Search Engine Round-up: Subterfuge, Spam & Swings

So we’re only half way through the second month of the year, and already things are heating up in the search engine battle between Bing and Google.

Firstly, Danny Sullivan broke the story that Google was accusing Bing of copying their search results.

For a full, detailed explanation I suggest you read the story here at Search Engine Land, but the basics are this – Google became suspicious that Bing was copying when the top results for some searches were the same even for misspellings and unusual search terms. So they sprang a trap…(!)

Yes, like something out of a Robert Ludlum novel*, Google manipulated their results for nonsense words such as ‘mbzrxpgjys’ and ‘hiybbprqag’, so that a particular honey pot page would show at the top of the search results. When these exact same pages showed up #1 on Bing too, Google had their confirmation.

(*If instead of writing books about kick-ass spies who look like Matt Damon, Ludlum actually wrote about the rather more dull topic of search engine positioning. Which seems unlikely, frankly.)

Once the story broke, Bing explained their side. Yes, the results were the same, they admitted, but because they were watching their users who have the IE toolbar turned on, and that influences the results people see. They were not copying Google.

Instead Bing turned the tables on Google, claiming the whole thing was an attempt to throw up a smokescreen* to avoid the fact that their search results are plagued with spam.

(*See? That’s totally something Jason Bourne would do.)

Which brings us to the second part of this month’s search engine news – Google’s latest attempt to find a way to block spam, particularly from content farms, such as those of Demand Media.

The plan is for a Chrome plugin which will allow users to block certain sites, while sending Google data about those sites so that they can analyze them and use that information to adjust the rankings accordingly.

Will it work? I’m skeptical. The amount of spam out there is tremendous, dwarfing the number of users who will a) use Chrome, b) also have the extension installed and c) use it regularly. However, I couldn’t be happier that at least Google is trying to do something about this mess.

Finally, the latest search engine stats were just released for January and show a 2% point swing from Google to Bing. A blip or a trend? What do you think?

admin 15 February 2011 All, Bing, Google, News, search engines, SEO No Comments

Social Networks and Search – Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together

As we come to the very cold end of another year, it seems like 2010 could be remembered as the year that the social web and search began to properly work together.
Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has a great post with authorative answers from both Bing and Google about how they are integrating social signals from Twitter and Facebook in to their search engine ranking factors.
While you really should read the whole thing, highlights inlcude:
  • Both Bing & Google do use retweets and Facebook posts as a ranking factor
  • They both calculate the authority of the tweeter/poster, and give more/less weight depending
  • Publicly available links on Facebook are tracked by both search engines
This is great stuff, and something we have been anticpating/suspecting for a while now, but it does raise some interesting questions.
For instance, how do they calculate ‘authority’? It’s not likely that it’s simply the sheer number of followers/friends, or the system would be overrun with spammers in no time. More likely it will be a more complex algorithm which takes in to account the ratio of followers to following, the number of times you are mentioned, how active you are, length of time on the network, and so on.
We also don’t know to what extent these social signals affect the rankings. Google has over 200 criteria which go in to ranking a site (PageRank, title tags, alt tags, etc), and these social signals are just one of these many, many different aspects. Don’t expect your site to suddenly jump to #1 because you’ve been retweeted a couple of times.
That said, it is good to have official confirmation of what we have thought for a while, that the social web isn’t in competition with the search side of things, but in fact both should all be considered part of your whole online strategy.
admin 15 December 2010 All, Bing, Google, News, search engines, Web 2.0 No Comments

Bing & Facebook, Sitting in a Tree…

Well it’s all been go, go, go with Facebook recently – the ongoing battle with Google over your contact list, copying Gmail / incorporating email (depending on your bias), opening a new $450 million data center in NC – but for me, one of the most intriguing developments is the Bing search integration.
The announcement, over at the Bing blog, covers all the ins and outs, but the main part that will affect the everyday user are the social features such as enhanced profile searches and sharing your Facebook information while searching Bing.
Firstly, in light of all the privacy criticism, it should be pointed out that these new features are all opt-in. This is what the experts term A Good Thing. Secondly, I think this is a potential first step towards greater personalization of search results and a widening of social search.
Bing is trying to improve search results with information from Facebook ‘likes’. Which makes sense. If I do a search for ‘New York hotels’, for instance, Bing should be able to enhance the standard results with the hotels which any of my Facebook friends have liked. And with no disrespect to Microsoft, I’m much more likely to be influenced by what my friends and family suggest than what Bing does.
Of course Google has been trying to incorporate “results from people in your social circle” for a while now, but with Facebook being far and away the biggest social network (at least in the USA), the potential for Bing is that much greater.
So what do you think? Will Bing be able to steal a march here and claw back some search share? Will you be willing to share your Facebook info with Microsoft? Does the whole thing sounds a bit Big Brother-esque to you? Let us know!
admin 15 November 2010 All, Bing, News, Web 2.0 No Comments