Microsoft recently launched a new search engine by the name “BING”. It is said to be an up gradation of the live search which Microsoft had earlier. It has gained a lot of popularity since its launch and has been compared to “Google”. But there are a few things that I experienced while using both the search engines and would like to share them with you’ll:

Starting with Bing, must say that it is better than Live search. It has a great user environment as compared to Google. It has a simple white background, which makes it more appealing. As far as search goes, Bing categorizes search results as Videos, News etc. and displays these options as a part of the left navigation, which helps users to directly jump on the desired category result for which search query was made. It tries to include almost all features that Google has, like image search and videos etc. the video search is more fun as the video actually starts playing when you hover your mouse over it. Technically speaking, it has a very good design and a great combination of plug-ins and modules put together – All in all a great user experience.

But I still feel that Google is much better than Bing. The reason being, Google provides more search results as compared to Bing, in fact more than double. Bing includes spell check, where it rectifies the spelling mistakes without user confirmation, where as Google asks the user for confirmation. Speaking from a brand perspective, Google is a much trusted brand than any other search engine. Only a Google logo or a “result provided by Google” tag makes it more trusted by the user. Google has been in this industry for a long time and people trust Google for everything, as said by some – “if you have any doubt, ask Google”.

Bing is a good search engine with lots of potential which would probably grow with time, and could be said, a very good step forward by Microsoft in the search market.

Google’s old keyword suggestion drop down box design -

Original Google keyword suggestion dropdown box

Google’s new keyword suggestion drop down box design -

Another example of A/B testing .

A recent Reuters’ article states that “Microsoft Corp is testing a new version of its online search service internally under the code name Kumo.com.”

The article also states that “The new service was unveiled in an internal memo sent by the head of research at the company’s online services division on Monday.”

The Microsoft memo stated that they believe that the new engine will help improve the quality of results thrown back at a user. It also stated that an explorer pane on the left side of results pages will give access to tools that will help users with their tasks.

Let’s see how this one pans out for Microsoft. Stay tuned for more updates…

Search Engines play a vital role in website promotion. They are the first stop for most people trying to find information, services and products online. Therefore, it is necessary that your website surfaces quickly in search results.

There are number of search engines on the internet, some of which offer a service called “Paid Inclusion”.
Paid URL Inclusion is a search engine marketing technique where you need to pay a specific amount to search engine as an annual fee for your web page to be included in their index.

The question now is, why pay, when most search engines have automated programs called ’spiders’ or ‘crawlers’ that index all the pages on the web for free?
It is true that search engines will find your page and index them with no cost but WHEN? It could take at least couple of months for search engines to finally index the entire website. This is where paid URL inclusion beats Free Inclusion – Speed. It offers faster indexing of your web pages.

Search engines that provide paid URL inclusion services, use an additional spider that goes out and indexes specific pages that have been paid for. Free spiders will find a site, follow the links and index the pages, but it will take some time and you could lose out on valuable traffic but a paid spider will index the pages that have been paid for, almost immediately.

Advantages of Paid URL Inclusion:
Quick Inclusion – after the payment is made, the website is indexed by the spider instantaneously.
Rapid re-indexing – the spider will return to the website very often, sometimes even daily!

Disadvantages of Paid URL Inclusion:
Cost – The biggest disadvantage is the charge. The annual cost for a ten page website ranges from $170 for Fast/Lycos to $600 for AltaVista.
Reach – Another disadvantage is the limited reach of paid URL inclusions. Popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and AOL do not offer paid inclusion. This implies that Paid URL inclusion will amount to only a small fraction of the daily traffic to the website.

In the end, the fact remains that search engines will still index websites whether they are paid inclusions or not. But if you want immediate indexing for your website on AltaVista, Lycos etc then you could opt for paid URL inclusion.

Google has introduced Quotes on the Google News result pages. Searching for a person on Google news now results in a quote attributed to him/her popping up at the top of the search result page.

Some webmasters recently experienced a delisting from the search engines without any good reason. The webmasters had not done anything wrong and their web sites were optimized for search engines. Nevertheless, the web sites had been removed from search engines.

Poorly configured firewalls can block search engine spiders

It turned out that the delisted web sites were all hosted by the same hosting company. More precisely, the web sites were all hosted by a hosting company that used a special firewall software by SonicWALL Inc.

