The much awaited stats for July are out for the search engines. Bing is already in to its second month and it was during July that the consolidation of Bing and Yahoo took place where Yahoo managed to keep its identity in tact. The statistical sample taken by Statcounter is of 1 billion out of which 258 million are of the U.S.

If Bing had to make an impact against Google I think enough time has been given to it although to be a patient person I will give it one more month for the combined might of Bing and Yahoo to assert itself.

The stats are for both the U.S and global, so what do they reveal?

Bing has increased its share in the U.S from 8.23% in June to 9.41% in July. The combined might of Yahoo and Bing stood at 20.36% in July compared to 19.27% in June. So how much did Google fall in the same period – by less than 1% from 78.48% in June to 77.54% in July.

Globally Google maintained its commanding presence at 89.23% in July while the combined might of Bing and Yahoo climbed up from 8.45% in June to 8.77% in July.

These results cannot certainly be said to be earth shattering for Bing. I think for a distinctly long period of time Bing will remain at this level give a percent here are there globally. The effect of consolidation will however be felt only next month that is when it will be known how many Yahoo users have decided to stay on with Bing and how many will have shifted to Google.

Link

http://gs.statcounter.com/

The first smart move that Microsoft had made was to prominently display Tweets as results. But may be it was biting off more than it can chew. Now comes the news that first, Facebook has acquired FriendFeed for $50 million , second it has replaced Live.com its search engine with Bing. Readers remember that Microsoft has 10% share in Facebook.

Facebook is no doubt much improved and less cluttered and more efficient in its search capabilities. In the old Facebook one had to browse through various categories and there was no way to search for shared items and status updates. Now tabs have been provided on Facebook on the left side where you can simply click to find various categories. You can also seach the web and find the results displayed as a filter rather than on your own page.

Hitherto the facility of sharing your up dates was not available to others and Twitter certainly scored over Facebook where you could search for anything on the earth. Now on Facebook you can go to “Posts by Everyone” and find information the same way you do on Twitter. A message on top of the screen will update the results of your query as they appear.

Although, Facebook has made its intentions clear the problem seems to be with the users who are not prepared to part with personal information to “every one”. Facebook is trying to get over this problem by introducing new privacy options.

The rivalry will begin if Facebook succeeds in turning Twitterish.

So, it is still early hours to expect Twitter to react and know how it will fend off competition. But, will Twitter move closer to Google?

The dust hasn’t settled since Bing’s arrival. The stats of the performance of Bing for the month of  July are not yet out. The hurry at which Microsoft has closed its deal with Yahoo indicate that Microsoft has realized that it cannot take Google by itself. The first round really went to Yahoo although share holders did not think so. At least Yahoo has not lost its identity, only its search engine.

You would think Google was quietly watching from the side lines. Well You were wrong. Google has made available what it has code named “Caffeine” – basically new architecture for Google existing under the hood. Google has invited web developers and power searchers to http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ where in they can check out the new hooded machine for its speed, indexing and ranking of the sites and can leave their comments.

From the reactions that have begun to pour in certain things are evident:

• More number of results are being displayed.
• If you Google yourself, your site is displayed on top.
• Twitter at last seems to be getting its due from Google.
• The speed is some thing that you should check with competition but “Caffeine” is definitely faster than Google.
• Nobody will have complaints about Google’s method of ranking but one still has to wait for the word to be out from the Googlers.
• Although not stated as yet crawling will definitely have become faster and this will help in real time search and development of a story as it unfolds.

If you are aware of Microsoft’s Bing Jingle and the winner of it, then you might come across the winner of that jingle MG Siegler for his song I’M Siegler.

Microsoft’s Bing is a Huge property for Microsoft already and the expectations are too high naturally on such a product. Whether its jingle or any other thing regarding BING follows the same trend and there is generally an uproar when such an excited competition ended up with some funny song by MG Siegler. Though MG Siegler won the award of 500$ from MS, Tech Crunch feels that the competition can be better.

MG Siegler on the Other hand felt bad at tech crunch’s lame words at him and released a new follow up video Which is intersting to watch. so have a look at both of them.

Here are those two videos for you.

