At the start of June Microsoft launched its new search engine, named Bing. Supported by an extensive advertising campaign in the US, Microsoft are hoping this updated version of their search technology starts to win market share back from Google. Bing is being positioned as a ‘decision engine’, which Microsoft hopes will “empower people to gain insight and knowledge from the Web, moving more quickly to important decisions”. But how does it compare to Google?

Bing incorporates some useful new functions, such as the new Explorer Pane. This includes Quick Tabs that break searches down into Web Groups relevant to the user’s search query. Although the Explorer Pane can be useful, the Quick Tabs often steers users to Microsoft services such as Bing Shopping, so it’s worth being suspicious of any search engine that habitually gives its own links precedence over others.

Bing’s results are also separately categorised, but this leads to a lot of scrolling down the page and seems redundant when there’s already the Explorer Pane to focus search results by categories. Both Bing and Yahoo! now display instant results in alternative formats to that favoured by Google’s “ten blue links” approach. Its Quick Preview feature gives you a text-based synopsis of the pages displayed in the search results and Instant Answers gives responses to questions such as currency conversion, weather forecasts and more. However, an issue with the Quick Preview feature is that it can take too long for boxes to pop up with text.

The layout and look of Bing’s new image and video search is good and the search-refining tools are easy to access. Microsoft has also added advanced technology to search queries involving travel and buying, through the purchase of Farecast in 2008. It is a useful function that compares the best deals for airfares and hotel rooms, although its level of accuracy is, as yet, unknown.

Overall, Bing doesn’t offer a great leap forward in search technology and results but it does make some progress by focusing on improving the consumer areas of travel, shopping, products and health. The new search engine is a great start with some useful functions, but Microsoft still has work to do, as the results don’t seem to be as intuitive as with Google. For example, it doesn’t personalise your results according to your IP address, like Google does.

So, as usual with Microsoft releases, Bing has potential but isn’t fully completed yet and it will only manage to convert Google users once it performs its ongoing tweaks and improvements to demonstrate more relevant results, presented in a better way. The US version of Bing is currently slightly different to all the other regional versions, from the Home Page image through to some of the functionality, although this is expected to be rolled out to all versions at some point.

More details about Bing can be found here. If you’d like to know more about Bing and how your website can rank on this search engine, please contact us.

Last month also saw the much anticipated launch of Wolfram Alpha, the new “computational knowledge engine”. There were the inevitable comparisons to Google, but the creator of this new search tool – physicist and software entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram – has discouraged these types of comparison as the new website serves a different purpose. Regardless of this, it’s an impressive new resource.

Despite all the press hype, Wolfram Alpha⁸ isn’t a traditional search engine. You can’t use it to find any type of web content online, but instead it can be used whenever you might be looking for a direct answer to a question. Stephen Wolfram has said that the site’s brain is built on content sites like the CIA World Factbook, US Census reports, Wikipedia, and “about nine-tenths of what you’d see on the main shelves of a reference library.”

The Home Page of the site provides example searches that can be done on Wolfram Alpha, plus there is further page of examples⁹ to give users the idea of its strengths. The team behind this search service have done well to collate all the data that it draws upon, but it’s only a small fraction of what’s available on the whole of the web and it may prove to be initially confusing or disappointing to people who are now so used to Google to find information online.

Wolfram Alpha’s main target audience will be mathematicians, engineers, and scientists – as well as students or journalists – because it’s based on Wolfram Mathematica, a software package that can do complex calculations. And being a “computational knowledge engine”, rather than a pure search engine, there are 5 main things that it can do better than traditional search engines, namely performing complex queries; localisation; precision; calculation and comparisons.

This is its main advantage, in that is can make calculations on the fly and present results based on the requested search. It can solve difficult equations and makes decent graphs for lots of specialised enquiries. This can also be its ‘Achilles heel’ however, as it encourages specialised search queries and it takes a bit of practice learning how to phrase queries so the engine understands the input.

Although it’s still early days and will surely improve, it’s currently too picky about syntax and not intuitive to work with. For example, if you enter a query it doesn’t understand, it just returns the text “Wolfram Alpha doesn’t know what to do with your input.”

Therefore despite exhibiting some interesting new technology, Wolfram Alpha isn’t intended to revolutionise search engines. Instead, it aims to add a useful new layer to them, not by trying to beat Google at its own game, but by complementing the traditional search engines and providing an alternative, specialised service to try bridging the gap between search engines and reference libraries.

If you’d like to know more about this new search engine, please contact us for further information.

Many of the trends likely to have an impact in 2009 have already started, but what are our predictions for some of the key developments this coming year?

1) The economic slowdown focuses attention online: there is little doubt that the economic impact of the ‘credit crunch’ in 2008 will have a significant impact on business in 2009, particularly in the US and Europe. Progressive companies will still need to maintain and grow their business in the face of any downturn and therefore even if marketing spend is cut back, the focus on online marketing will be greater, due to the measurability and proven cost-effectiveness of this form of advertising for many businesses. Search advertising will still see an overall growth in spend and market share of online advertising and despite some companies withdrawing from this sector, many others will put more spend into this targeted advertising to support their business.

2) Analytics becomes more mainstream: partly because of the widespread uptake of Google’s free Analytics tool and partly because of the greater need for advertising spend to be effective in 2009, the use of website statistics or analytics is expected to become more common, even for small companies. However, the interpretation of the data and the way that understanding can be used will still be the most important aspect of this trend, but companies can now access much better data on their online activities which in turn can help to improve their website and marketing strategy to get the most from their online spend.

