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Search Engine News : Microsoft to renew link with Baidu

By Andrew Redfern @ 5th July 2011 11:53 am Bing

In a statement issued on Monday Microsoft and Chinese language search giant Baidu have announced partnership in the Chinese search sector.

Baidu is by far the biggest web company in China and will link-up with Microsoft’s Bing search engine to provide results for English-language searches. This means that English search queries entered to Baidu will be directed to a Bing search results page.

Baidu dominates search in China with more than 75% of the market and saw profits double last year. Google by comparrison is struggling to establish itself in the Chinese market. It clocks in with 20% of the market and has fallen fall out state regulators on several occasions.

Microsoft’s deal will neatly sidestep suich problems because control of the searched for query will still remain firmly with Baidu with Bing effectively operating under Baidu’s control.

Quoted on the BBC’s Technology pages Dong Xu, an analyst with Analysys International, said “The co-operation between Baidu and Microsoft will further strengthen Baidu’s dominance in China’s search engine market, and will also make Google’s business in China more difficult”

This move will add further pressure on Google’s Chinese operation with many analysts already seeing a retreat from sector from the a company that is the undisputed king of the search sector.

China has proved an impossible nut to crack for Google (with the exception of Hong Kong). In other markets such as Singapore and Japan Google has gained market share but it seems that entrenched local search engines such as Baidu and Yandex in Russia can still hold out against it’s dominance of the search engine market.

Bing Most Search Keywords in 2009

By Andrew Redfern @ 22nd December 2009 5:17 pm Bing

Kristin Meldahl from the Bing Community Blog posted the top searched keywords in 2009.

Kristin comments “Earlier this month we announced the top trending searched topics on Bing for 2009 (we wish the circumstances for Michael Jackson topping that list were a bit more positive) and we also revealed the top searched celebrity of 09 (Oh…. Perez Hilton you were hot, hot, hot).

We then asked you to go and take our End of Year Facebook quiz to test your I.Q. of hot topics in 2009. How did you do in the quiz? I was batting around .500 this year and so were the majority of you (roughly 40%) and only 7% of you were search Gurus. I didn’t do too well this year but know I can do better next year.

Who would’ve thought that Las Vegas would beat out Hawaii for most searched travel destinations, or that Susan Boyle was searched for more often than Taylor Swift?

We know a majority of you swore the iPhone was the most searched electronic device…well as a matter of fact, you were close, it was the iPod. And over half of you were pulling for New Moon for most searched movie which was actually runner up to the original movie, Twilight. Below is the complete list of the top 2009 searches on Bing.

Top Male Celebrities
1 Perez Hilton
2 Robert Pattinson
3 Jon Gosselin
4 Howard Stern
5 Brad Pitt

Top Travel Destinations
1 Las Vegas
2 Napa
3 Hawaii
4 Boston
5 Universal Studios

Top Female Celebrities
1 Megan Fox
2 Kim Kardashian
3 Kate Gosselin
4 Jennifer Aniston
5 Kristen Stewart

Top Musicians
1 Michael Jackson
2 Susan Boyle
3 Taylor Swift
4 Chris Brown
5 Adam Lambert

Top Electronics
1 iPod
2 iPhone
3 Zune
4 Laptops
5 Blackberry

Top TV Shows
1 American Idol
2 Dancing With The Stars
3 Oprah
4 Hannah Montana
5 Biggest Loser

Top Political Figures
1 Rush Limbaugh
2 Barack Obama
3 Michael Savage
4 Sarah Palin
5 Michelle Obama

Top Movies
1 Twilight
2 New Moon
3 Harry Potter
4 Transformers
5 Star Trek

Top Car Brands
1 Ford
2 Nissan
3 Chevrolet
4 BMW
5 Dodge

Top Sports Teams
1 New York Yankees
2 Pittsburgh Steelers
3 Chicago Cubs
4 Boston Red Sox
5 Philadelphia Phillies

Google unveil “Google Caffeine”

By Andrew Redfern @ 11th August 2009 2:51 pm Bing

Google have revealed details of Google Caffeine, a new search project that claims to be faster and provide more accurate, relevant results. A post on the official Google Webmaster Blog todays reads.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

It comes during a period when the major search engines are all gearing for major overhauls of their search offerings. Promising to “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness” is an extremely enticing claim for a product that already boasts around 80% of it’s market.

Despite that dominance a series of developments over the last 6 months have underlined that this is no time tobe resting on ones laurels. In particular Microsoft’s high-profile efforts increase it’s market share which has so far included an expensive rebranding of search offering from Live to Bing and working out an agreement to takeover Yahoo’s search division.

As well as this other technologies are beginning to redefine the traditional search sector. The Wolfram Alpha “knowledge engine” added a new dimension to internet knowledge gathering positioning itself midway between the search engines and informational sites such as wikipedia. Also the social media giants such as Twitter and Facebook are becoming more and more relevant to the search market with their ever more up-to-date activity and information feeds.

At present Google are offering users the chance to test the new system in a sandbox version and are inviting users to give feedback about how the new results stack up against the current version of the Google search engine.

Right now, we only want feedback on the differences between Google’s current search results and our new system. We’re also interested in higher-level feedback

It is an interesting project and a good way to get users on-board from day one. It will be interesting to compare and contrast the results in order to gain a handle on what route Google algorithm is taking.