I personally liked both of the videos.

Microsoft and Yahoo have come to an agreement that will allow Microsoft to compete with Google in a better way by consolidating its market share in search and search advertising. Microsoft will acquire a 10 year license to Yahoo’s search technology and it will power Yahoo Search.

Bing will become Google’s main competitor in search, with a market share of about 28% in the US and about 11% worldwide. After a massive relaunch in May, Microsoft’s search engine didn’t convince many people to switch from Google. Bing’s ranking algorithms have been improved and Microsoft has a lot of interesting specialized search engines including, a great interface for image search and an excellent travel site. But the overall experience does not offer several reasons to use Bing as your main search engine in an extensive manner according to your preferences.

This agreement with Yahoo will create more innovation in search for Microsoft, better value for advertisers and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single firm. The secret to success in search requires both innovation and scale which with the new Bing search platform will create breakthrough innovation and features. This agreement with Yahoo will provide the push needed to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness.

The result of this deal will accentuate Microsoft, which has great technologists and wide network and user base that will have the scale to bring users faster, more useful and more personally relevant search. Competition equals innovation. But with one player dominating 70% of search, that field has been pretty lopsided. This transaction will definitely create a healthy competition that will keep everyone on their toes.
I don’t think scale is the missing ingredient from Bing’s recipe: Google managed to create a search engine that offered great results even when it was just a small project. Google year ending average in 1999 is approximately 7 million searches each day, a roughly 70,000% increase over the 10,000 searches per day that were performed on the Google site in December 1998, according to a newsletter in the year 2000. Microsoft should focus more on innovation by finding new ways to improve search quality and to make the results more useful to the users than trying to create better competition with Google.

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Link

http://www.demotivate.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/bing-vs-google.png

Ever since Microsoft launched Bing it has lived up to its predictions to be a Google Killer. The Hundred Million dollars invested on its advertisement has never hurt them and Bing has generated some significant consumer interest to carve out a niche for itself on the World Wide Web. If you happen to be a website owner, you will also notice that in effect, Bing is beginning to notice you considerably.

Lately, there have been more and more SEO related blogs that have been focusing on Bing optimization and it has crossed my mind, should we be optimizing our sites for Bing as well as Google? It is in fact true that Bing has only been going strong for a short while, but it is definitely going to accentuate full speed ahead and will eventually take over Yahoo.

The following tips are for those users who take Bing optimization seriously:

• Bing favors older domains more: which means that for example there are two domains A and B. If domain A is older than B and both are targeting the same keywords, automatically A will be given higher ranking.
• The titles are the key to higher ranking on Bing: Bing is similar to most other search engines has affinity to keyword rich titles. This means you should really concentrate on SEO when writing blog posts or creating content on them. You must not only ensure that the title to be keyword rich, but it should be related to the content as well.
• Bing mostly favors longer forms of writing: When the content of your blog post, article, or web page has more than 300 words, then you are likely to be ranked higher in Bing.
• You must also ensure that you are letting in the MSNBot to your site: which is nothing but the spider that crawls on your site looking for the keywords and text.
• Linking out App.: In Google your rank is affected by linking out, but in Bing it is not so and so feel free to do so on Bing. You must ensure not to do too much as it may affect your Google Rank. I tend not to worry about that because linking is a natural app of the World Wide Web.

Data Research firms that monitor the number of searches made using a search engine have started releasing their figures. The first one to do so is Stats Counter a Dublin based firm that tracks the data of searches by taking a sample of 4 billion page loads in a month  and that is really a huge statistical sample.

The results are for the month of June for all the three search engines Bing, Yahoo and Google.

What news does it bring in for the harbinger of decision engine. People must be really dumb not letting bing take decisions for them. The number of searches using bing in the month of June from the time of its release rose from 7.8 to 8.2 %. If you take into consideration the figures for April, Microsoft’s share was 7.2%. With all the hue and cry and the publicity spend bing increased the search share of Microsoft by a mere 1%.

The surprise was Yahoo which not only stood its ground but actually managed to better its performance albeit only slightly.

That brings us to Google whose percentage dropped by a mere 0. 2% from 78.7 to 78.5.

