Category Archives: Bing

Ask, Bing, Google, keywords, META tags, Yahoo

The meta keyword tag is dead.

Yahoo! has publically announced it no longer uses the Meta keyword attribute for ranking sites. Apparently they stopped using is a few months ago but today at the SMX East conference’s “Ask the Search Engines: Best Practices” seminar, Yahoo Search’s Senior Director, Cris Pierry, let slip that Yahoo no longer uses the keywords tag when ranking pages.

So is that it for the keyword tag? Is it now just a part of Internet history? Google has never used it, Bing does not support it and now Yahoo doesn’t. Of the major players that only leaves Ask and I can’t find any recent concrete evidence that says they use the tag either. The specifications for HTML 5 don’t include the keywords name although it has been proposed as an addition.

So should you ignore keywords from now on? Yes, unless you’re optimising for a custom search engine for your site or Intranet.

Bing, McAfee Safe Search, Search Pad, Yahoo

New look Yahoo! goes live worldwide!

Although we’ve already had access to Yahoo!’s new look here in the UK and in the US, the redesign and new features are now live worldwide.

At first glance basically everything is purple instead of red. It has a choice of skins or colour schemes to choose from, switch to “compact view” (change the page size so it fits on 800 x 600 monitors by getting rid of the left hand “My Favourites” column) and “Move News To Top”, which moves the headlines from Yahoo! News, The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Mail to the top of the page. According to the BBC the new look is now “the second-largest source of online traffic to the newspaper’s website”. Of course Yahoo! are taking a share of the revenue the traffic generates.

Hovering over on of the “Favourites” in the “My Favourites” list brings up a list of headlines from the site if it’s a news site, you can watch your eBay auctions from the Yahoo front page, see customized sports results and more. Of course most of the content that appears on the portal page is customizable too, but it seems like an awful lot of effort to set up. Personally I go to Yahoo! for search, not to organize my life. According to Yahoo’s senior vice-president for Europe, Rich Riley, surveys suggest that 60% of Yahoo users in the UK want a one-stop shop to organise their life on the Internet. But that’s a survey of Yahoo users, not the general public or the average user. Whilst I applaud Yahoo! for listening to it’s users I think they should be catering for the mass market rather than the 1% of UK search users who use Yahoo. In a word that means fixing it’s search engine rather than investing in skins and customizable home pages.

The new look isn’t powered by Bing yet, as the tie-up between Microsoft and Yahoo is still being scrutinized by the regulators. Even if Yahoo! does begin to use Bing, will it bring back the visitors?

There are some nice features about the new Yahoo search. As well as the list of search results you can also search for related MySpace sites and Wikipedia articles from the left hand column, see related searches (like Google has at the bottom of the page), and of course there are sponsored ads. The search suggest tool is still clumsy and shifts the whole content of the page about which I dislike immensely.

Finally we come to “Search Pad”. I have absolutely no idea what this does at first glance. I can type notes in it. What these notes do I really can’t say. I can re-order them by dragging them but that’s it. I have to have a Yahoo! account if I want to save them, although it does seem to remember your search pad entries as long as your session is valid. After watching the tutorial videos I’m still at a loss to explain why I’d need “search pad”, surely I can just bookmark the results that interest me?

On the plus side, Yahoo! search retains it’s tie up with McAfee Safe Search so you know if a site is safe to visit or not. Unfortunately Safe Search is off by default and you have to enable it in the preferences. Again you need to be signed into your Yahoo! account to make sure the option stays on. I tried to turn Safe Search on, without signing in, and the default preferences say it’s already on yet the icon in the search results says it’s off. Safe Search also relies on user submissions to tell you if a site is safe or not, unlike Google’s malware warnings which are automatic.

So in summary it’s all very pretty and purple, but it’s still not as fast, relevant or as good as Google and all the bells and whistles aren’t going to change that.

Bing, Google, Live search

A review of Bing

Microsoft’s Bing is live and in beta and seems to have completely replaced Live Search across the Microsoft network of sites. MSN still sports a “Live Search” graphic next to it’s search box but entering a query takes you to Bing.

