A Bing Overview. Part 1: Are the Features Any Good?

After making a concerted attempt to use Bing exclusively for the last week or so, there are a lot of things about Bing that are excellent. In Part 1, the good and bad features of Bing will be highlighted. Part 2 will focus on the impact Bing has made in the month or so since its launch.

Bing is Microsoft's latest attempt to take up arms against a sea of troubles in capturing more market share in search is Bing, its self-titled 'decision engine'.

The Explorer Pane - Bing reserves the left hand side of the search page for additional links, divided into three categories, Quick Tabs, Related Searches and Recent Searches. I found the Explorer Pane links more useful than not most of the time, especially the search history feature which saves the last 5 searches. Microsoft estimates that up to 50 percent of searches are repeated.

Preview Video in Browser - Bing's most discussed feature is probably its best. When SERP's include a video result, flying over the result with the cursor plays a preview of the clip without leaving the search page. For integrated videos from popular services like YouTube and Hulu, choosing the result plays in a larger in-browser window, also without leaving the search site.




Bing Travel - Bing Travel excels on two fronts. When searching for travel between two cities, Bing will offer its travel results first. For my sample search of New York to Boston, clicking the first Microsoft featured result promised, "Bing Travel utilizes over a billion airfares on a daily basis to bring you Price Predictors, and now we're using that data to uncover cheap flights from New York to Boston every day."

Incorporating technology from Farecast that Microsoft acquired a year ago, the results page will also create a graph showing the likely fares for the next 30 days. Bing will also recognize airport abbreviations, especially useful for cities with multiple airports.

The only downside to this feature is that it's currently available for only the most popular cities. Cities like San Jose and Las Vegas don't make the cut, but flights in and out of San Francisco from most big cities do. Also, while there is a link to Bing Travel from the main page, it is not one of the tabular links across the top.

Scroll for Images - Click on an image search, and Bing allows you to scroll through the first 500 results or so without leaving the search page. Flying over each image created a larger thumbnail, along with a link to the source, the original image size, and an invitation to refine your search by choosing similar images. On the left panel you can specify image size, layout (square, wide or tall are the default options), color, style and type of image for personal photos.

Real Time Search - Bing has also taken the lead in real-time search. First, Bing is giving more primacy in their search results to breaking news. A search for Brett Favre has news about his potential comeback as the top three results. Google’s results go to his website and Wikipedia. A recent TechCrunch review found pretty much the same thing.

Bing is also indexing and displaying Twitter posts in an innovative and informative way. As discussed in this great John Battelle article, for a select group of Twitterati, Bing will tease their profiles by posting their picture, Twitter username, and two most recent tweets in real time at the top of the search results page. Clicking “see more tweets” delivers you directly to their Twitter page. To this feature are having to structure the search query as “[name] twitter” or “@[name]”. Also, tweets are not indexed and displayed by Bing instantaneously, but rather more likely at some sort of interval, perhaps up to an hour. Looking at the Bing and Google SERPs side-by-side, the Bing SERP is definitely more attractive.

While indexing a few celebrities’ tweets is just the tip of the iceberg of search nirvana promised by the potential of real-time search, it is an area where Google and Microsoft are both starting on roughly equal footing. Continuing to index and display real-time, relevant search results will help Bing gain marketshare.

THE BAD


Preference for Microsoft Brands - Just when you were thinking "Hey, this Bing sounds pretty good", Microsoft bollixes it up with a move that is classic Redmond.

Numerous articles, including this one in CIO magazine, have noted that Microsoft is shading Bing results to give preference to its products and partners. In Google, using the search term virtualization, VMware, the market leader, is the first link on the results page after Wikipedia. With Bing, it is not on the first page of results, with Microsoft's Virtualization product ranked third, and a related search dedicated to "Virtualization Microsoft".

A search for smartphone had similar results. On Bing, the search had 'Quick Tabs' truncating the results to four links. Microsoft was at number two. On Google, Blackberry and HTC were the second and third results, respectively. Microsoft.com was seventh result.

Quick Preview - The concept of this feature is more interesting that its execution. An orange dot is to the right of the search result. Flying over it generates a few paragraphs of text about what the site is about and other links from the results page. Generally, the information is scraped from the site, ignoring the Description META tag (making text-based content on the site critical as per usual).

In practice, the information wasn't any more relevant than the standard description. Some sites did not have a Quick Preview. Sometimes it took a second or two to load. Sometimes the preview pane was blank. It was also especially aggravating for me as I usually position the mouse cursor around where the quick preview pane would pop up to scroll through the search results, requiring me to move it further to the right to avoid getting an epilepsy-inducing display of windows consistently opening and closing.