We think the stats are self explanatory and may be Microsoft should ask bing to take a decision of their capabilities.

If you have a website and are involved in a variety of online marketing strategies you will have discovered how important keywords are. Google has discovered a tool called ‘Wonder Wheel’ which is a boon for online marketing. You will need to master keywords for search engine optimization, on page keyword density, article titles, Blog titles, inbound linking strategy, PPC advertising and many more applications.

The Wonder Wheel has enhanced the quality of search engine marketing which reduces precious time and produces instant results. Before you think why the Wonder Wheel is so exciting for online marketers let me show you how to find it.

Firstly, type a search query into Google. On the top left page there is a tab that says ‘Show Options’. When you go to the next screen, on the left sidebar, you’ll notice a link that says ‘Wonder Wheel’, click on this! A tree like formation appears with several keywords. The structure of it is similar to that of a mind map. When you click on one of them it will take you to the related links and you can keep searching till infinity. This is very exciting as you can search deeper for more and more excellent keywords including negative keywords. Another exciting application for this tool is to use it to find hot niche markets and you can also use it to organize a site with a lot of content prior to building it.

The Wonder Wheel is a Flash-based interactive visualization that places the main keyword in the center, with related terms around it in a circle. Clicking on a related term creates a new, connected circle with more related terms to graphically allow you to be more specific about your search without having to enter another search query. The terms that you might not have thought of on your own can be found through the wonder wheel.

Actually you’ll get different results each time you click on one of those wonder wheel links based on whether you are logged into personalized search or not. It’s interesting that Google analyzes your search query to determine what links should appear at the spoke of each wheel. The Google Wonder Wheel can help you to discover what you were interested in finding and take you off on tangents to better optimize your blog.

Bing has with pride unveiled its knockout punch to Google or at least it hopes so. Bing will start displaying Tweets of thousand prominent and prolific people. The best thing is Bing wants to showcase this as a part of real time search ( what has happened to the connotation that it is a decision engine?)

I have come across two very interesting comments in a site called “College Humour”. They are 1) The matrix is made of Windows and  2) Bing the easier way to Google.

To this I do not know if they will add “Bing tweets in Real Time”

One thing is that if you want to make a search facility available make it universal – that includes the application of filters not only for time but also for relevancy and quality.

Twitter is a site that thrives on followers. Fortunately, the number of twitter users is limited when compared to face book. But by limiting your search results to only 1000 isn’t Bing putting off the other twitter users?

It is one thing to display the tweets of a person. That is not real time search. It is when you select a topic to search and Bing displays the tweets real time , pertaining to that topic, it is a real time search. Otherwise it is not a search at all.

Debate is veering to search engines (google, bing, yahoo search, ask search) and probably Bing started it by trying to position itself as a decision engine.

Searches are being categorized into “tapping into consciousness” and tapping in to “memory”. We presume that by “memory” it is meant the memory of the web. Real time searches are being equated with consciousness presumably of the web too or is it our consciousness? 

Real time searches as on today is merely updating the results in chronological fashion. That is if your search is for a particular subject. It is true that mere chronological sorting brings in lot of unwanted results too. This can be eliminated by a quality filter. But our consciousness is the sum total of our experiences based on which we arrive at a decision. Merely organizing the results of a search does not help a person who does not have prior information on that subject.

One way of organizing a search of listing the latest occurences after filtering them with a choice of opting to know more about the search and categorizing it in the usual manner.  Another is displaying the pulse of real time searches by indicating the most searched topics of the day and by providing the results.

There is another important method that is tailoring the search to individual preferences which is stored in his history or on his home page. When the individual exercises his option all the latest updates of his favorite sites and favorite topics can be provided under one heading.

The last thing is can the search engines help an individual when he does not know the exact word for his search for e.g Latest technical jargon doing the rounds which he wants to catch up with. Then he may want to know the latest discoveries and theories of the universe. These cannot be categorized by a single word and can be different sites on different subjects under the heading of “Universe”. May be he wants to know the latest singles released by various artistes etc.,

Yes, there is a need for integrating chronological search with memory search. One can be provided as an option to display when the other is searched for.