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Posts Tagged ‘bing’
Sunday, August 14th, 2011
I don’t think many Internet marketers would question whether or not social signals are used in search. It’s pretty clear that they are. The only question is, to what extent?
Facebook and Bing have a very close relationship. In fact, if you are logged into Facebook, then take a look at Bing’s home page. You should see along the top navigation menu a little Facebook icon next to your name. If you click your name or the down arrow, then you’ll see a link. Click that link and it takes you to a page explaining Bing’s social search feature.
In short, Bing allows you to see what your Facebook friends like, not necessarily what they are searching for. And your Facebook friends can see what you like.
Google does something similar with Google+. If you conduct a search on Google, you’ll see a +1 icon next to the search results. If you +1 an item and you are logged into your Google+ account, then that item will appear on your +1s list. The same for the people you connect with through +1. Then you can see each other’s +1s – if that person has set their preferences to allow you that privilege.
But Google goes one step further. On the search results page, it will tell you which of your Google+ friends have shared an item on Google+ or on any social network they’re a member of. So you can really watch what your friends are sharing.
This is just the tip of the iceberg on social signals. There are plenty more, and I think the search engines will get a lot more sophisticated using those signals for search purposes. It will be interesting to watch.
Tags: bing, facebook, google, search, social signals
Posted in search engines | 2 Comments »
Saturday, June 4th, 2011
It’s not often that all three major search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo!) team up together on a project, but this time the project is well worth the mutual cooperation. The three search giants have partnered to launch the site schema.org, which helps webmasters define structured data for their websites for easier searchability.
First, you might be wondering what is structured data? It is also called microdata, or microformats. This is a type of markup that defines more narrowly specific content on a web page that humans might understand when they read the text content, but that search engines would have a difficult time understanding from the text.
The Schema.org website uses this example:
*h1*Avatar*/h1*
(note: replace * with < and >)
Avatar is a term that can be used in more than one context. For example, it could refer to the movie or it could refer to your Web graphic or profile picture. The simple html tag H1 tells browsers how to render the text, but it doesn’t tell search engines the particular context of the reference.
To fix this, you could add a schema to your html code to tell the search engines what “Avatar” means. If you are referring to the movie, then you’d enter code that looks like this:
*div itemscope*
*h1*Avatar*/h1*
*span*Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954) */span*
*span*Science fiction*/span*
*a href=”../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html”*Trailer*/a*
*/div*
Itemscope is the schema and the content that falls between the div tags is the microdata that defines that schema.
The brilliance of schema is that it is flexible, so flexible in fact that webmasters can define their own schema beyond the definitions offered by the search engines. If those schema become popular enough, then the search engines will begin to use them for search indexing purposes.
I encourage you to look over the schema.org website and see if you can identify any web pages that could benefit from defining microdata. It could push you up a little in the rankings by helping the search engines define your content a little more clearly.
Tags: bing, google, microformats, schema, yahoo
Posted in search engines | 2 Comments »
Friday, May 20th, 2011
If you are involved in any link building efforts at all – and you should be – then you’ll have to keep track of where you put your links and which ones are tracked by the search engines. I recommend a simple Excel spreadsheet for the former – or you could buy a bit of software that does it for you (if you really want to spend the money). But for keeping track of what the search engines consider inbound links, you have two options.
- You can buy a program that monitors each search engine’s link count (which won’t be 100% accurate – especially for Bing and Google)
- Or you can use a free link checker
There are link checkers online that are free. Of course, the free ones are no better at accurately counting the inbound links from Google and Bing than the paid ones are. That’s because these two search engines don’t report all their links. They prefer to keep that information secret.
Yahoo!, on the other hand, has always been open about letting website owners (and the whole world) know what it considers to be a good inbound link. You can find that information through Yahoo!s Site Explorer.
Site Explorer is free and allows you to get more than just inbound link information about your websites. And you can use it to explore link opportunities for your websites. It’s one of the world’s most valuable free tools.
Tags: bing, google, inbound links, link building, link checker, yahoo, Yahoo! Site Explorer
Posted in link building | 3 Comments »
Saturday, April 2nd, 2011
Frank Reed has a thoughtful post at WebProNews about Bing, Google, and Local Search. His premise is interesting and it leaves me wondering. He says that Bing can lead in local search by being the “anti-Google.”
I was particularly struck by this paragraph:
So spend the money you have wisely by investing in the human side of the Internet. Hire people to be city managers. Give them a more than fair wage plus the chance to earn commission based on reasonable metrics like number of verified business accounts in the portal and other things. Let them earn the right to hire more sales people and be entrepreneurial in their market but with the backing of a Goliath like Microsoft.
If Bing, or any search engine, took that approach, it would be revolutionary. By posting this to the world, Frank Reed runs the risk of Google picking up on the idea and implementing it. But that likely won’t happen. Google have their own ideas.
Still, we are human, are we not? Would you respond to a search engine taking this approach? Would the “human side of the Internet” tickle you pink?
As a small business owner, I think this would certainly get my attention. I’d also be likely to experiment with Bing products for small businesses and see how they could help me in my business. Right now, Google is doing a fairly adequate job of helping small business owners, but they could do more. Do you think strong stiff competition from Bing would up the ante?
