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.

Last year Microsoft launched a new search engine which couldn’t find itself and obviously didn’t want to make the same mistake again.

It seems that the MSN Live Search results for each country have all been hand edited to include the geo-specific version of Bing.com as the top result. You can tell by the fact the URL being indexed is www.bing.com/?mkt=de-de when you search on MSN.de and www.bing.com/?mkt=en-gb when you search on MSN.co.uk

Those URL’s don’t exist and both redirect to a holding page so there is no way anybody would be linking to them. Google certainly isn’t indexing them.

Joking aside I’m looking forward to using Bing, about time somebody started eating into Googles 90+% market share in the UK. Most SEO’s with less than a few years experience probably don’t remember the days of optimising for more than one search engine.

Check out what Wolfram Alpha knows about blogstorm.co.uk.

Today marked the official launch of Wolfram Alpha, a research engine designed to offer instant information about almost anything you care to ask it.

People are calling it a Google killer but that’s like calling Wikipedia a Google killer when the two work perfectly hand in hand. Wolfram Alpha is a tool to give you all the information you want to know about a particular “thing” whether it’s a company, town, chemical element, person or date. Read more >>

Twitter Search is undergoing some interesting changes under the direction of Santosh Jayaram the former VP of Search Quality at Google.

The most exciting change is that Twitter is going to start crawling the content of links posted to index the content of the destination pages as well as the text in the tweet. Read more >>

Forget MSN and Yahoo, Twitter search is the biggest threat Google has faced. Sooner or later Twitter is going to figure out that search is the way to make money but how could they improve it? What would Google do?

Relevance

Twitter search at present is just a list of status updates with the most recent at the top. This isn’t how search engines should work – finding a needle in a haystack is easy, finding the right needle in a haystack full of needles is the hard part and that’s what Google does better than anybody.

The key is to look at the content of a status update and evaluate whether it is actually relevant to the query – if I want information about the latest plane crash then seeing a status update from somebody saying “anybody got an update on xxxxxx plane crash” is useless.

RR (RetweetRank)

Google is built around PageRank and each link is a vote. Twitter has Retweets and replies – the most important status updates get retweeted and replied more than the useless ones.

A really important tweet might get hundreds of retweets and this needs to be reflected in it’s rankings.

TrustRank

Google ranks the BBC and Wikipedia top for everything whether they are right or wrong. A tweet from a twitter user with 20,000 followers should be trusted more than one from a brand new account.

Relevance needs to play a part here too – if Stephen Fry (who has loads of followers but no history of writing about SEO or conversing with people who write about SEO) writes something saying “what the hell is SEO” then his tweet shouldn’t rank for “SEO” . If somebody with less followers always covers SEO their tweets about SEO should be trusted more.

Conversation density

What’s more important, a standalone tweet about a subject or a tweet that comes as part of a wider conversation between trusted users? Twitter needs to be analysing conversation threads to see exactly how important each status update really is.

Universal search

If I write about something and include a link then Twitter should be spidering that link and seeing how many other people are talking about the page. If it’s a particularly important page then Twitter should be pulling the video or image into the main search results using the same format as Google blended search.

If Twitter doesn’t do all this then somebody will.

Bobbie Johnson has an article in The Guardian today asking if Twitter is polluting Google with useless results.

Now, I’m not knocking Twitter (even if I am fed up of reading about it): it’s perfectly fine if I want to share short messages with my friends. But when I’m searching for information on Google, Twitter isn’t necessarily going to give me much value back.

In a way, I suppose, it’s like searching the library for a particular book and – instead of finding the copy you’re looking for – finding clippings of newspaper reviews of it, or discovering a bunch of notes from people who have read it.

I agree with Bobbie – seeing a short message is almost as useless as being directed to a page on Digg rather than the original article. Google needs to change the rules on this and work with partners such as Digg and Twitter.

First they need to learn to consider following the links in Twitter messages and Digg story pages and show users the actual destination page without making them pass through another site first.

Secondly they need to start ranking these sort of sites lower than the original page.

Thirdly they need to work with Twitter to ensure they are indexing the breaking queries and clustering tweets based on keywords correctly. For example if I searched Google during a plane crash then Google should be directing me to the Twitter search results for that query.

Google struggles to find results in real time for the hottest breaking queries but Twitter has that information on tap. Why are they not working together?

A Google Twitter partnership gives the best crowdsourced real time search engine we could ever hope for.

What would you do if your email account was closed down and all your emails were deleted?

This is the situation that users of the Lycos email service are apparently facing next month after Lycos decided to shut down all unprofitable activities. People need to realise that webmail accounts are only as safe as the companies running them. You don’t get any guarantees with a free service.

Lycos is also closing down the Tripod web hosting service and will be deleting all the data and websites still using the system.

Below is a copy of an email forwarded to us by a Lycos email user:

Dear User,

We regret to inform you that our parent company has decided to discontinue all unprofitable activities.

One of the activities that will be discontinued is our E-mail business division. For this reason, we are hereby terminating your account as of 15 February 2009. Currently, we are still working on finding a solution to provide you the service through another provider. If we should succeed to do so, we will inform you within the next 4 weeks. But as this is currently doubtful, we would like to ask you to assume the end of the service.

Prior to this date, you may continue to log in to your e-mail account and receive and send mail as usual. After this date, however, we will close your account and delete all content and access authorizations stored with Lycos in relation to your e-mail account, in accordance with legal requirements.

You will then no longer be able to receive or send e-mail under your e-mail address. The contents of your mailbox will also no longer be accessible. For this reason, we ask that you back up all important data from your Lycos e-mail account in the next few days and switch to another e-mail provider.

Should you still be entitled to services for any additional paid options, we will of course reimburse the balance to the bank account you provided.

We regret this measure and would like to thank you for the trust you have placed in us.

Kind regards,

Your LYCOS Mail Team

Lycos UK Ltd., 35 Vine Street, London, EC3N 2AA, UK
registered in ENGLAND AND WALES | Registration No. 03923511 | VAT number: 756796467

Copyright © 2009 Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Lycos® is a registered trademark of Lycos, Inc.

E-Mail: mail-support-uk@lycos-europe.com | Tel.: 0906 784 4 784 (1£/min.)
http://www.lycos.co.uk

Lycos, the search engine once worth $5.4 billion, has resorted to finding advertisers by searching Google for related keywords.

The email below was sent after somebody searched for “buy a iphone” on Google and found a site of mine on page 5 of the results.

Lycos.co.uk are offering 1 company the chance to appear in the Number 1 Sponsored Link on the right handside of every page on a 12 month tenancy, with unlimited clicks. The keyword IPHONES costs £475. All keywords work on a broad match unless the additional keywords are sold separately. (broad match – every keyword that contains your choosen keyword)

* You can choose any keywords of your choice, if available.

If any keywords are of interest, you can contact me on 0845 020 4337 or via
email.

Kind Regards
Linsay Weller
Adrac Ltd

IP: 82.71.96.158
Referer 1: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=buy+a+iphone&start=40&sa=N

Would Google ever do this?