Posts on State of Search about ‘Google’

SEO for Google vs Bing: How Different are They?

This post is part of our coverage of SMX Advanced London 2011. It is a panel discussing the differences between Google and Bing and how or if we should be optimizing for these differently.

In this post we will describe the talks from Gill Reich, VP of Product Management, at Answers.com and Daniel Ruby, Research Director at Chitika. They took an in depth look at the differences between the search engines.

Demographics

Firstly some basic demographics:

- The biggest difference between the browsers: 87% of Bing users come from IE vs 47% of Google users from IE

- Users of Bing predominately come from the US - 83% vs just under 50% for Google

- Top cities are all US for Bing vs Google where only NYC is the only American city in its top 10 traffic-generating cities.

Bing’s Growth

Yahoo! and Bing are potentially monetising better than Google and seeing significant growth. This double combination is enough to warrant a second look. Users of Bing are generally less tech savvy therefore generate a greater value per impression, this is worth taking into account.

There are varying views on how well/poorly Bing/Yahoo! will do over thecoming months. Some (Mashable apparently) say that at this rate, Bing could potentially surpass Google within the next year.

Sounds more than a little optimistic to me. Others (Henry Blodget) suggest that the traffic acquisition costs are more than three times their revenue as they try to hit scale.

Bing is buying their traffic at the moment, hoping this will pay off in the long run. Whether it will or not remains to be seen.

Portals and Platforms

Take the MSN homepage as an example– not only is there a search box that points to Bing but it also includes footer links and sidebar links that point to search results on Bing.

Looking at upstream traffic to Bing – 21% comes from MSN whereas Google has a wider variety of sources including 17% Facebook followed by YouTube etc.

Bing SERPs are clearly centred around their own properties – e.g. above the fold predominately centred around links back to MSN pages. Google is much more open, it powers the entire web. E.g. Adsense = a large chunk of pages on web are advertising Google and monetising large amount of the web.

Bing is focusing on being a portal. Google a platform.

How Gill came to Understand Search Engines’ Importance

Search engines were previously always used to help you find websites. Now search engines, particularly Google, is how you find information. Often you barely even know you are on another site. This makes it very difficult for webmasters.

People no longer think of search engines as a way to find a website with an answer, they see it as a direct means to an end.

Summary of the talk by Gill Reich

Users are different (Country, browser)
Searches are different (context, number of words)
Engines are different (technology & business models)

Bing has got significantly better but Google’s technology is still in a league of its own. This sets it apart.

A more in-depth look at Bing

Daniel Ruby, Research Director at Chitika.

Why should I care about Bing?

Volume

Yahoo/Bing has become the first volume related competitor to Google in years. Based on traffic generated by search engines – even though Bing serves much more as a portal, it does still drive traffic. 15-18% for Chitika.

Value per impression

Both Yahoo! and Bing users are more likely to click on an ad, so they’re worth more as monetisation tool.

What affects my Bing Postioning?

By and large, it’s similar to Google – content, links etc.

The differences between Bing and Google?

1. Bing does not like forums, 90% of forum results show up further down Bing results than Google results.

Many forum results that Google positions on the front page don’t appear in Bing’s top 100.

2. Bing does not like content farms

Even post-Panda, Bing tends to rank low quality content sites lower than Google positions.

3. Bing is significantly worse than Google at broad matching keywords such as 401k – Retirement Plan

Verbatim keyword matching is much more important for Bing traffic. Be more verbatim in your keyword strategy for Bing, don’t expect it to understand synonyms and context as well as Google does.

4. URL results are ineffective

If a user searches for a url, Google will assume that the user is looking for information on the url and will also show results with that URL as keyword

5. Bing is more likely to show related searches, sites that are similar to that original searched-on url

6. Phone number searches

Bing provides fewer results, assumes that if you don’t find the number you are looking for within the first couple of pages – there is no point in showing more ‘spammy’ types of results.

7. Ambiguous searches

If a search has multiple possible meanings, Bing will err of the side of local results whereas Google is more likely to err on the side of brand.

General observations

Bing more likely to censor ‘questionable’ content such as watching copyrighted tv shows online, finding free essays, cheats etc. It also seems to struggle with parsing PDF files compared with Google.

Summary of the talk by Daniel Ruby

- The number one long-tail results on Google will appear on Bing’s first page 67% of the time, Bing/Google have a lot of fractured results crossover.
- So do I need to focus on Bing? Yes, according to Daniel. And yes again.
- The traffic is growing and it is valuable.

Yandex

Someone who could be a competitor is Yandex. The session at SMX ended with a few words from Andy Atkins-Kruger on his experience of Yandex having visited Moscow and met its founder Ilya Segalovich recently.

Yandex is focusing increasingly on MLR (Machine-Learned Ranking), which some are suggesting is also the preferred route for Bing. Google uses this to a much lesser degree, favouring it only for the Adwords algorithms. This could lead to increased differences further down the line.

All in all, Bing is growing and isn’t about to go away. It can provide valuable new visitors that may not reach your site if you focus all of your efforts solely on Google. It’s worth taking the time to consider it.

(Thanks to Razorfish for the image!)

More posts about Bing vs Google that might interest you:

- Google or Bing: The Royal Wedding
- Searches on Bing More Successful than on Google
- The Bing and the Beautiful
- Bing keeps denying copying Google and accuses Google of clickfraud
- Osama Bin Laden killed: how did Google and Bing respond?
- Why Bing will be trailing on Google and why it should hook up with Apple and Facebook

News near you: local, mobile and personal integrated by Google

Yet again Google has launched a new feature. And again it seems to be part of their bigger strategy which has to lead to a more social like Google: news near you. If you are an Android or iPhone user living in the US you can now go to news.google.com and you will be prompted with a request to share your location. If you accept, “news near you” will be available.