I did a few comparison tests with the beta version of Bing on some of my recent Google queries and compared the results. Overall Bing performed well. Not quite as on the money as Google and unsurprisingly Microsoft owned sites ranked better for some searches than on Google. For example a search for “HTML 4.0 doctype” returns the W3C site first in Google but the MSDN site in Bing with the W3C coming in a lowly tenth place. Bing does give a nice pop-up snippet box next to each result showing the relevant text from the the search result so you don’t have to click through to the site. I can see this ticking off a lot of webmasters if the general public realise this feature is there. It’s not immediately obvious and took me a few searches to spot it.

Bing still has a way to go on blended results from first glance. Using my search history again for an example search I typed “blackberry way” into both Google and Bing. Both return the wikipedia article for the song as the top result but Google then shows stills and links to videos on youtube whereas Bing just shows one standard link in it’s results. Bing’s video search does return a variety of versions of the song though and to my eye is more visually appealing than Google’s by a large margin.

Book searches seem to return far too many Amazon results in Bing. For example: a search for “Shadows of the empire” (a Star Wars novel and video game) returns results for the book, the game, the cast list, videos and reviews from the game in Google but 3 results from Amazon in Bing, 2 from the Star Wars wikia and 2 unrelated results.

Results times seem fairly similar, both engines return their results extremely quickly. I imagine Bing would be slower to load on a slow connection as it uses more images but in these days of super fast connections hardly anyone will notice. Search suggestions on Bing is a bit more limited than on Google but I’m sure that will change as more people use Bing and Microsoft have more data to feed into the suggestion box.

So in conclusion, Bing may look prettier than Google but Google is still king of the castle, for now… Bing is a good step forward by Microsoft and given a few more tweaks and a bit more work may yet challenge Google’s dominance.

Bing, Live search, Microsoft

Introducing Bing!

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer revealed Bing! to the world tpday at the D: All Things Digital conference earlier today and now the Live Search Blog introduces the rest of us to the sound of found: Bing!.

“Today we’re introducing a new kind of search that goes beyond traditional search engines to help you make faster, more informed decisions. It will do this by combining a great search engine (with powerful new features to improve your results for any query), more organized results, and unique tools to help you make important decisions. We think of Bing as a Decision Engine.” says the blog entry.

“Bing is rolling out internally to Microsoft employees worldwide today and will be available to you and your friends in the coming days.”

Personally I’ll be interested to see if it produces relevant results, is easy to use and helps me find things quicker. In other words all the things Live Search doesn’t do!

Bing, BOSS, Google, Hook, Kumo, Larry Page, Matt Cutts, SearchMonkey, Sift, Yahoo

SEO News round up

It’s been a hectic week here at Denial Towers so I’ve not been able to blog about this week’s stories so I thought I’d do a quick round up of the SEO news headline.

Microsoft will unveil their new look search next week at the D: All Things Digital conference before going live at the SMX Advanced conference a week later. Developed under the codename “Kumo” there has been speculation as to what Microsoft will call this new search technology. Will it use an existing brand like Live or MSN Search or even it’s codename, Kumo? Or something else entirely new like Sift, Hook or Bing? Sift.com is owned by someone else and Microsoft’s Sift seems to be a mobile search platform, Hook.com is also already taken which leaves us with Bing. Bing.com is owned by Microsoft but Google’s Matt Cutts posted on Twitter that the US Trademark Office rejected the application due to the fact a similar mark is already registered to Bing Mobile Inc.

Yahoo is also getting ready to revamp their search. Apparently they want to get rid of the “10 blue links” and change to a system they are calling “WOO”, or Web Of Objects” instead of the current “Web Of Pages”. WOO is an attemopt to return “a better representation of the “real world” in search results. In other words: more closely aligning user intent with search results and mapping those to real-world tasks.” and will include multi-media elements.

Yahoo have also been singing the praises of BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) and SearchMonkey (which is now 1 year old).

Google are changing the way Google Suggest works (the drop down that suggests queries as you type). See the Official Blog for more information.

And finally Google founder Larry Page is at today’s Monaco Formula 1 Grand Prix as a guest of Vodafone (and by extension, Ferrari who Vodafone sponsor). Maybe Google are looking at some sort of deal with Vodafone or maybe Mr. Page is just trying to score a new Ferrari!