrase that have images or video embedded whereas yours doesn’t. Or there might be local map results showing up that make your result less appealing.

7. Review the landing page for the keyword phrase that lost traffic. Is there any obvious reason why it’s not bringing in as many visitors as it used to? Does it even exist anymore? Did it change substantially at some point during the year? Did it get buried deeper into the site architecture for some reason? Is the content duplicated from other pages within your site or contained on other websites? Were there links pointing to it at some point that no longer are? Does the copy read naturally, or are there a few extra instances of the keyword phrase than really makes sense to a person?

8. Review your long-tail traffic. Since the end of April and early May 2010 a few large sites lost a substantial amount of traffic for keyword phrases that brought small numbers of visitors individually, but in aggregate they made up a lot of website traffic. You’ll want to filter your keywords to those that have only a few visitors (even just 1) and see if there are significantly fewer of those than previously. If this is the case, Google has gone on record stating that they’re doing a better job at sending long-tail traffic to more meaningful and relevant pages than they used to. Which means you’ll have to go above and beyond what you’re currently doing if you want to get that long-tail traffic back.

9. Decide if you’re dealing with a search engine penalty. For drastic drops, in the rare cases where it’s not a technical issue, you’re most likely dealing with a penalty. You can check your Google Webmaster Tools account to see if there is a notification of a penalty, but they don’t usually bother to tell you. Still, search engine penalties are much rarer than people think. In fact, most website owners know what they’ve done wrong when they have a search engine penalty. There are some cases, however, where they may have been duped by a less than scrupulous “SEO” company. The penalties I’ve seen seem to occur on sites that have no redeeming value because they have the same products and content that can be found on many other sites (often ones owned by the same company), plus they are deeply entrenched in massive link farms. It’s likely that they are also hosting part of the link farm on their own site in the form of a link directory. If this is what you find, you may be better off to start from scratch rather than trying to salvage the penalized domain.

I hope these steps help you diagnose your loss of traffic. I imagine they will keep you busy for quite some time!

Google SEO vs Bing SEO has been a topic of discussion throughout the industry since Bing was launched. The topic got some heavy play last week at the SMX Advanced conference, and with Yahoo and Bing coming together sometime this year, online marketers are going to want to start thinking harder about incorporating Bing into their strategies if they are not already doing so.

WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo out at SMX, who presented on this topic. As she notes, some businesses actually see better results from Bing than they do from Google, and when Yahoo starts using Bing for search, Bing’s share of the search market is going to grow dramatically (it also powers search in Facebook, let’s not forget).

anet discusses a tool Bing has in its Webmaster tools that lets you see the types of links that point into you, and lets you look at their value, so you can go after similar links.

Bing is actually redesigning its Webmaster Tools, however. WebProNews also spoke with Bing’s Eric Gilmore about this.

The point is, Google’s Webmaster Tools have been very helpful for site-owners over the years in their conquest for better rankings. Now that Bing is growing in significance, its tools are going to be helpful as well.

You’ll have a better feel for today’s search engines if you know a little of the history behind them. Of course, there’s not much history to cover, since the Internet is still a youngster! Let’s take a look at how it all started.

We’ll begin by clearing up a common misunderstanding. Did you ever wonder what the difference is between the Internet and the World Wide Web? Many people believe that the two terms can be used interchangeably. In actuality, nothing could be further from the truth.

The Internet is a worldwide network of computer networks. It was dreamed up in 1969 by a U.S. government agency called ARPA, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency. (In fact, the Internet’s original name was ARPANET.) Nowadays, you can access the Internet via telephone lines, cable, fiber optics, and other communication mediums.

The Internet: A worldwide network of computer networks

The World Wide Web is younger still. It came into being around 1990, when researchers realized that they could use the Internet to connect a web of stored hypertext pages and make them accessible to people around the world. That web of pages grew from a handful at the outset to billions today.

The World Wide Web is, by far, the most commonly used application on the Internet. (E-mail is another application of the Internet that you’re familiar with.)

All users of the Web utilize HTTP, or the hypertext transfer protocol, in order to navigate from one Web site to another. Look at the address bar near the top of your Web browser. You’ll find that the www is preceded by http://. This tells the Web site that you’re on the World Wide Web and that you’re using the hypertext transfer protocol.

It’s important to understand the difference between the Internet and the Web so you can fully grasp how search engines work. While search engines use the Internet, they don’t search the entire Internet. Typically, search engines only search for Web sites on the World Wide Web.