The feature was introduced by Google News Product Manager Navneet Singh. The new service from Google lets you see news from the location your phone tells you where you are. You can personalize it further on the personalization page where you can determine whether you want news on specific topics. (more…)

Facebook Behind Whisper Campaign Against Google

Earlier this week I reported about a “whisper campaign” which had been set up against Google by PR Company Burson-Marsteller, trying to get media outlets to report about privacy issues around Google’s social circle and Gmail. The whisper campaign backfired at Burson-Marsteller when the story came out on USA Today.

At that time the client which had hired Burson-Marsteller to set up the campaign was unknown. We immediately thought of companies like Microsoft, Apple or Facebook. But Burson-Marsteller was smart enough to mention them too in their e-mails as being companies who were dancing around on thin ice when it comes to privacy matters. Now is revealed, and confirmed, that it was indeed Facebook that had hired Burson-Marsteller. The reason? Google tried to use Facebook data for their search results. (more…)

PR-Company Supposedly Started Whisper Campaign Against Google

The world of PR is a strange one. Some might think it is nothing more than sending out a few press releases. It however is a lot more than that. And it also has a dark side to it. PR agencies also are very well versed in lobbying. Trying to get politicians to vote a specific way or trying to get journalists to write about a specific topic. Now that sometimes can get into a grey area. Because the ways to get people to vote or write in a specific direction differ very much.

PR company Burson-Marsteller doesn’t have the best name in the market when it comes to campaigns like this. And it now seems as if they tried to ‘nail’ Google on privacy matters using a so called “whisper campaign” (Wikipedia: “a method of persuasion in which damaging rumors or innuendo are spread about the target”). They tried to get several top media outlets in the US to write news stories and editorials about how Google was invading privacy from Americans using their Social Circle features. (more…)

Google is Testing New Search Result Pages, Opinions on Twitter differ

Google has been making quit some changes to its SERPS in the past months, most of which we reported on here on State of Search. Only a few days ago we highlighted some tests Google was doing.

And just when the ink is dry Google decides it is time for yet another “test”. This time a little bit bigger then the others though, if we can believe our sources but also those on Twitter, which are with a lot more. Many people are spotting a new way of presenting the search results. The comments differ, but in general people think they are ‘ugly’.

The biggest change we can see from the screenshots going around Twitter (I haven’t spotted this in the wild myself yet) are the not-underlined results which we talked about earlier this week, much more “white” on the page and in some cases a dotted line between the results. (more…)

Dutch government discourages Google Maps and encourages the paid version

Now, I’m all for privacy and being open and making people understand of the consequences when it comes to the use of some services, especially Facebook and in some cases Google. But in this case I think there is somebody being a bit to eager.

In the Netherlands, the Local Affairs Office decided to warn Dutch municipalities for the use of Google Maps because of privacy issues. This warning was based on a 68 page counting research which showed that many municipalities use Google Maps on there websites but don’t have any idea about the privacy consequences of that usage. The most remarkable result of the report however is that they advice the municipalities to use not another free service, but the paid Google Maps service, which costs 7000 euros a year or develop a tool for 550.000 euros. Talk about useless spending of public money… (more…)

Eric Schmidt tries to get quotes from Tina Fey

A few weeks back Marissa Mayer had the chance to giggle around Lady GaGa when doing a special interview with her at Google. Last week it was Eric Schmidt’s turn to do the questioning. He talked to US stand up comedienne Tina Fey.

Osama Bin Laden killed: how did Google and Bing respond?

Last week I started with a series in which I am looking at the differences between Bing and Google: which one is actually better? After all, Bing seems to be doing well, although there are some doubts about that. I decided to take a look at the both of them based on current events. So “hot stuff” which anyone could be searching on. The question then is: which one of them handles the current affairs the best? Which one offers me the most relevant results and which one is the most user friendly?

Last week the first comparison was made based on the Royal Wedding. There Google seemed to win it based on the quality of the page in general, but Bing did a better job when it came to user friendliness. Today we can already look at another current event which shows differences between the two: this morning news broke that Osama Bin Laden was killed by US Forces. This off course immediately led to many reactions world wide. I took a look at how Google and Bing reacted. This time not with a video, but in text. (more…)

A good Friday laugh: Google Fail Videos

It is Friday, almost weekend and while the rest of the world is watching the Royal Wedding, you can easily enjoy yourself with a few funny Google Fail videos.

We all know the funny Google suggests you sometimes get, nothing new. Still, it is very funny when Graham Norton points them out.

(more…)

Google or Bing: The Royal Wedding – UPDATE

Since Bing is gaining market share in the US and a little in the UK and we are always complaining that we don’t have the ‘right’ Bing here in Europe I figured it was about time to take a closer look at the differences between the two. So I decided to put up my “user” hat and act as a user searching for current events and compare the two. In the coming weeks I will be trying to compare Google to Bing based on searches related to current events. That way I hope to get a real insight into what the real differences are between the two search engines. Today I made a video about the differences between Google and Bing when it comes to the Royal Wedding which takes place tomorrow in London. (more…)

A Google board meeting got videotaped! (In 1999…)

It’s rare that you actually get to see what is going on within the Google Plex. In some cases you get a peek of what happens after working hours (are there “after” hours at Google anyway?). It is even more rare that you can actually look into a Google Board Meeting.

Yet somebody decided to bring a camera to a regular board meeting which shows some announcements of new employees and the celebration of some birthdays, amongst which Larry Page’s. The video has been posted on YouTube. But before you get too excited: it is a video of 1999, when Google was still a relatively small company, way before Eric Schmidt had even heard of the company.