Quick Tabs - With Quick Tabs, Microsoft stretches the SERP page, and inserts its own "categories" of results. For instance, my search for '30 Rock' was broken into Quick Tabs for Theme Song, DVD, Characters, Wallpaper, Quotes, etc. It then displays the top 3-4 SERPs for each category. If you want to more results, you click the "See More Results" link, which brings up a full page of links, not including the links on the prior page.

Why wouldn’t searching for 30 Rock Wallpaper or DVD’s just be a related search? The longer SERP pages were an improvement, considering the primacy of the blended search results, but I hated having to scroll down to see if one of the three results were on the page, and then having to click through if it wasn't. Also, if you wanted more results, the top results were not retained on the “more results” page – instead those results were the 4th through 13th results. If you chose to use one of the ‘Quick Tabs’ as a link and clicked directly through, you’d get the same page that had already excised the top 3 or 4 most relevant results. The categories weren't always helpful (wallpapers?). Moreover, the same resource page could be used to populate numerous categories. In the 30 Rock example, Wikipedia featured prominently in 6 of the 7 tabs.

Conclusion

Bing has some promise. I think it has surprised a lot of people with its feature set, and while it is not going to topple Google any time soon, hopefully it will spur more innovation in the search space. And Bing certainly has seemed to caught the attention of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Titled “Fear Grips Google”, this New York Post article says: “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.”

Bing’s market share is also growing. While it’s too early to make any reasonable predictions of long term success, in the week ending June 12, 2009, Bing’s worldwide market share has increased from 13.7 to 16.7 percent, per ComScore. Even though it has Google worried, Yahoo should be even more worried. On the U.S. side, StatCounter reports that Bing has eaten into Yahoo’s market share even more, moving from 7.2% of the search market to 8.3% in the two weeks since its debut. Yahoo’s share is down to 11% with Google at just over 78%.

Author: Chris Pantages with contributions by Laura Reichle, WebMama Team Members

Video and Search - Overview Presentation Stanford 2009

Why do Video??? This presentation provides some basic information about leveraging the interplay of search and video for direct marketing and branding. It was presented at the Internet Marketing course at Stanford in May 2009.

Video and Search - Overview Presentation Stanford 2009

View more OpenOffice presentations from Barbara Coll.

Wave New World: Executive Summary of Google's New Ambitious Product

What might email look like if it were invented today?
By Chris Pantages, WebMama.com SEO Expert

During its I/O event, Google introduced its answer to that question, Google Wave. Wave is an extraordinarily ambitious communication and collaboration tool. Wave is an application with elements of email, instant messaging, social media, wiki based collaboration, and, if that weren't enough, allows for integration of an almost infinite number of online applications.



Wave was developed by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the team behind Google Maps. The application starts much like your current email inbox, with contacts in the left panel of the screen and the messages taking up the center. To communicate, you initiate a ‘Wave’, opening a dialog box into which people you want to write to are added. If the recipient(s) have their Wave application open, your Wave is communicated to them instantly, letter by letter, in real time, instead of waiting for the sender to finish the message and click send. Said Lars, "In our experience, a lot of time in IM is spent waiting for the other person to press 'Done'".

Even more unusual, the Wave can be interlineated with a response, anywhere within the message, at any time. Other recipients can be added at any time, and their responses can be inserted at any point. Multiple people can comment in a Wave simultaneously. While this sounds like it could be confusing, each response from each different person is distinguished by a border specific to that user. Wave's are cataloged in your inbox and anytime anyone adds to it, it is highlighted and moved to the top of your inbox queue. If you want to break off from a multi-person wave into a private conversation, this, too, can be conducted as part of the same Wave.

Probably the most amazing feature of the application is the feature called "Playback". As anyone who has tried to follow an already developed email thread knows, with multiple parties arguing back and forth and attempting to integrate other references, it can be frustratingly hard to follow. Playback solves this problem by allowing any person participating in the Wave to rewind it to any point and view it comment by comment.

Wave can also be used as a collaboration tool. Wave even allows people to collaborate on the same Wave simultaneously, showing the changes on every users screen in real time. These changes can also be unwound with Playback. At any point, the Wave can be exported or a new one created.

But, wait, there’s more! With Wave, you get not only a product, but also a platform. Open APIs allow developers to build new extensions that work with Waves. Online games, polls, and integration with social media services like Twitter and Facebook were examples from the presentation, but the open-source nature of Wave allows developers to built virtually limitless extensions. Wave’s can also be published and embedded virtually anywhere on the web, allowing the Wave to be crawled and integrated into Google’s search engine.

