Agriya

It used to be that you would expect to have an e-mail account or three, you would receive a few messages everyday from work or from your friends, you would sniff when you saw the Spam folder say “100 New Messages”, every week, and you would consider your e-mail existence pretty fulfilling. On the other hand, there is life on the Twitter and Facebook plane that sees your Inbox full with wonderful emptiness every 15 minutes. The social media craze has not gone unnoticed as a potential area to capitalize on, in the search engine war between Bing and Google.

Microsoft’s tested the waters first in this area; there is now a special Twitter search option on Bing. When you search with this service, the results page shows a pretty hysterical cloud of tags of hot Twitter topics, along with a swarm of relevant shared links to them. You can even search among the search results you get.

Google won’t be left behind of course, having put down arrangements with Twitter. It says it plans to show Twitter search results among its regular search results; this innovation could be a few weeks coming though. But there’s not nothing quite like The Google Social Search feature that Google has planned; you could probably guess that it’s a Google Labs project yet again.

Google’s Social Search is for Google account holders only; when an account holder performs a regular search, Google looks up everything that your Twitter pals may have put up on the subject you searched for and gives you that information too. Now this is not exactly an all-new feature the way you might imagine, seeing it appear on Google’s Labs. Search websites like Crowdeye have been letting you search for Twitter results for quite a while now. It’s just that having the major search engines do it helps you do all your searching in one place. Will great new startups like Crowdeye be crowded out of the market they helped create, by the majors? Only time will tell.

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Bing, Microsoft’s decision search engine, has been chipping away at the market share of its competitors since its official launch on May 28th this year. On an average, Bing has gained about half a percent a month and an overall 1.3% (9.3% in August, 8.9% in July, 8.4% in June and 8% in May) gain in the three months succeeding its launch. In about the same period Google, the market leader registered a fall of 0.3% to 64.7% while Yahoo came down by the same amount to 19.3% (source: ComScore). In August, Bing grew faster than Google for the first time, with a 31.9 percent annual increase in search queries compared to 21.6 percent growth for Google and 16.8 percent for Yahoo. So the rise in the market share of this Microsoft search engine does seem to be at the expense of the other two.

Some experts consider these early gains in the Bing market share the result of superior technology from its recent acquisitions and better algorithms for seeking the context underlying a search. Many users feel aerial photos available via Bing are more up to date and have better clarity than the corresponding Google photos. The eye-catching design too is bound to have helped Bing made inroads with viewers.

Skeptics, however, contend that this so-called increase in market share is driven by any number of factors such as the curiosity engendered by a new launch, the publicity and media hype that a hundred million dollar marketing drive is likely to generate, the fact that Bing is the default search engine on the latest versions of IE and Microsoft’s cash back offer for Bing users and is highly unlikely to last. Some of the skeptics also are casting doubts on the veracity of the statistics by stigmatizing the sources as unreliable.

A strong competitor to Google in the search market can only be good news for users. Google has for too long been almost a monopoly. The more choices that consumers get the more likely it is that necessity will drive more and more innovations in the search engine market.

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The entire field of search engines was taken over after the emergence of Google. Primarily flourishing because of its strong networking and extensive data which it provides to its users, Google has surpassed all its competitors in quality and quantity when it comes to the usage of search engines. With Google dominating the entire sector of search engines, it has been considered quite an impossible task to match the levels of delivery Google provides. Microsoft Bing has managed to finally break these ideals and with all the advertisements it has made, seems to show a lot of promise.

Industry experts on the other hand have stated that Google has not had a realistic competitor for years and for Bing to attain the quality and popularity that Google has established will also take time. Due to this Google has been able to give time to its smaller projects like Chrome OS, Google wave and several others. If by any chance Bing is seen to show stable growth and attains popularity among the masses, Google will release several other advanced features similar to its launch of the “Show options” feature that will once again overthrow any possible competitor.

All the same with all the advancements Microsoft has displayed many companies are looking to optimize their sites with Bing. Microsoft also launched a PDF called “Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters“ which essentially states that all sites should continue with their solid regular practices which they have been using to optimize their ranks through SEO techniques and this will work well even for Bing. Some of them include using keywords like titles and meta descriptions for every page on the site, using keyword oriented and relevant URLs, themes per page in context and in relation with your keywords, submission of an XML sitemap and your site to Bing.

Ultimately there is a lot more to effective SEOs like the quality of your inbound links, along with other standard SEO best practices play significant roles and any special initiatives your site has taken to increase page ranks will also prove useful in Bing. It has also been reported that Bing is increasing its focus on local results than Google. So not only does increasing quality of your meta descriptions along with the regular SEO practices play a role, but having a unique content to attract consumers will all be picked up by Bing thereby giving you a direct leverage to increase your page ranks.

Microsoft Bing has established itself as one of Google’s most challenging competitors but whether it will be able to deliver on all its expectations and stand the test of time can be determined only based on its performance in the forthcoming years.

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The recent buzz in the net world is the Microsoft/Yahoo! Deal according to which Microsoft will integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its search engine Bing and Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Through the deal, Microsoft has taken a brilliant move to capture the search market.

According to figures released by Hitwise last month, Microsoft’s search market share will rise to around 21.5% or roughly one quarter of Google’s share. Ergo, SEO people have to concentrate on Bing while promoting their clients’ sites for reaching all the net surfers.

When we focus on search algorithm, it is clear that Bing concentrates on keyword placement in the sub or root whereas Google focuses on exact keyword matches. By default, Bing’s results are richer than Google and Yahoo. It is more likely that the market for search engine Bing will expand.

If you don’t have an account with the Bing webmaster tool, it is time to start your account and learn the difference between Bing and Google to optimize your site for Bing.

Even if Bing does not overtake its rival Google, it will be the second largest search engine. Hence you have to work for Bing to reach global audiences irrespective of search engines used. Obviously the changes will not take place overnight, but potentially Google could have a much bigger, consolidated competitor in the near future.

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Every successful corporation has a responsibility to use its resources and influences to create new things for people. Bing is the latest attempt by Microsoft to gain popularity in the search market. Bing, is a new Internet search engine designed to navigate the web and find online information easily.

Microsoft is a multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. There are hundreds of new features on Microsoft’s Bing. A few of the interesting features include:

Bing will provide useful links and information related to your search. For instance, if you search information about a black berry, Bing will provide links to reviews on the item and give you complete details about the particular product as well. This feature will reduce a user’s clicks to find specific information.

Going into search engines, typing something in, and searching items is very difficult nowadays. Bing facilitates people to save favorite sites while they are searching information. It helps them to save their time by saving their favorite stuff and accessing them at anytime.

Microsoft maintains partnerships with different online services like airlines, hotels and holiday resorts. If you are searching for flight information, Bing can offer specific information like flight deals, reviews etc.

Bing will Auto-Suggest the search queries. For instance, if you’re looking for “Obama” then it will auto-suggest some additional queries like his biography, information on his speeches, quotes, facts and so on.

Bing can also provide videos and images about an item in the search results page.

Microsoft is currently holding a third-place behind Google and Yahoo Inc. it hopes that Bing will play a big role to reach a good position in the search market. Microsoft is trying to pull people away from Google and Yahoo.

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