The Search Engine Power Players, Yesterday and Today

For a young industry, the search engine field already has quite a past! Here’s a quick summary of important points on the search engine timeline. If you’re a real history buff, you’ll find more details in the FAQs for this lesson.

1993: The first widely acclaimed search engine, the World Wide Web Wanderer, appears. Created to measure the growth of the Web, it performs its job through 1997. The statistics compiled by this search engine are still available on the Web today.

1994: WebCrawler comes on the scene. The original WebCrawler database contains just 6,000 Web sites. (I think I have more Web sites than that listed in my favorites!) AOL-now there’s a name you probably recognize-purchases WebCrawler in 1995, but sells it just two years later to Excite. Infospace, its current owner, buys WebCrawler when Excite declares bankruptcy.

1994: Another powerhouse, the Lycos search engine, launches with 54,000 indexed documents. The Lycos search engine is still a player today, but it’s changed hands several times. Currently, it’s a subsidiary of the Korean-based Daum Communications Corporation.

1995: AltaVista explodes onto the scene. AltaVista (or AV) is the first search engine to include multilingual search capabilities. After changing hands several times, AltaVista becomes the property of Overture Services. (Overture is owned by Yahoo!, which we’ll discuss a bit later.) AltaVista maintains its status as the search king until the launch of Google.

1998: Larry Page and Sergey Brin introduce the world to Google, which quickly shoots to the top of the search engine rankings. (The name comes from the word googol, which is the name for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.) Google’s database now includes trillions of Web pages, and most experts agree that Google enjoys greater than 50% of total search engine traffic. This means that a top Google ranking will yield more traffic to your site than a top ranking with any other search engine…period.

That’s where things stand now, with Google by far the most used search engine on the Web.

However, things change rapidly, with companies constantly buying, selling, and creating search engines. As a result, you’ll want to keep tabs on which search engines are gaining or losing popularity.

Search Engines versus Directories

Are you wondering why we didn’t talk about Yahoo! in the last section? That’s because Yahoo! began as a directory, not a search engine.

While search engines’ indexes are compiled by computers, directories are categorical lists of Web sites compiled by humans. Before it’s accepted, each Web site listed in a directory is carefully scrutinized and deemed acceptable for placement in one specific category.

Some people argue that because directories are compiled by humans, they’re limited because they don’t offer as many search results as search engines. However, I think you’ll find that the search results displayed by directories can often be much more useful than the search results displayed by search engines.

The most popular directory on the Web is Yahoo!, founded in 1994 by David Filo and Jerry Yang. They started Yahoo! on a couple of computers in a campus trailer at Stanford, initially using it to track their own interests. It surprised them by taking off quickly, and they incorporated it in 1995 with an initial investment of almost $2 million. By the way, Yahoo! Is an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle-but I promise not to test you on that!

In an effort to diversify, Yahoo decided to use Google’s engine to supply users with primary search results. However, in 2004, Yahoo! unveiled its own brand-new search engine.

You can still tap into Yahoo!’s directory, and I think you’ll find it extremely useful at times. If you perform a search at http://www.yahoo.com, the results you’ll get are derived from the Yahoo Search Engine. However, you can obtain Yahoo Directory search results by initiating a search at http://dir.yahoo.com.

The Open Directory Project is perhaps the second most popular directory on the Web. It’s compiled by more than 50,000 volunteers who’ve indexed nearly 4 million Web sites. The directory contains just under 500,000 categories, all of which can be searched by keyword or category.

Due to the limited resources of the Open Directory, searching for results through their Web site can be time-consuming and cumbersome. However, some search engines include Open Directory listings within their secondary search results.

Author: 818 Solutions

Every major search engine provides hints and tips about how to optimize your pages for improved rankings on their sites. But when you read these guidelines you quickly see that most of it is just their own wish list. Things like ‘Write for humans not search engine bots – or – do not hide keywords with a font matching the background color.’ It is all good advice but kind of general and already well known (for the past decade.)

But there are always things a search engine will not tell you. And, of course, these are the things that make all the difference in your SEO efforts and results. That said; here are eight things that Bing does not want you to know (or you can skip to the Magic Formula section at the end):

1.) Your Domain Name Matters – A Lot

Search for just about anything on MSN / Bing and at least three of the top five matches will have some version of that keyword as the domain name. For example if you wanted to optimize for the keyword ‘my domain’ you should try to get the domain name ‘mydomain.com.’ If that is taken, opt for ‘my-domain.com.’ If that’s taken try for a name starting with ‘mydomain’ and ending with a word that is commonly associated. This is called LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing. A good example would be ‘mydomainname.com’ or ‘my-domain-name.com.’ BTW, Bing treats dashes as a space so as long as long as the dashes merely separate words, they are treated much like the non dash version.