Finally, because of the open protocols of Wave, it can be integrated into organizational networks completely independent of Google using federation. Federation allows users to take the application and tailor almost every aspect of it, even the user interface. As an example, say WebMama decides we want to adopt Wave to carry our own internal messages. Because of the open protocols, we can design our own Wave system, and all the messages are kept on our own servers, completely independent of Google. In this way, it is possible developers can even improve on the version of Wave distributed by Google.

It’s difficult to completely wrap your head around all the possibilities and permutations of Wave. Google has certainly hyped it as the next big thing. If it has a weakness, it is that it seems that its user base is limited. Wave targets those who currently use email as a collaborative tool, mostly high-tech workers who use it as part of their job, or as another social media tool to help people keep in contact with one another. In order for it to be successful, it needs to be more widely adopted. As one of Wave’s developers said, “email is the most successful protocol on the planet.” It’s going to be hard to replace it.

During the presentation, the brothers Rasmussen frequently mentioned the product is still in its infancy. In the interest of keeping this post short, I’ve only scratched the surface of Wave’s capabilities and features. Wave will debut later this year. It is possible Google has created the next big thing – an application that revolutionizes email, instant messaging, and, using Google Apps, challenges Microsoft Office and Sharepoint. It remains to be seen if this brave new world will ever be realized.

Other resources

Official Google Blog – includes a link to the nearly 90 minute keynote presentation. Also has links to the Developer’s Blog, Open Federation Protocol, and Open API’s for developers.
Sign Up for Google Wave – be among the first to get Google Wave.
GigaOm’s article tempering the enthusiasm for Wave.

Google Squared: Toy or Tool

What Is It?

One of the most interesting new developments to come out of Google Searchology was the unveiling of Google Squared.


Google Squared is a new search tool that renders the results in spreadsheet form (“squared” refers to squares populated by the Squared search). Each "square" of information is independently sourced from Google results. Click on a cell, and you can go directly to the site providing the information.

With every search query, Squared will construct a box with headings germane to the search. Always beginning with “Item Name”, a search for ‘sports cars’ might have column headings for manufacturer, horsepower, price, and mileage, while a search for ‘New York Hotels’ might have headings for location, room cost, hotel size and amenities.

After the squares have been populated, you can add items to both rows and columns, either by choosing among pre-populated selections, or by entering free text. You can also remove columns and rows that are not relevant to your search. Typically, seven results make up the initial square. You can get more results by using the “Add next 10 items” link at the bottom of every square.

By using a feature "Add to this Square", additional searches can be compiled in one square for evaluation. Using your Google account, squares can be saved for future use and also shared.

Strengths

Squared is a comparative search engine. On one front, it competes with Wikipedia to the extent people use Wikipedia to find comparative information or lists of things - U.S. Presidents, Biggest Movie Opening Weekends, Worst Natural Disasters in U.S. History, etc. The flexibility to add and remove columns and rows gives the user the ability to tailor very specific queries. While still in its infancy, if Squared evolves to interpret and resolve searches with the insight and precision of a Google internet search, there are grand possibilities.

One such possibility is that Squared could be the world’s most powerful price comparison engine, unlimited by industry. The business models of companies like Pricegrabber, Expedia, or Rent.com are based on providing comparative price results and charging vendors to be featured in their listings. Currently, Squared search results are far too general to be used for this purpose, but the structure of Google Squared certainly lends itself to be direct competition with these services.

Weaknesses

As a comparative search engine, it is by definition limited by searches that have a comparative element. Searching for a specific product or person returned mostly irrelevant results.


In a separate search for ‘U.S. Modern Art Museums’, a search Squared should excel at, Squared returned results from the Netherlands, the U.K., and had headings for type and price. Columns and rows added with free text frequently rendered ‘no value found’ results. Also, Squared does not allow you to sort the results in any way.

SEO for Squared

Presumably, Google will use the same relevancy factors as they use in Google searches to determine how to populate the Squared searches. Based on a search for ‘San Francisco Hotels’, the ‘Description’ snippet was pulled from the first descriptive paragraph on each respective site. One site without any copy had its menu pulled into the snippet. There is no secret to optimize for Squared. The best strategy is to have an SEO friendly site, with relevant content and keywords and phrases used in context on your front page.

As far as applications for Search Engine Optimization, Squared can offer some insight into which results Google feels are most relevant for certain searches. Again, though, this is qualified by Squared’s limitation of only generating relevant results for the most basic of searches. Squared has potential, but right now it’s more of a fun diversion than an analytic tool.

