SEO For Bing

Written by James Doran – Original Post Is Here.

You’d think nothing would get under the skin of search giant Google.

But co-founder Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft’s rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service, The Post has learned.

Brin, according to sources inside the tech behemoth, is himself leading the team of search-engine specialists in an effort to determine how Bing’s crucial search algorithm differs from that used by the company he founded in 1998 with Stanford University classmate Larry Page.

“New search engines have come and gone in the past 10 years, but Bing seems to be of particular interest to Sergey,” said one insider, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The move by Brin is unusual, as it is rare these days for the Google founders to have such hands-on involvement in day-to-day operations at the company, the source added.

A spokesman for Google declined to comment about Brin’s interest in Bing but said: “We always have a team working on improving search.” He added: “We dedicate more time and energy to search than anything else in our company. Our algorithm is constantly evolving.”

Microsoft launched Bing two weeks ago with a massive marketing budget that sources say ranged between $80 million and $100 million.

The software company has struggled to survive in the Internet-search business, with its former MSN search engine managing to grab only 8 percent of the lucrative search market share — far behind Google’s 60 percent and Yahoo!’s 20 percent share.

In fact, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, in an effort to close the gap on Google, last year made an offer to buy Yahoo! That offer was rejected. More recently, pre-Bing, there had been talk of Microsoft being interested in some sort of deal or partnership with Yahoo! search.

Those efforts have cooled.

Bing has been warmly greeted by analysts, critics and users alike who seem to largely welcome Microsoft’s new approach to the everyday business of searching the Internet. Early statistics show Bing increasing Microsoft’s market share by two percentage points, to about 11 percent — but that the gains largely didn’t come from Google or Yahoo!

Microsoft prefers not to use the term “search engine,” however, choosing instead to describe Bing as a “decision engine.”

While Bing is presented differently from Google — with a colorful home page and easy-to-navigate search categories compared with Google’s stark white page and search box — there is little difference between the two when it comes to searching for simple terms.

A spokeswoman for Microsoft said, however, that Bing is currently focused on improving search results in four main categories: shopping, travel, health and local searches.

Scott Kessler, senior equity research analyst at Standard & Poor’s, and a Google specialist, said that Bing has a lot going for it but he does not expect it to knock Google from its No. 1 perch.

“In a recent survey we found that the predominant features that dictate how people search the Internet are ease of use and force of habit. Google has been so dominant for so long that it will be tough for anyone to take significant market share away from them.”

Written by Marius Oiaga – Original Post Is Here.

Bing 411 is just one of the pieces of the search engine puzzle that Microsoft is setting into place after it has scrapped Live Search altogether. After the start of June 2009 was synonymous with Bing going live worldwide, replacing all Live Search verticals one by one, the software giant also unveiled the successor of Live Search 411. Just as its
precursor, Bing 411 is designed to let users access the search engine via the phone using voice commands. For this, Microsoft is taking advantage of voice recognition technology acquired from Tellme.

At the start of this month “we launched Bing, the new decision engine designed to help you make more informed decisions. [We are now] excited to share that Bing 411 (1-800-BING-411 or 1-800-246-4411), with voice search powered by Tellme, has also arrived! More than simple local business search, Bing 411 makes it easier to get on-the-go information: driving directions, traffic reports, sports scores, stock quotes, weather reports, and even information the cheapest place near you to buy gas,” revealed Yvonne Chou, senior program lead, Bing 411.

The Bing 411 service is available for free in the US, and is designed to replace Live Search 411. Previously, users had to call 1-800-CALL-411 (1-800-2255-411) in order to access the service when it was under the Live Search brand umbrella. In fact, the Live Search 411 webpage continues to be live even at this point in time, despite the fact that other Live Search properties have long been rebranded to Bing.

“Bing 411 now takes local business search a step further, helping you to complete tasks from your phone. Call Bing 411 to find a business, then connect to it or get an SMS with a link to a map (which you can also send to a friend). Bing 411 even includes star ratings of businesses based on reviews by other consumers. You can get traffic-influenced driving directions, and for movie theaters, you can get show times and even buy tickets,” Chou added.

Written by Marius Oiaga – Original Post Is Here.

Written by Jonathan Richards, Times Online – Original Post Is Here.

On face value, the questions driving research into the next generation of search engines may appear simple enough — “What exactly is this person looking for and how do we guide them to the best information about it” — but the work involved is mind-bogglingly complex and goes to the very fabric of the web as we know it.

Search engines are readily confused. A common example is the keyword “Paris” — does this person mean Hilton, or the one in France, or maybe Texas?. But in every query, and especially as people shift to use more “natural language” in their searches, engines such as Google have to sort through levels of ambiguity. A good way to solve that problem, it’s agreed, is for all objects — places, people, songs, even individual genes — to have a “key”, a kind of unique identifier observed the world over. (In the jargon, this is known as a “universal resource indicator”.) Each time a web page made reference to that object, the code of the page would reference the key. That way engines would know precisely to which object a page is referring. This “semantic” approach to search, as its known, would achieve two things. First it would enable Google to understand the content of web pages with greater certainty, but more importantly, it would allow search engines to extract specific bits of information out of different web pages and serve them up as one “result”, rather than the way it works now, where an engine lists many pages, each of which may be relevant in its own way.

Say, for instance, two scientific papers are published online — separately — which make reference to a particular gene. At the moment, Google has no way of “knowing” whether the two papers are talking about the same gene. If the gene had a key, it could. Search engines would thus be able to draw much more sophisticated connections between information on different web pages.

One challenge — among the many — is how you decide what key will be used to refer to the billions of objects that may be tagged in this way, and that requires some deep “under the bonnet” maintenance on the web, not to mention international consensus — both of which are still very much works in progress.

Bing

Microsoft’s new search offering. The quality of results has improved greatly from its previous incarnation, Live.com. In look and feel, quite similar to Google, but on the results page, there’s a thin vertical line at the end of each result, which, when you click it, shows a more in-depth preview of the content on the results page — helpful for gauging the usefulness of searches. A stream of pictures also rotates behind the home page.

Ask

Ask has a nice “page preview” feature: when you click on a pair of binoculars next to a result, you’re shown a snapshot of the page — a helpful way of steering clear of ugly, cluttered pages. The Q&A tab also tries to pre-empt full sentence questions you may have in relation to your keyword. For instance, if you type “gladiators”, the Q&A tab will give answers (from Yahoo! Answers) to questions such as “Why did gladiators fight?”

Google

Try clicking “Show options” on the left of a results page to get richer results. You can select “Past 24 hours” or “Past week” to display more recent content, or elect always to see images from results pages as well as text. “Wonderwheel”, also under Show options, is a quirky graphical way of exploring topics similar to the one you looked for. A search for “cheese”, for instance, quickly takes you to the related “Cheese Maturing Webcam”, and to cheddarvision.tv — where you can watch cheese ripening in the West Country.

Written by Jonathan Richards, Times Online – Original Post Is Here.