Bing
Microsoft has today unveiled Bing and it’s probably the most promising search engine of the last few years. Not necessarily in terms of results but because they are actually going to invest in branding with $100m campaign (Google spends around a tenth of this and most of that is on recruitment).
It’s interesting to see a search engine with content optimised to rank for cheap flights. Google steers clear of such conflicts of interest by never trying to rank for commercial queries.
Once nice tool is xRank a kind of celebrity tracking service currently ranking Oasis at the top.
Currently Google Analytics isn’t recognising Bing as a search engine so keyword details are not showing up. As far as I can see the UK results are pretty much the same as the old MSN results so no real changes in algorithm.
Image search for non-celebrities is terrible unless you are Matt Cutts in which case the results are 100% perfect almost as if they were hand picked.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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People will always judge on the quality of results given. The screenshot above shows that the results are not good enough yet with the first two news stories not relevant to Oasis the band.
Bing seems promising but it needs to index more websites to show better search results like Google
Well Bing.com has just been blacklisted by our local authority due to the way that it’s video search works… No more porn vids for kids!
For more info see TheReg – http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/01/bing_hits_uk/
I did some searches on geo-targeted keywords on Bing to get an idea of the local results that Bing serves up and as of now it looks like there is still a lot to be desired. As an employee of a Local Search Agency, I fully understand the importance of accurate local search results as more and more people are searching on a local level.
Still a lot of things for them to Iron out.
Accessed from Work, but got crazy results because I was deemed to be based in Belgium. It gets the location correct when at Home , but there’s still a lot of wierd stuff. Do a search for ‘Mobile Phones’ , and the top listing is a map result for Phones near Mobile,Alabama. It’s fair to say that type of lisitng is relevant to nobody, and on a pretty big term.
I do hope they get things sorted though, as we really could do with the competition
Agree with Aukseo .
I was searching for “Kingfisher” on Bing, which is quite popular airline in India. Look at the top 10 websites the official website is missing from top 10!!
http://www.bing.com/search?q=kingfisher&go=&form=QBLH&filt=all
It clearly show that algo is not that good. If you type the same keyword on Google you will get the airline website on no -1.
Bing still need to do alot of things. Old algo in new label is not going to work anymore.
I think Bing is great. It certainly does me some good when people are looking for camping France . Can’t say fairer than that.
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June 5, 2009 at 7:22pm