SEO Industry News

Announced at the TechCrunch 50 conference today, Yusuf Mehi from Microsoft shared with the audience that the next release for Bing will provide a richer search experience.  Microsoft sees Bing being more of a “decision engine” than a “search engine”.  The vision is to provide the best in “first search”, but more so, they want to lead the way with richer and more organized information.

Yusuf Mehi, Microsoft Bing Engineer

The next round of Bing development is a result of studying users’ search behaviour.  Internet users are becoming more sophisticated with their search queries.  Search users are changing and moving beyond the “keyword to url” mapping search function.  Mehi and his team found that;

• 25% of all clicks lead to the “back” button on the browser
• 42% of search queries need refinement
• 50% of user search sessions are spent on longer queries.

Short queries, mapping keyword query to url, takes approximately 1-2 minutes.  More complex search queries can last as long as 30mins per search session with people looking to solve a sophisticated problem such as buying a product, finding specific health information or where to go out on a Saturday night.

Currently only available to US residents at www.bing.com/visualsearch, Microsoft launched today Bing’s Visual Search product.  It provides a graphical way to search and discover information.

When searching for a digital camera for example, Bing displays a “Visualize Digital Cameras” link next to the search results. After clicking this link, a rolling cascade of digital cameras is displayed.  While scrolling through the different products, the user is also able to refine their search query by clicking relevant links such as Type, Model, Optical Zoom and other specifications.

Bing's Visual Search - Searching for a digital camera

With Bing, Microsoft is aiming to help users perform simple key tasks within the Travel, Shopping, Health and Local Search categories.  Although, Bing’s visual search engine is not limited to these categories alone.  Bing also presents Popular Galleries, allowing users to select the best of movies, books, celebrities, sport, politicians and more.

Mehi accidently slipped that Bing will introduce “Twitter” results in the not too distant future.

The much talked about new search engine from Microsoft is now live.  What do you think of Bing?

www.bing.com

A longer post is coming soon.

Originally named Kumo, Microsoft’s new search engine is now rebranded to Bing and is about to be revealed.  Microsoft is rolling out a TV, radio, Internet and newspaper brand campaign to convince people to “use today’s search engine”. 

Microsoft believes that 42% of all first query searches need to be refined which presents a huge opportunity. The goal of Bing is to reduce the time involved with searching by providing better results the first time round. They will do this by displaying related categories to help provide a better user search experience.   For example, Bing will provide related categories such as Reviews and Prices for product related searches.  Finding exactly what you are looking for within a shorter amount of time is quite compelling if Microsoft can pull it off. 

The question remains, since Google provides a great search experience and is adequate, will users switch to a better engine?  Is a better search experience on another engine just frills that the masses won’t switch for?

In any case, the web needs Microsoft’s Bing to succeed.  Even though Google is not technically a monopoly, it dominates most markets around the world and is certainly beginning to feel like one.  Google still demonstrates its ability to innovate, specifcally with its recent Rich Snippets release and support of RDFa and Microformats.  However, we need competition in the search industry as it provides choice for users and stimulates innovation.  It is obvious that Google’s new use of data was spurred on by competitive moves by Wolfram Alpha.   These new services by Google is proof that competition ensures that the encumbent keeps on innovating.

Can Microsoft innovate to a level that keeps Google on its toes?  I hope so.  There are plenty of smart people who work for Microsoft.  Contrary to popular belief, the brightest people in the world do not all work for Google. Let’s hope that the Microsoft Bing team have the ability to experiment and develop search technologies that can make a difference.

I viewed Google’s last Searchology event a couple of years ago when they launched Universal Search.  That single event was a game changer in the search industry.  Vertical searches by media type (video, images, maps, books, web pages, etc) were blended together within main search results.

Well, Google has done it again!  Yesterday at the second Searchology event, Google announced the adoption of Microformats and RDFa, a structured format of data.  This is another game changer that search marketers need to be aware of.

Similar to Yahoo’s Search Monkey, website owners who use microformats or RDFa to format their content may have it displayed within Google search results. Google has a never ending quest of delivering results that are the closest match to the intent of the user’s search query and to offer other relevant results that could benefit their search further.

Google has enhanced search result snippets by adding content from website pages such as Reviews, People Contact Information, Business and Organization Information and Products.  Let’s take a closer look at what data types are supported for each of these and how they can be implemented. (more…)

Who says that Twitter and SEO do not go together?  Wednesday night, Santosh Jayaram, the Vice President of Twitter Operations stated that Twitter Search will begin to crawl links submitted to its application and will index the content of those pages.

It will also incorporate a reputation ranking system based upon the reputation of the person submitting the article.  When a topic is gaining popularity within Twitter it will insert it within the Twitter Sidebar.

The reputation system will certainly improve the quality of search results that Twitter Search provides, which currently displays low-value content and plenty of re-tweets.

Hopefully these changes will influence Twitters to add more meaningful content to their tweets.  Still, there will be those who will always want to manipulate the ranking system so let’s hope Twitter Search has a few tricks up their sleeves to combat this.

For SEO professionals and their clients, Twitter Search has just become an essential item on our To Do lists.

Source: CNET News

SiteVisibility discovered on 22nd April that Google added local search volume to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.  When you tailor your results to a specific region around the world, Google Keyword Tool displays local search volume for the previous month.

This is essentially the same as what it was before.  The earlier version of Google Keyword Tool provided Search Volume for the previous month which one presumes was displaying number of searches based upon the region you had tailored results to.  One can now be sure with Local Search Volume that this is the case. (more…)

This week (14th Tuesday  2009), Google announced upcoming changes to the search referrer strings they display when people conduct a search.  This new referring url format will not affect Google Analytics, but other analytic software packages due to the way they record referral data.

You need to be aware of this in case your analytics vendor has not made the appropriate changes to their software which means that referral data will not be reported upon correctly. (more…)