Posts tagged Bing’s
SEO Mustache Competition Backed By Google’s Matt Cutts & Bing’s Duane Forrester – Search Engine Land
Oct 28th
 Search Engine Land |
SEO Mustache Competition Backed By Google's Matt Cutts & Bing's Duane Forrester
Search Engine Land Mike Halvorsen has set up a special competition this November to help raise money for Prostate Cancer Foundation and Livestrong. The competition is on growing a mustache and both Google's Matt Cutts and Bing's Duane Forrester are participating. … |
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SEO Strategy Affected By Bing’s Growth – AddPR.com (press release)
Oct 24th
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SEO Strategy Affected By Bing's Growth
AddPR.com (press release) Since the rise of Google as the most used Search Engine, thousands of SEO Companies have established their businesses based on helping clients achieve front page visibility in Google. These such companies spend hours each week researching and keeping … How to do Keyword Research: Free #SEO Webinar Online Marketing Tips For Small Business: SEO Often Overlooked Essential 'On Page Optimization' Services Launched By Ribbun |
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Bing’s move towards social networking integration is a smart move, says SEO … – SourceWire (press release)
Apr 4th
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Bing's move towards social networking integration is a smart move, says SEO …
SourceWire (press release) This is the kind of move search engines need to be making if they want to engage with a new audience, claims SEO company Queryclick.com (http://uk.queryclick.com/). A spokesperson said: "Integration like this is the best way search engines have of … |
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Bing’s Travel Search, So Much Better Than Google, Gets Even Better
Feb 26th
Google does almost nothing interesting in travel search. Bing offers a much more compelling travel search experience and today added a new little feature that makes me want to use it even more.
Search on Bing for the phrase “fly to…” and the name of a major destination city and you will now see an automatic display of the best dates to fly from where you are to that place, with the lowest price for a round trip ticket and advice about whether the price is likely to go up or down if you waited to buy the ticket later. It’s really cool.
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I don’t know if I’m going to change my travel dates or destination based on a difference of a few dollars, but this is at least fun. It’s really fast and easy to see cheap flights and dates at various places. Click through the results and you’ll see even more, much of it powered by Microsoft’s very wise acquisition of airfare prediction company Farecast in 2008.
Google has a big travel search acquisition of its own in the works of course. It’s looking to buy ITA Software, but that deal is super controversial and faces regulatory challenges due to concerns about monopoly power.
Presuming Google can buy ITA, it will be interesting to see what it can come up with to wow users performing travel searches. That is ultimately, after all, what it’s all about in the end.
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Google’s Cutts: Bing’s Higher Search Success Rate Due to Bad Hitwise Data
Feb 11th
Google’s Matt Cutts is skeptical about the latest Hitwise data that showed Bing provided users with more accurate results than Google.
As we reported earlier this week, Bing had its highest search success rate in January (81.54 percent), while Google had a 65.58 percent success rate. Hitwise defines a successful search as one that results in a visit to a website from a search engine’s result page.
Click to read the rest of this post…
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So, Bing’s Copying Off Google: What Now, Google?
Feb 4th
If you’ve missed it, there’s practically been a spy novel written over the past couple of days about Bing copying Google’s search results. The whole thing started with a novella by Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, which related the tale of Google’s honeypot trap to catch Bing in the act of copying its search results. Ever since, the two companies have been battling it out in public, accusing and denying, in blog posts, tweets and more blog posts, but one question still remains – what now?
Even if the move wasn’t intentional on Microsoft’s end, the end result is the same – Bing search results that more closely mirror Google’s search results. One ex-Googler has some thoughts on how this can change how Google approaches search, which he shared earlier today on Q&A site Quora.
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The Short Version
First, if you’re in the mood for a great but long read, take a look at Danny Sullivan’s story that broke open the whole debacle. There’s mystery, there’s intrigue and there are diagrams. The long and short of it is that Google started making up "words" that no one would actually search for – "hiybbprqag" for example – and then linking them to unrelated results. The gotcha moment came when Google engineers searched Bing for those "words" (after weeks of using Internet Explorer, searching for those “words”) and came up with those same results.