Google, Yahoo, Bing Take The “Blind” Search Engine Challange

By Andrew Redfern @ 10th August 2009 11:15 am Bing

Each of us have our favourite, we are by and large mostly Google devotees. But are we right to be? are we loyal to the best search engine or do we stick with them out of loyalty. There has been a general view within the industry is that users are not as discerning as they would like to think. Google has become what “Hoover” became to the vacuum industry and this will only serve to reinforce the idea that to search on the we, means: to “Google”.
So with a scientist cap on, the people at fejus.com. have created: http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ .
Try now and search for something, it doesn’t matter what it is, you will receive the results from Yahoo, Bing ( soon to be the same) and Google ( fanfare please!). All branding is removed and the results are split into three columns.

I voted twice for the result which I favoured, by searching “HitSearch” I was presented with three different search results. At this point it would be nice to tell you the reader, that Google was hammered by Bing and that all the years we have been hoodwinked.

Well not quite..but almost:

Google: 44%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 23%. When you compare this against the 80% market share of Google and paltry 5% for Bing, Bing may very well be one to look out for in the future!

Spotlight falls on Bing’s PPC policies after report on online drug paid ads

By Andrew Redfern @ 6th August 2009 11:05 am Bing

Interesting report on SearchEngineLand today. They quote a report by LegitScript and KnujO that reveals that the overwhelming majority of pay per click ads featured on Bing for online pharmacies lead to what official guidelines would term “Rogue” sites.

This controversy has echos of the furore in November 2008 when Baidu was found to be carrying, and in fact favouring, links to bogus hospitals in China.

The report claims that of the online pharmacy ads featured on Bing’s adCenter Pay-per-click advertisting system almost 90% were for drug suppliers that fall into the categories of:

Those that facilitate the sale of prescription drugs, including controlled substances, without requiring a valid prescription.
Those that sell drugs from sources that are not licensed as a pharmacy in any US jurisdiction.
Those that illegally source unregulated, unapproved prescription drugs from outside of the United States.
Those that are otherwise deceptive or misleading.

This study was carried out in the last two months and shows how disreputable companies can simply side-step all the excellent work carried out by the search engine’s alogrythms in weeding out sites like this from the natural organic listings.

Interesting this report comes out on the same day that Facebook announced it was tightening up it’s advertising guidelines.

A few weeks ago Hit Search were asked to contribute to an ongoing BBC investigation into how the Google adWords listings were being used be bogus ticket agencies. It show the a PPC budget is, in some cases, the perfect shortcut. Whilst it is extremely difficult for disreputable sites to climb to the top of the natural listings without resorting to an expensive, time-consuming black-hat link building campaigns.

Google has always steered clear of allowing sectors such as online pharmaceuticals and adult website to use it’s paid search system, Google adWords. Until recently it would not allow any advertising to do with alcohol and gambling however it relaxed these rules in certain geographic areas last year.

Bing allows Microsoft to make further gains on Google

By Andrew Redfern @ 4th August 2009 3:55 pm Bing

Latest figures from the internet monitoring company StatCounter show Bing having a 9.41% share of the US search market in July. This is up from 8.23% in June. Google saw its share drop to 77.5% from 78.5% the previous month.

The figures come in the aftermath of Microsoft’s recently deal with Yahoo! that will mean Bing will end up being the underlying system behind Yahoo!’s search services.

Combined Microsoft and Yahoo! have 20.36% of the search market and so are still a long way from challenging Google’s dominance.

Globally Google’s position is much stronger. Its share of the search market fell slightly last month, but it only slipped less than a single percantage point from 89.8% in June to 89.23% in July. Microsoft and Yahoo combined had just 8.77% of the global search market. This figure is actually down from 8.45% in June.

StatCounter Chief Executive Adohan Cullen told Reuters “At first sight, a 1 percent increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing but the underlying trend appears positive.”

It would seem that in the US at least the overall effect of Microsoft’s hugely expensive re-launch has been cautiously positive especially considering the recently announced deal with Yahoo!

The markets will, however, wait until a longer trend more widespread can be ascertained.

Leapfish Search Aggregation, Whats So Special?

By Andrew Redfern @ 28th July 2009 4:35 pm Bing

“Don’t Worry You’re Not Cheating On Google!”

A fun and smart look unfortunatley can’t hide what can be a slow clunky service. A quick search for “Gatwick Airport” should have resulted in a welath of top story results relating the airplane emergency landing, in relaity a slow wait for some pretty low-value results. Leapfish uses Google, Yahoo and even Bing to generate it’s search results.

Whilst I liked the fun vibe: “Don’t Worry Your Not Cheating On Google” displayed in the search bar, I cant conclude with the view that it dipslays the very best of video, blog and search. It simply doesn’t. I am a little unconvinced as to the viabillity of this niche altogether. I-google has wormed its way quite cleverly into our homepages and for a rival to pull me away I want something I cant get easily through Google

The business model replicates AdWords, Bing Adceneter and Yahoo’s Marketing Solutions offering paid search advertising amd keyword sponsoring. New updates will come in August 2008, and will focus on web2.0.

Why do they think we’ll switch?:

“Google has built a reputation of commanding precision access to a tops down organization of websites, which is extremely valuable. But is that everything everyone cares about in the world of web 2.0? The user interactivity demonstrated by the recent events in Iran and with the late Michael Jackson, the tremendous number of new portals including Wolfram Alpha, and the continued loss of accessibility due to the growing information overload is evidence that we need a more sophisticated gateway and interface to the web. We believe a growing number of searches will be answered more completely with LeapFish.”

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