2.) There is No Sandbox

Here’s some great news for anyone just getting started. Bing does not seem to care about the age of your domain name. There is no ‘sandbox’ like Google has. Many people, myself included, have registered brand new domains and had them ranking in a matter of days.

3.) DotCom Trumps DotNet

Today some search engines like Google will often give .net and .com virtually the same value, and possibly higher value for a .org that is for a recognized non-profit organization. Bing however appears to prefer the .com version. You can even see instances where a ‘.co.uk’ site gets high rankings simply because it uses the exact keyword in the domain name and .co is close enough to .com.

4.) We Like Sub Domains

Most web hosts will let you add sub domains to your website. On Bing, if you have the sub domain mydomain.mydomain.com you are in for some potentially great rankings. The same is true if you have my.domain.com, but to a slightly lesser degree.

5.) Less is More – Part One

We have been trained by Google to try to have hundreds of pages of quality content on every website. Bing adheres to the old policy that they are indexing web ‘pages’ not web ‘sites’ (like Google says they do, but Bing appears to really mean it.) This means each page is treated on its own merit so a site with one page has the same chances of being ranked as a site with 100 pages, because each page is genuinely treated individually.

6.) Less is More – Part Two

The same rule as above goes for on-page text. Pages with 800 to 1,200 words seem to do best on Google but on Bing the reverse is true, with 250 to 500 words being the magic number. Just do not overuse your keyword.

7.) Links are Nice But Not Required

Forget about spending your life building an ever growing number of inbound links for Bing. They do not need them. Your site, for now at least, is judged by its own merits, page by page.

8.) Be Bold not Strong

The original SEO method dating back to 1996 was using the H1 or ‘strong’ heading tags in your HTML. Forget them for now. Bing gives higher priority to how you would express importance in a word processor document; larger font and bolded text as the main markers.

Summary: I build hundreds of Bing (formerly MSN) targeted mini sites every year using the information above (as it has evolved) and the results have been consistent top ten rankings. You can do it too!

Here’s my magic formula for a one hour top ranking:

A.) Get the .com version of a three to four word keyword as the domain name (dashes are fine.)

B.) Use the domain name as the page heading in a bolded font, slightly larger than the paragraph text.

C.) Write 400 words of natural sounding text using the keyword up to five times.

D.) Mention the keyword once in the first sentence and once in the final sentence of the page – then up to three times scattered throughout the remainder.

E.) Bold one instance of the keyword. Italicize one instance of the keyword. Use one instance of the keyword as a link back to the same page.

F.) Always fill in your Title, Description and Keywords META tags. That’s it.

Good luck and take care!

PS: This works for Yahoo too.

Author: Mike Small

Remember when Bing launched its recipe results? Now Google has launched a similar feature with recipe rich snippets. “For example, if you were searching for an easy to make thai mango salad, you can now see user ratings, preparation time, and a picture of the dish directly in search result snippets,” explains Google. It may not be incredibly far-fetched to suggest that maybe Bing’s offering nudged such a feature into development, whether or not Google would admit this

This story isn’t about recipes though. It’s about the major search engines’ quest for gaining or keeping you as a user. It feels like Bing has been around quite a while now, but in reality, it hasn’t even been out for a year. Right out of the box, Bing seemed to make Google want to improve. Google is even in the process of testing redesigned search results pages that borrow some design characteristics from Bing.

Both Google and Bing still have their relevancy issues. We recently looked at an example of a query for “matt cutts” on Google (though we compared them to Yahoo rather than Bing, as Yahoo mentioned the same query in a blog post). Frankly, Google’s results left a bit to be desired. It wasn’t that that they were bad exactly, but personalized results pushed the more relevant results further down the page, and Matt’s Facebook profile was MIA, despite Facebook being one of the most popular sites on the web, a good result for a search on a person’s name (It was in the first few on Yahoo’s results).