That firewall stopped the search engine spiders from accessing their web sites. Google, Yahoo, MSN and all other search engines that request the robots.txt file couldn’t index the web site anymore because the firewall didn’t allow that:

“An attacker could retrieve robots.txt from the server, then use the contents of this file to discover the path of an unprotected administration interface for the server. The attacker may gain control of the webserver using this interface.

The information gathered from robots.txt could be used for system compromise and control of the web server.” (source)

This is the standard security settings of the SonicWALL firewall and it basically means that your web site won’t be spidered by search engines if you use this firewall without customizing it.

A firewall with these settings will drop the connection to anyone requesting the robots.txt file so that it looks as if the web site is offline. From an SEO point of view, this is very bad for your web site because all good search engine spiders request the robots.txt file before indexing your web site.

What does this mean to you?

If your web site is not listed on search engines although it has many good incoming links and optimized web page content, you should ask your web host if their firewall blocks search engines that request the robots.txt file. Your web host might not be aware of the problem.

I wonder how serious Yahoo was when they re-initiated partnership talks with Microsoft… cause just hours after the official calling off of talks with Microsoft, Yahoo announced a partnership with Google to host and display Google’s Adwords ads on its search engine result pages.

Is that good? Well, for Yahoo it is. Cause Google Adwords is much more popular than Yahoo’s search marketing program. Google Adwords Ads are also more expensive per click than Yahoo ads were. This means that Yahoo may get more revenue per click than their own program was able to generate.

For advertisers, the positive is that Adwords will now be able to give them a much wider audience. On the flip side, the deal makes Google a virtual monopoly in the paid search advertising (popularly known as pay per click) arena.

Again… I think this hasn’t ended and there is more to come! Stay tuned…

Or something like it! I remember watching Bill Gates’ interview long back (Dec, 2005), where he was asked about Google’s business model and about free software and he answered, ” I think, when you use a free search engine (like Google), if somebody is making a lot of money from advertisers, they ought to share it with you.” So I concluded that the day Microsoft decides to go all out against other search engines, it would launch a search engine that would change search marketing dynamics and actually share the revenue from advertisers with users. And I thought, could they actually make that happen?

From the looks of it, seems like Microsoft is close. I believe here is a test version. And they’ll announce a new search advertising model at Advance 08 Conference in Bellevue, Washington today!

Would microsoft go for a pay-per-acquisition model rather than google’s pay-per-click (where users still burn a lot of cash)? Will they really share revenue with visitors? What would the market dynamics be then? And surely Yahoo! would fit in somewhere. Mr. Kevin Johnson (President, MSFT Platforms & Services), we’re waiting for your presentation!

- Archit

In line with my expectations (ref. to my blog post on May 4th 2008 – Microsoft walks away from Yahoo deal) that walking away from the deal was just a temporary ploy adopted by Microsoft, major news papers have today reported that Yahoo and Microsoft have resumed talks in the wake of a shareholder rebellion launched by billionaire investor Carl Icahn.

However, this time the discussions are focusing on a deal short of outright acquisition. Microsoft announced the discussions in a brief statement that it made on Sunday.

The press reported that Microsoft was proposing an arrangement focused only on Yahoo’s search advertising business.

Makes sense doesn’t it? They need to compete with Google and its Adwords program and Microsoft’s Adcenter isn’t really doing too well.

Well, I guess it promises to be a long, exciting and complicated battle, but I still week Microsoft may get Yahoo in the end.

Was just chatting the other day with a close friend and her tag line said, “When in doubt Google”.  I gave this a decent thought and came to the conclusion that Google actually runs our life. We query Google for every small thing, from finding information on a travel destination to looking for that perfect recipe which will make your dinner a class apart.

Surprisingly though, Google always finds a way to give the right results. You can also make an argument that we believe Google is right because we follow it and do not turn to other search engines like Yahoo, Live, Netscape (yes, they do exist) to cross check the results thrown in by Google.

This gave me a thought and I was curious to know how much of the world market does Google dominate. Not surprisingly, I “Googled” for this too. Anyways here are some results as per the Market Share stats

Google is making a killing with almost 78% of the market share (was shocked to know this).  Yahoo is second with 12.21% and MSN is third with just 3.27%.

If this trend continues then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) would have to be soon re-coined as Google Optimization or may be as one of my colleague puts it – Googlization. Think about it???