Tags: bing, google, local search
Posted in Local Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »
Sunday, March 6th, 2011
It’s been almost a year now, but I thought I’d write about Bing’s successful Farmville experiment.
Bing promised fans farm cash if they became Facebook fans and it worked. In less than 24 hours, Bing gained 400,000 new Facebook fans.
There is a lesson here. While a lot of attention has been put on Facebook and Twitter in the social media sphere, Farmville (according to Bing) actually gets more traffic than Twitter and looks to be the new way to gain some social media traction. That is, if you can get creative and use it well.
So how can your small business use Farmville, or Cityville, or one of the other hundreds of Zynga games on Facebook? I’ve seen dating sites use Fubar for their marketing, which is an online singles bar.
All you have to do is engage. If that means tossing out a bribe to get people to friend you on Facebook (promise them a free download or something) or to follow you on Twitter, then do what it takes. Once you get your foot in the door, you can build that relationship and filter them through your sales funnel.
Social media marketing isn’t hard. It’s a whole lot easier when you get creative.
Tags: bing, facebook, Farmville, Social Media
Posted in Social Media | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, March 1st, 2011
While trying to help a client with some content, I performed a search for “online dating videos.” I performed this search first on Bing and then on Google. The results? Bing had a website promoting an online dating video contest at No. 1; Google had the same site at No. 4. Page 1.
So what’s the problem, you might ask. The contest expired on December 31, 2009.
On one hand, you could argue the result was relevant to my search query. After all, the domain name is onlinedatingvideos.com. You can’t get any more relevant than that, right? Except that the information on the website is outdated, which means it isn’t relevant at all.
Relevancy has typically been defined solely in terms of the nature of content. That is, if you are promoting content related to basketball, then any content related to basketball is considered relevant. But here in the real world, that isn’t the case. Every searcher knows that. How many times have you searched for information only to find that the search engine returned results that weren’t even close to what you were looking for? Or worse, the information was outdated.
As marketers, we have to be conscious of this ourselves. What can we do to ensure that our content ranks well to reach the right searchers?
The dating video website was a site sponsored by popular dating site Date.com. It’s clear that they win with this search result. But searchers do not. Nor do the search engines. After all, if I can’t trust the results, then why would I use that search engine?
I think the search engines need a filter for discarding outdated information. This has been a problem at Google for a long time. It’s not new. I’m tired of seeing outdated information in search results. And I think this is one of the reasons that social media is such a good bet for marketers (and consumers) right now. What do you think?
Tags: bing, google, search, search results, Social Media
Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011
Google claims Bing is copying its search results. Ouch! That’s a bold claim. Bing responds:
“We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm,” Bing vice president Harry Shum said Tuesday, referring to the mathematical code that search engines use to choose their results.
I’d be curious to know if any of those signals and features include crawling Google’s search results. If so, that could be a problem. Here’s why I think that’s possible:
Suspicious of their new rival, Google engineers set up random results on their site for a series of unlikely search terms, such as “hiybbprqag.” (Google arranged for the nonsense word to point to a Los Angeles theater seating plan on its search engine.)
“Within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing,” Google said in a statement on its official blog Tuesday.
Evidently, Google thinks Bing could be doing something underhanded as well. Just looking at this story, it doesn’t look good for Bing.
I think competition is healthy. I certainly think Bing has a right to improve its search results and try almost anything that it thinks may help searchers find the information they are looking for. But if a nonsense search term invented by Google appears in Bing’s search results, that’s a huge red flag. I’m about 99.9999% sure that should never happen.
So why not 100% sure? Well, because of this response from Bing:
Bing gets “a small piece” of the data for its algorithm “from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users,” Shum said,
If some anonymous Google employee submitted the nonsense search result to Bing in hopes that it might make the company look bad, then that would be on Google. That would certainly be unfair and nefarious. Is that what happened? It’s possible given that Bing does allow for anonymous data sharing by its customers. If I were Google, I’d want to know just how Bing got that search result in its own results. If I were Bing, I’d definitely want to make sure the problem isn’t with my own internal processes. Both companies have a reason to ensure the truth comes out on this one.
Tags: bing, google, search, search results
Posted in search engines | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010
If you had the chance to steal 200 million users from your competition, would you consider that success? Well, Bing recently announced that it has snagged that many users from its strongest competitor, Google.
This is actually pretty significant. I don’t know how much that will affect the total market share of these two search engines, but a few more deals like this one and Bing could gain considerable distance on Google. Trying to win searchers through TV and radio advertising, or word of mouth, could take a very long time. But convert publishers who have an exclusive agreement with your largest competitor and you make good headway.
Look at it this way: Bing just gained on Google by 400 million users. Google lost 200 million and Bing gained 200 million.
What if that happened with 5 other exclusive deals that Google currently has in place? That would be a total shift of 1 billion users from Google to Bing. Do you think that would be noticeable?
I don’t really know how poised Bing is to make that kind of move, but if they did it once, then they could do it again. And Microsoft is just savvy enough to make deals like that. Google has partnerships in place with certain computer manufacturers to have a built-in search feature on computer desktops. A few of those for Bing with large computer manufacturers and we could see some evening of the score. What do you think?
Tags: bing, google, search engines
Posted in search engines | 1 Comment »
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