Other Resources:

Official Google Blog - Google Squared release announcement and more details
Search Engine Journal - Want More Organized Search Results? Google Square It.
SEO Roundtable - Google Squared Is Live: What SEOs & Searchers Need To Know
eBrandz - Google Squared Becomes Live With Mixed Results

Thanks to Chris Pantages, a WebMama Team Member, for providing his prospective on the subject of Google Squared. More to come from Chris on Google Wave. Stay Tuned.

BING - Quick Comments

BING is game changing for Google as I believe Microsoft may have leaped them in search quality.

BING takes what Google has shown only in the blended search navigation bar and in 'show options' option, and puts the right information on the first page of results. Microsoft, in BING, has categorized into obvious buckets what you would like to see when you do a search. It has uncluttered the page giving you not only what you want to see about the keyword but provides you with a way of interacting with that 'keyword'.

And if you want to interact with UPS to track a package then search for UPS on BING and you get the track package option in the search results - no hidden short cuts, no 9 other results. http://cli.gs/bing-results


If you want to go to southwest airlines and use search to get there, then search southwest on bing. You get the top results for the site. You get Southwest's navigation (top left column of page). You get related searches and similar sites (listing competitors primarily). You get ads. And you get the customer service number - brilliant. And what you don't get are all the other results, unless you want them - a clean page with a ton of white space.

Does this change the game on SEO? The methodology at my company has always been clear - don't let the search engines dictate what you want them to display. That still holds true. There are three things that continue to need to be applied to sites in order to ensure visibility:
1 - make sure your site is indexable
2 - make sure you TELL the search engines what pages are the ones you want displayed in the secondary links through internal and external linking
3 - optimize EVERY online media asset that you control, on and off the site

All opinions welcome.

80+ Online Resources for the Digital Enterprise - Posted

The WebMama Team recently posted an update to the toolbox on webmama.com.

80+ Online Resources for the Digital Enterprise

There are a plethora of tools available on the Web to help you develop and optimize your Web site, and during this miserable economy, it’s especially important to have all the tools, tricks and tips at hand and easily accessible.

That’s why we’ve created this list of over 80 online, free resources to make your life easier. You’ll find everything from general site research tools, to analytics, to online marketing, to SEO, to search engine marketing, to social media monitoring, to technical performance; many of which can be used for competitive analysis, search visibility and traffic growth.

We will continue to expand this list, so comment on this blog post and include your favorite top free tool that will help with discovery and management of digital enterprise projects.

If you are a 'digger', please consider digging the page. Thanks.

Google Putting Shopping Results on Right Side

Just a little proof of Google moving shopping results to the right column above the right side ads. This takes the shopping ads out of organic, thus freeing up visible space for other listings. It also pushes the, what I call , the "wannabe ads" (as in, I wannabe across the top ads) down the page. All comments welcome on how this helps them make money (when shopping results are free) or is it finally the day when Google will start charging for Google Product Search, affectionately known as Froogle?

CANONICAL LINK ELEMENT – Definition & Practical Uses

CANONICAL LINK ELEMENT – Uses of Tag and VMware Communities Case Study
by Chris Pantages – WebMama.com

In short, “A canonical tag is a simple piece of HTML code that you insert into the section of a duplicate page, letting the search engines know that they are on a duplicate page and they need to find the original content elsewhere, and guide them there.” (Daily SEO Blog)

Matt Cutts, head of the Google Webspam team, consistently refers to it as the Canonical Link Element, but the popular name seems to be the canonical tag. The tag itself looks something like this:

link rel="canonical" href="http://www.website.com/original-content.html"

The value of the tag is that duplicate pages that serve up duplicate or nearly identical content confuse search engines and risk siphoning page popularity away from the main or “canonical” page. By using the canonical tag, website developers can ensure search engines are seeing the original page (the parent page) and not numerous, identical, or almost identical pages – which could be possibly a sign of spam or take up valuable space in search results.

The tag goes only on the duplicate page – and instructs the search engines to redirect any link and content metrics to the original page. In this way, the effect of the canonical tag is the same as a 301 redirect. The canonical tag must be entered on each duplicate page you want the search engine page value redirected.

Unlike a 301 redirect, the canonical tag can only redirect the page popularity within one domain. Also, the canonical tag does not redirect visitors.

The pages themselves must be identical or nearly identical. There is no need to use the canonical tag if your site does not have a structure that allows for users to find the same content through numerous paths, or you have addressed this possibility already by setting the preferred URL in Google Webmaster tools, your CMS, or any other program.

It is part of the WebMama methodology to never leave it up to the search engines to decide what pages achieve high visibility in search results. The canonical tag can help direct the engines to the parent or main page.

All major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask) have agreed to honor the tag.

