Bing has been up to A LOT over the last few weeks. Below is a round up of all things BING!

- Bing Goes Live in the UK
- Bing Integrates Wolfram Alpha
- Bing Updates Home Page with Task-Focused Functionality
- Bing Adds Instant Answers
- Bing Adds Additional Additional City Data (attractions, neighborhoods, local data from newspapers, etc.)
- Bing Upgrades Preview Feature
- Bing Adds Event Search (sort by performances, civic activities, music, etc.)
- Bing Integrates Facebook and Twitter into Search Results
- Bing Updates Maps

And that is just to name a few of the recent upgrades.

Well, if we look at the new data from Hitwise, Bing had a 7% gain in October, while Google and Yahoo both lost 1%.

I think Bing is really trying hard to be a serious competitor to Google — and it is working.

Check out Bing today – Bing Search.

This post was also featured on Traffic Flow SEO. Images used in this blog post are from www.marketmixup.com and WebProNews.

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In a world dominated by Google and Bing headlines, we decided to take a peek at an alternative search engine and see where they see the future of search. Founded by industry veteran Randy Adams and John Holland, SearchMe is a visual search engine that launched into private beta in March 2008.

From CrunchBase:

Searchme is a new search engine that uses visual search and category refinement to help you find what you’re looking for, faster, with a lot less spam. It’s a new way to search that takes advantage of the size and bandwidth of today’s Internet and the increasingly visual way that we all interact online. The idea for Searchme came when Mark Kvamme, Searchme’s chairman, got tired of looking through a bunch of unrelated results for articles on motocross. He suggested to founders Randy Adams and John Holland that they create a search engine that sorted results into categories. The Searchme visual interface came about when Randy, a father of seven, helped his four- year-old son search for children’s web sites that he’d seen on TV. It struck Adams that if a search engine could show big pictures of the pages it found before users clicked through to a site, it’d be much easier to quickly find what they were looking for. After more than three years of engineering, imaging billions of web pages, and fine-tuning our approach many times over, Searchme was born. We’ve built it from the ground up to optimize it for speed, but we still have a long way to go. We’re just getting started on our first steps toward creating a smart new way to search today’s Web.

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Have you ever wondered how many new keywords/phrases are entered into search engines on a daily basis? Well, Google has recently released some information that helps get a better understanding of the real opportunity in using broad matching.

From a recent online Google Update Newsletter, I found a small section that had a “Did you know….?” fact that I found particularly interesting. It stated that 20 percent of all search queries they receive each day are ones they have not seen in the last 90 days, if at all!

That got me thinking about what kinds of numbers are we really talking about? So, I went and found some recent comScore data that showed that Google.com (not the entire network, just Google.com) received around 8 billion searches a month. From there I divided that by 30 and multiplied by 20 percent and came up with the conclusion that:

Google sees around 53 million new* search keywords/phrases each day!

That is a pretty impressive number and really puts the idea and value of broad matching in perspective. Imagine 53 million new searches each day…grabbing 1 percent of those would be nice.

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There has been a lot of speculation and apparent confirmation (as per Shoemoney’s recent blog post) that Best of the Web Directory (BOTW) may be buying The Open Directory (DMOZ). If this goes through, the combined directories (assuming they are combined) would rival the Yahoo! Directory in size and scope making it the largest web directory on the Internet.

I could understand why AOL would want to drop the DMOZ as it really generates no direct revenue and requires a lot of resources to manage and maintain. Based on all the corruption allegations and the lack of feedback from the volunteer editors, I think now is a good time to try and save the DMOZ by selling it and BOTW is probably the best suitor.

BOTW has the opportunity to turn the DMOZ around and make it into an organized and functional directory much like their own directory, offering full support and reasonable review timeframes. This leaves many questions for the search marketing community including:

- Will Google still use it as a data resource for their own directory – Google Directory?

- Will Google still value the ‘link juice’ that the DMOZ currently provides (BOTW was not hit with the Google web directory penalty as many of the other web directories experienced, so it is possible that Google may still value these links after a merger)?

- Will the two directories be run as two separate entities or merged?

- Will all current listings remain? Will they be updated? Will the structure change?

- Will it remain free (unlikely)? If not, what will it cost?

It will be interesting to watch if and when a merger between these two industry giants happens and what new opportunities this may provide for the online community. In the end, I believe the overall result will force the issue of what the real value of a web directory (no matter what size) is, in today’s search engine world.

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Does MSN Live Search matter? In a nutshell, YES. This is especially true for search marketers, as it may be the last major search property left that is not partnering with Google for search ads. Ask.com has been backfilling their ad inventory with Google for some time now; and with Yahoo! potentially partnering with Google, that leaves Microsoft with the last major independent search property.

What does this mean for search marketers? Well, it means that by just buying into Google AdWords your ads will most likely get coverage on Google, Yahoo! and Ask.com. These search properties combined cover an estimated 85-90% of all U.S. search traffic, leaving MSN somewhere between 10-15% (depending on which data you look at). The real distinction with Ask.com and Yahoo! was that each provided unique value (usually lesser costs-per-clicks) than Google. With multiple engines now using Google ads, the majority of those savings may be lost. And without those savings, why not make life easier and just deal with one engine in the future? It will lower the time associated with collecting data from multiple engines, it will help to quickly organize data as information will all be in the same format, and it will simplify the billing process as you will only have to deal with one vendor. Sounds like a good time-saving idea to me.

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