Microsoft may like consumers to think that Bing gives all the right answers. Those commercials would certainly seem to suggest they have a leg up over the competition in that regard, but they’ve got their own relevance issues. For example, for an article I was writing recently, I was looking for that site Bing has that showed all of the latest features they’ve released. I couldn’t remember the name of it, so I searched (on Bing) for “latest bing features”. Given Bing’s philosophy of wanting to provide answers, I would expect to easily find what I was looking for through such a query, but instead the first organic result is an article called “The Latest News from Bing” from November of 2009.

http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/article_pics/bing-latest-features.jpg

Search Diversifying

In the latest search market reports, Google has lost a little bit of market share. Bing is gaining (and has the potential to gain a lot more for reasons discussed here). Another thing Bing has going for it, or Google has working against it rather, is that search itself is becoming much more diversified as a result of mobile, social media, and geo-location. People are simply using more ways to find the information they’re looking for. It’s not that they’re not using Google anymore. It’s that they’re maybe using it less for certain types of queries. For example, where someone may have once used Google to search for a movie showtime, maybe they now have an app for that on their phone.

Is a Bingized Yahoo Good for Yahoo Search?

At some point in the near future, Bing’s results will be taking over Yahoo’s results to some extent. While most will agree that the Microsoft-Yahoo deal will be good for search advertising. Another question would be is it good for people who use Yahoo to search? Are Bing’s search results better than Yahoo’s? I’m not so sure, looking at the “matt cutts” example. For the “latest bing features” example, however, I can’t say that Yahoo’s results are really any better than Bing’s.

I realize that just looking at a couple of examples is kind of grasping at straws and are hardly representative of all queries in general, but it’s still a question worth pondering. Are Bing’s results better than Yahoo’s? Does it even matter? Will the average Yahoo user even notice a difference?

Google’s Edge in Innovation

Google still seems to have the edge in getting out new and interesting features. Take real-time search. Microsoft and Google both announced deals with Twitter around the same time. Microsoft even had one with Facebook too. While Bing had a separate destination relatively quickly, where users could search Twitter with Bing, they didn’t integrate real-time Twitter results into Bing results themselves. Google did this after a little while with not only Twitter, but many other sources to make up its real-time search results. Just this week, Bing announced that it is starting to include such results, and only from Twitter, and only to a small subset of users in the U.S. Google is even doing Twitter archive search now.

That’s not to say that Bing doesn’t do some things first (like the recipes for example), but Bing has a lot more to prove (and in all fairness, they do regularly release new features). Google is already established. Bing is still trying to win people over.

Google is frequently making acquisitions to better its search technologies. Just this week, Google acquired Pink, to better its Google Goggles product, which lets people search with their phones by simply pointing their cameras toward an object. They recently acquired Aardvark, a social Q&A search service (a space that is growing rapidly – see AnswerBag/MerchantCircle news for one of the latest examples).

Wrapping Up

With regards to relevance, you’re going to find better results on Google, Yahoo, and Bing on a query-by-query basis. In reality, none of them deliver perfect results all the time, and that is why the diversifying of how people search is likely to continue, and for the better. The search engines can work to personalize results all they want, but in the end, it’s the user that personalizes how they search, and right now, it’s not looking like any single search engine is going to control all of that.

Author: Chris Crum

Microsoft announced some new updates to Bing today at SES NY, where WebProNews covered the event live (during which a representative for Bing also let me know that live.webpronews.com would be a good place to check it out).

Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president, Online Audience Business, announced the updates during his keynote, which you can view here:
SES Keynote Day
“The updates demonstrate Bing’s continued mission to connect people with the knowledge they want on the web,” a Bing rep tells me.

So what are the updates?

There’s an update to the Bing user interface, which adapts the page and search results based on the intent of the query. “We’ll be testing a new user interface that includes new design concepts that move the Quick Tabs functionality to the top of the screen, so customers see a more visual and organized page,” the rep explains. “On the left side of the page, there will be query-specific options to help refine users’ questions and help Bing better understand user intent. This rolling update begins today and will become available to approximately 5% of customers.”

New Bing User Interface:

http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/nl_pic032510.jpg

A new search experience for autos will also be rolled out (and available to everybody in the coming weeks). It pulls together disconnected content from across the web for what Bing calls a “one-stop-shop.”

In addition, there is a new Foursquare map app for Bing Maps, where customers can see Foursquare check-ins, badges, and mayorships in Bing Maps.

When asked about how businesses can monetize the new opportunities presented by Bing, Mehdi said they can provide different kind of ads and find out more about user intent. “Signals of data have helped us understand user intent,” Mehdi said.

The flighting of most of the updates begins today and will be rolling out to all customers later this spring and summer.