Uses for the Canonical Link Element

Basic Uses

The most basic use of the canonical tag is to mask systemic differences in a site’s URL structure. The canonical tag can be used on the non-preferred URL to transfer the visibility to the preferred URL.

www.example.com vs. example.com
http://www.example.com vs. https://www.example.com
www.example.com vs. www.example.com/print (for “print only” versions of pages)

It can work between secure and unsecure pages.

A preferred location can also be addressed in Google Webmaster tools and Yahoo Site Explorer. These preferences can also be expressed in a sitemap.

Advanced Uses

The primary use for the canonical tag is for pages that have unavoidable duplicate content issues:

• You have different landing pages (a/b testing, etc) for the same content
• Different URLs depending on the path you take to get to a page. For example:
  - A site that generates different URL’s for products based on “sort by” choices
  - Pages that allow breadcrumbs to alter the URL – different paths create different URLs for the same terminal page.
• You add tracking codes or session ID’s to track the user’s path through the site, therefore resulting in different URL’s for each parent page
• In community discussion forums, replies/comments to each thread/question may be set up to look like separate files while the content is almost identical. This leads to lots of pages that look like duplicate content.

Case Study: VMware Communities –
http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer?view=discussions

The VMware Communities website has an architecture that unfortunately generated duplicate content, due to the fact that "thread" pages include a number of messages, and each of the individual messages were duplicated in a "message" page.

A discussion thread has a URL like this:
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/208441
has 3 replies like this:
http://communities.vmware.com/message/1243852#1243852
http://communities.vmware.com/message/1243992#1243992
http://communities.vmware.com/message/1244024#1244024

VMware decided to implement the canonical tag to the thread URL and each of the message URLs in order to tell the engines explicitly which page was the main/parent page – in this case, the single thread page. It was an easy implementation -- just a small amount of code to calculate the /thread URL for each message, and then adding the one line to the section of each page. It appears it took less than four days to implement in Google.

Miscellaneous Items

The original page URL should be an absolute URL as a best practice.

Per Google, the canonical tag is not a directive but it is “a hint that we honor strongly. We'll take your preference into account, in conjunction with other signals, when calculating the most relevant page to display in search results.” Canonical tags can be chained (e.g. page 3 refers to page 2 which refers to page 1 → link power from pages 2 and 3 go to page 1). This practice, per Google, is not recommended but permitted.

Some CMS systems already have plug-ins that allow you to specify canonical pages from the front-end. Drupal, Wordpress, and Magento already have plug-ins. If the tag gains traction, expect there to be more.

Other Resources

SEOmoz has one of the best summaries/articles.

For the more intrepid, Matt Cutts' Blog has a link to a 20-minute video he did explaining the tag and the slides he uses as part of the presentation.

Insightful Sitelink Results: Phrase From Blog, Result from Website

Like all companies should, I track the reputation of my brand on the search engine organic, paid, twitter, video, facebook, etc results. I especially look at Google.com for the search keyword webmama.

Recently the sitelinks changed. The pages that each link points to did NOT change but the phrase that appears in the list did. Two of the sitelinks now show phrases from a blog postings of mine at blog.webmama.com but point to the same page on www.webmama.com that they previously did. [The blog posts do link into the same page as well.]

What used to be nice, clearly worded link text is now weird to searchers I am sure (see image below). When I first saw the new links, I did a search on Google for the phrase: webmama 'present in front of an audience'. This turned up a blog post from July 2007 posted about the now extinct SES Latino conference. The link in the blog post said exactly that 'present in front of an audience' and it linked to the speaking page on my website.

The other link that changed, much to my chagrin, was the SEO audit link. I used SEO in lower case in a blog post in March 2008 and that is what Google picked up. The blog post also appeared in blogcatalog.com with exactly the same text. I have since retroactively changed the blog post wording to capitals and am waiting to see how long it takes Google to update the site link. I am always watching traffic to see if I lose ground on clicks to the audit page.

New Sitelinks:


Old Sitelinks:

How I found the link text that was showing up in the sitelinks:

WebMama Team Expands

I am thrilled to announce two new additions to the WebMama Team: Amy Middleton and Chris Pantages.

Amy joins the team bringing with her a deep understanding of the opportunities of Paid Search campaigns for all WebMama clients. She will specialize in keyword expansion, ad creative testing and budget management through bid optimization.




Chris brings a wealth of experience in all aspects of technical Search Engine Optimization (SEO). His knowledge of how search engines 'see' sites, whether it be from the infrastructure, design, domain usage, or outside factors, he will be a great asset to clients who want to increase traffic from search engines.



Our customers, and future customers, will find that these two are great additions to their account team.