In other words, Bing was coming up with search results for something that only Googlers were searching for using Google on Internet Explorer. (If you’ve seen The Departed, it’s very much like the envelope that outs the rat.) Internet Explorer and the Bing toolbar had been collecting anonymous click data and, according to Bing, this data was one of more than “1,000 different signals and features in [its] ranking algorithm.” So, it wasn’t that Bing was directly copying results, said Microsoft, but that it was taking click data into account. Ever since Sullivan’s post, the two companies have been going at it – and that’s the very short version of it all.
Why Innovate?
Edmond Lau, formerly a part of the search team at Google, says that “the result of this discovery will be to diminish Google’s incentive to innovate in vanilla search quality ranking and to increase its efforts on other differentiating search features.”
Lau points out that, unless Google has a legal argument against Bing’s usage of click data, Microsoft will likely continue with the practice. Over time, he posits, Bings search results will likely move closer to Google’s, taking away a key incentive on Google’s end to innovate its search product.
“Any new innovations in ranking by Google could in theory quickly become assimilated into Bing’s search results, reducing Google’s incentive to innovate in the ranking space,” writes Lau. “Therefore, in order to maintain its competitive edge, Google will need to both try to reduce Bing’s ability to copy its results, and it will need to significantly increase its efforts on other important areas in the search experience outside of ranking.”
What’s Google’s Next Move?
Lau suggests that Google has two possible moves at this point. First, it can give Bing toolbar users worse results by “[dropping] a misspelling here or an optimization there,” thereby giving undermining Bing’s efforts and giving it only “medium-quality” results to copy. The second option, he says, is for Google to “focus more on non-ranking related improvements,” such as snippet quality, metadata extraction like IMDB data at the top of search results, query refinements such as localized results and search suggestions, more relevant ads and a better integration of universal search. In other words, Google can focus on all the neat information and context that surrounds mere search results.
“Not all is lost for Google even though Bing may be hijacking its results,” writes Lau. “Months after the summer of 2010, when Google figured that Bing had copied some of its results for the misspelled query [torsoraphy], it’s clear that Google still understands the web much better than Bing does. [...]Bing’s top result doesn’t have the spell-corrected query highlighted because Bing still isn’t able to connect the dots between the misspelled and corrected query. I’m not too worried for Google web search.”
What do you think? Would Google lower the quality on some search results just to keep Bing from copying it? From what we’ve read, information is not collected by the Bing toolbar alone, but by Internet Explorer use, as well, which makes up a majority of Web browsers worldwide. It seems like lowering the quality of your search results to a majority of users worldwide simply to stop someone from copying your answers would be counterproductive. Instead, we’re willing to bet that Google continues, as it has, to focus on enhancing all of these “non-ranking related improvements.” Google is continually pushing to make search results more customized to the individual user, according to previous search results, social context, location, and more. Is this the type of thing that could be simply copied by click data? We’re not so sure.
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Twitter Hires Bing’s Principle Scientist Away From Microsoft
Jan 26th
Alek Kołcz, Principle Scientist at Microsoft’s search engine Bing, appears to have left the company and joined Twitter this week. Kołcz’s Twitter messages are protected and he hasn’t changed any of his profiles online, but we noticed tonight that he’s been added to the list of staff members on the Twitter website. The company has yet to respond to our request for comment.
Kołcz spent nearly five years at Microsoft after leaving AOL where he was a system architect. He now joins his old friends from the AOL days, the search scientists who came to Twitter in the Summize acquisition of 2008. According to LinkedIn, Kołcz will be the 8th former Microsoft employee at Twitter. Twitter’s full staff consists of 362 people.
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Kołcz is an info-science heavy, having published numerous research articles in publications like The Journal of Supercomputing, Neurocomputing and Neural Networks. He appears to have a special affinity for spam crushing, something Twitter must struggle with a whole lot. As use of the service grows, so too will the importance of its search – especially given the very public nature of Twitter’s data.
Bing announced that it was including Twitter updates in its search results more than a year ago, in what was presumed to be one of Twitter’s first big money-making deals.
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