Posts on State of Search about ‘Search Engines’

Google Update affecting local Australian rankings?

A few reports are floating around these upside down Australian shores that a recent Google update may have rolled out a double whammy impact, targeting both the devaluation of spammy links as well as a direct impact upon location rankings within a particular area.

This second area is of particular interest for me, as it is so different to the European markets. Take the UK for example, although there are definitely changes in search results based on the actual location the search is undertaken from, it is also difficult to pinpoint geographical changes exactly due to the high number of cities within a relatively small geographical area. Here in Australia, this is very different. With only 6 states, and 4 or 5 key cities within the business sector – it should be quite easy for Google to provide the most relevant listing as per geographical location. (more…)

Predicting Trends in Search Cycles

This month I wanted to share some insight into search cycles and the way you can apply lessons learnt from historical search trends to forecast future demand. In particular I wanted to focus on the changes in search behaviours around product life cycles. In this case I have chosen the phenomenally popular Apple iPad as an example.

You can see from the graph below the defined search peaks for the iPad across time. There are big spikes in search activity in the run up to the launch of each iteration of the iPad and also around Christmas time when people want to buy the product as a gift. (more…)

A New Era: Are Google and Bing Embracing SEO?

The wonderful thing about working in SEO is the fact that things are constantly changing – we’re always kept on our toes and the man behind the curtain seems to go to great lengths to keep SEOs at a distance and to keep manipulation of the mighty SERPs to a minimum.

However, amidst a torrent of abuse from some of the more prominent white hat SEOs in the industry of Google for “making liars out of the good guys in SEO“, who have treated content as king, and who have put the user first, it seems to me as though some very serious changes are afoot.

Inspite of my critical view of a number of major developments in the industry and moves by the search giants, I am going to do something that I don’t often do and defend the search engines for a moment. As I have said in the past, it is easy to be critical and it is even easier to get frustrated when you put in the long hours doing what Google tells you is “right” and don’t see the results translate into success in the SERPs whilst others that engage in activities that would not appear on a list of “best practices” from the major search engines continue to benefit. (more…)

FairSearch.org comes to Europe

The American FairSearch.org organisation has been fighting to ‘foster and defend competition in online and mobile search’ for a wee while now. Since its inception in October 2010 by Microsoft and Foundem, many other businesses have joined the FairSearch cause, which is specifically aimed at Google and what FairSearch denounces as Google’s anti-competitive monopolist behaviour.

Now FairSearch has crossed the pond and has started a European-focused branch: FairSearchEurope.org. It has recognised that in Europe Google’s market position is even more dominant than in the USA, boasting market shares in excess of 90% in many European countries, and that there’s a strong case to be made for regulatory intervention to safeguard search neutrality. (more…)

E-Bay Combines Search, Social, Personal and Mobile in One App: Visual Search

Imagine this: You are looking for a second hand car and you spot a type of car you like on the streets. What do you do? You might write down the type of the car, go home and look it up. You then might be able to find it on E-Bay.

Or… you take a picture of that car and hit search and find it on E-Bay. Pretty smart, right? Great search engine who did that! But it is not Google or Bing taking the next step in visual search, it is the auction site itself who thought of this idea. Their newest version of the Motors iPhone app does just that. (more…)

Greplin: Search your Social Timeline

There’s search and there is social search. Usually “social search” stands for search through social media or searching with social elements embedded within the search, think the “x-many people +1 this” in the search results. Since a few weeks ‘social search’ stands for everything which is shared via Google+. At least, if you are logged into Google.com

In the shadow of Google there are a lot of small search engines who each try to beat Google at the social search game. Or at least they try to take a piece of the search pie. Can they be successful however?

“Personal search engine” Greplin is one of the social search engines which tries to grab a part of social search. It looks through your social accounts to find that one message or topic you lost or couldn’t remember who said it. I decided to take a good look at this search engine. To see if it is useful and if it is capable of being a Google competitor. (more…)

Search in Europe: it’s a one company show, focus on the verticals

I’ve always been optimistic about the intentions of search companies and the possibilities for more competition in the European search market. At the beginning of this year I wrote a post on State of Search named What Bing needs to bring to the table in 2011 Sadly at the end of this year I have to conclude search in Europe has even more become a one company show. Nor Bing, nor any of the other competitors like Yandex, Yahoo!, Blekko or Wolfram Alpha has taken even the smallest slice from Google of the search pie. (more…)

Impact of SSL Search

Google has introduced encrypted search per 17th of October. It rolled out initially on google.com

The introduction of this so called ‘making search more secure‘ strategy caused quite a stir and ongoing discussion takes place here, here and in our own State of Search podcast here.

At the beginning the impact seemed to be in the single digit numbers being about 2%-3%. Last week I started to notice a dramatic increase on these numbers, so I decided to do some historical reporting on the percentiles. (more…)

Is MC Hammer Going To Change Search?

In the eighties he was a very successful musician. In the nineties he discovered the Internet and in the first decade of the new century he got successful in “Web 2.0″, the predecessor of Social Media. And now MC Hammer is going after search. Yes. Really.

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco he introduced “WIREDoo”. A search engine which looks at search in a different way (where have we heard that before?).

With his search engine he says he is not looking for a ‘recreation’ of search, but he feels it can be improved. “You can always make things better”. (more…)

Re-friending Google, Dealing with Penalties and Suspension – SMX London Day 2

This was a great session with frank and honest assessments of Google penalties and how to avoid them and if you get them what to do about it. (more…)

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

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