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Microsoft's new search engine Bing - and how
to optimize your website for Bing
Microsoft's Bing search engine has just become publicly available,
allowing you to decide whether Microsoft's latest effort has
the goods to take on Google. Bing is available at www.bing.com
and replaces Live Search.
Microsoft is expected to spend $80 million to $100 million
on Bing marketing which would be a nice hedge against Yahoo!
because Bing will most likely take market share from Yahoo!.
Whether Bing ultimately succeeds or not, it will push Google
to keep innovating search, and the new pay per click competition
will ensure that Google doesn't get too greedy.
How is Bing different from Google?
Bing is not dramatically different from Google, but some
people have found its results stronger. There are some visible
changes:
Bing shows a preview of the web pages in the search results
when you hover your mouse pointer at the right side of the
search results.
Bing displays fewer results if it is certain that it has understood
your intent. The search for "Facebook", for example,
brings up just one result linking to the site itself.
Some search results are divided into categories. For example,
if you search for the popular musician "Justin Timberlake",
you'll get results in the categories news, songs, movies,
biography, wallpaper and downloads. In addition, the search
results show images, videos and the popularity of the musician.
Wikipedia searches can be displayed inline in the search results
without leaving the Bing site by clicking the "Enhanced
view" link.
Bing features a different background image every day. The
image contains special hidden hotspots that lead you to more
information (soon advertising?) about the image.
Despite the background image, Bing's homepage loads very quickly
in your web browser because the search box and logo load first.
You can turn off the background image.
Bing's video search lets you watch videos without leaving
the search engine.
Bing offers specific health, shopping and travel search engines,
as well as instant answers to travel searches. For instance,
the search "Vegas hotels" displays a selection of
hotels in Las Vegas, including hotel stars and prices.
Bing's search history lets you return to your most recent
searches of the last two days. This feature can be turned
off to protect your privacy.
Some of Google's features are missing, for example, Bing doesn't
seem to recognize misspellings and returns no results in these
cases.
How can you get top rankings in Bing?
We have already updated our popular SEO software IBP to support
Bing. This means that you can run IBP's Top 10 Optimizer to
get specific advice on how to optimize your website to rank
on top of Bing's search results.
IBP will tell you in great detail what you have to do to
get top 10 rankings on the new Bing search engine. Of course,
IBP also works with Google, Yahoo and other major search engines
and it also works with the different language and country
variations of all major search engines.
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