3) Yahoo won’t survive in its current form: it seems inevitable that Yahoo’s ongoing saga that was the source of much news coverage in 2008 will come to some sort of conclusion in 2009. Whether this is with Microsoft eventually coming back on the scene and buying Yahoo’s search business, or some other form of takeover by another leading online brand, it’s likely that Yahoo won’t be able to survive the next 12 months in their current form, despite – or maybe because of – the change in their CEO. It would be a shame for Yahoo to lose more search market share, as Google needs a stronger competitor, but with the economic problems in the US, it’s hard to see Yahoo surviving much longer as a key player and we can expect more developments here sooner rather than later.

4) Video becomes the new marketing tool: as mentioned above, with the growth and impact of ‘universal’ search, video is now playing a more visible role within search and in 2009 this is likely to see a bigger impact in the business sector. Companies need to think about ways they can effectively use video to drive traffic and new business to their website, as it is becoming a more widespread medium and one that can play a bigger role within search and advertising channels. The ‘optimisation’ of video will be as important as the production if the effort of creating videos is to reap the rewards expected, particularly against the massive growth of user generated video content on sites like YouTube, but the creative use and marketing of videos will become more mainstream this year.

5) Reputation management becomes a core service: we’ve covered this issue before, but with the increasing growth and focus on user-generated content sites – such as review sites, blogs and comments on social networks – the need for companies to monitor what is being said about their business and brands, and to respond effectively to that content, will become a bigger requirement in 2009 as more businesses realise the potential dangers as well as the advantages of this trend. Online reputation management will therefore become a service in much demand from PR companies and search engine marketing firms, as web content is monitored and responded to in a more effective manner.

These were our 5 predictions for 2008 that were made in January last year, together with a review of what actually happened:

1) ‘Universal search’ becomes a significant optimisation issue: the inclusion of all forms of search results – such as images, videos, news or maps – within the main search engine listings has become more prevalent over the year, particularly on Google. This has created many opportunities for companies to achieve visibility within the search results in new and more creative ways. Local business listings have been the most effective method for many companies who target a localised area, so much so that Google has had to control some of the more extreme methods by companies trying to get listings within these results. Video sites like YouTube continue to attract huge traffic volumes and videos do appear within Google’s search results, when applicable. Google has also introduced new formats for PPC adverts although these remain limited to the content network and have yet to be offered within the main search listings.

2) Personalisation gains ground: the impact of personalisation has yet to be understood as no figures have been released by Google, or other websites that offer this option, to show what the levels of uptake have been. However, at the end of 2008 Google introduced the Search Wikia option for logged in users, so that search results could be adapted to suit user preferences and notes could also be added to listings. There were also hints from Google that this data may also be eventually used to determine search engine rankings which is likely to attract abuse of the system. We believe that personalization is still in the early stages of development with the vast majority of web searchers being aware of, or using, this option, although it is likely to gradually increase usage within the market and to become a more significant issue for search engine optimisation.

3) Behavioural advertising becomes the next ‘big thing’: this is still expected to become a key service for advertisers but has still to become a mainstream function, partly due to the technology still being developed and data being collected, as well as the privacy issues that are raised once individuals realise how their data is being used to target advertising. The huge mass of data that’s being collected by search engines and other major web properties should provide highly targeted advertising opportunities but the balance between this and privacy concerns is still to be determined.

4) Content targeted advertising becomes the new PPC battleground: Google has made further improvements to the content advertising network for PPC advertisers in 2008, most notably with the introduction of Placement advertising, and with the use of display and video advertising options. This sector has not become a battleground as other PPC services offer weak alternatives, but with better data and reporting on Google’s own service, the content network has become a more accountable resource to extend the reach of this targeted form of advertising.

5) Mobile search finally becomes serious: the launch of the Apple iPhone at the start of the year and the new Google-apps phone some months later has marked the start of the mobile Internet in earnest. The range of applications seems to be limited only by ideas at the moment and so as these type of phones gain market share and become ‘the norm’, then companies need to seriously think about focusing part of their online presence to the mobile market. This has yet to happen in any significant volume but the signs are there and examples can be demonstrated.

Recent research by eMarketer has revealed the huge reach of internet use and confidence in ecommerce amongst the UK population.

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One of the most discussed and possibly hyped topics of 2007 was the continued rise of social networking sites, such as Facebook. However, recent news coverage of this sector now seems to be declaring that the popularity of social networking may be on the decline.

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What you should know about search patterns of UK travel consumers

Google and the online behaviour analyst ComScore recently reported results of a study into search patterns of UK travel consumers.

The study found that, in the UK, search engines are increasingly used to find and buy travel and holidays. (more…)

A recent survey of UK small businesses by Microsoft and research company Vanson Bourne revealed that 33% thought search marketing was too complicated, 44% thought search marketing was too time consuming, and 55% thought it too expensive.

The report estimated that as a result, UK small businesses could be wasting some £3 billion on websites that cannot be found in search engine results.

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Google recently announced that they have added the ability to define Geographic Targeting within a webmaster tools account.

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The Internet has dramatically changed the way that many businesses operate over the past decade. This has mostly been for the good, although there can also be added pressures, such as on employees from the use of email, or on businesses from the distractions that websites – such as social networking sites – can have upon staff.

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