Search engines have a very difficult job having to deal with a multitude of issues – however possibly one of the more complex is intent. Without context many search engine phrases typed into search engines may relate to a multitude of different things and without further qualification a search engine may struggle to return relative your particular requirements.

Bing have already made some early inroads into integrating personalisation into their results, with the development of a localised resultset and then considering previously visited sites into the result framework. At SMX today, Bing announced adaptive search.

So how does adaptive search work. Bing describe this as follows

Every time you search on Bing, the information provided helps Bing understand what you’re trying to do. The more you search, the more Bing can learn – and use that information to adapt the experience so you can spend less time searching and accomplish what you set out to do.

As an example, let’s say you’re in the process of planning a vacation – you might decide to search for “Australia”. In this case, you’re most likely to be looking for websites specifically about the country Australia, or information about travel. You can see an example of the search “Australia”, for someone who is planning a vacation, below:

Source: Bing

Now suppose, instead, you’re a movie-buff and are trying to decide on a movie to rent for the evening. With this context, the smart technology powering this feature will infer that you’re probably looking for the movie “Australia”, and begin to adapt the search page to your intent by showings results relevant to the movie Australia higher up on the page than they were previously:

Source:Bing

The differences are generally quite subtle, but the more confidence we have about what your intent is, the more personalized the results will become. We certainly don’t want to make any assumptions that prevent you from seeing a diverse set of results and lock you into a “filter bubble”, so the results that correspond to differing intents (e.g. travel to Australia) will still be available to you on the page.

Check out the following video to learn more about Adaptive Search:

It would appear these adaptive/personalised results are a lot easier than turning them in Google – and it would appear personalised search is something Bing would appear to have a significant eye on. The adaptive search results are not being rolled out beyond the US initially and timescales for more widespread rollout are still unclear.

I personally am liking a lot of the stuff Bing are doing at the moment, and I would suggest its not a surprise to see them taking market share off Google. The Facebook relationship as well should it develop is something I am positive Google in particular will be hoping doesn’t develop as there is no doubting Google see Facebook as a potentially significant competitor.

Theres no doubting Bing are improving – but are they improving fast enough.

Its the start of a bright new year, and rather than give you my personal thoughts on what I thought the new year holds, I thought I would get a couple of friends to join me in sharing their thoughts and opinions on what the new year holds. Due to the sheer nature of the beast, we have broken these down to a regular series of posts which we will be releasing over the coming days.

To get a more holistic picture I asked a number of people from across the search spectrum to get involved including:

• Shaun Anderson – HoboWeb – The most influential SEO in the UK according to a recent poll on Holistic Search and the Telegraph (the Greenock Telegraph that is)
• Paul Reilly – Now Search Director for Mydestinationinfo.com however met him during his days at StickyEyes and have always enjoyed hearing his opinions and thoughts on SEO and the sector as a whole
• Nichola Stott – the Media Flow – Nichola spoke at our recent Sascon Manchester SEO event and as well as being one of the most intelligent people I know is also one of the best laughs
• Ben Bisco – Brilliant Media – My colleague at Brilliant – however hugely knowledgable and a laf to boot
• Andy Redfern – Hitsearch – Someone I have known round the digital scene for a while and MD of search agency Hitsearch.
• Judith Lewis – Well respected in the industry and conference scene, and highly talented to boot.
• Andy Beard – Where do I start, Andy wows me with some of his comments during the Dojo chats, and talks in a language few dare to speak. Highly respected in the industry and very pleased to have him involved
• and last but certainly by no means least David Harry – someone who I was very pleased to have involved in this post – founder of the SEO Dojo and Search News Central. Hugely knowledgable – and one of the people I personally have learnt a hell of a lot of this year.

Do you think a viable competitor to Google will emerge in 2011?

David Harry

And then there were 2. Yup, we lost Yahoo last year so it’s just MS (Bing) left in the game. Unfortunately they will have to do something pretty innovative to make any inroads as far as I see it. Or Google will have to falter in some way. Throwing money at the marketing dept. just doesn’t seem to be cutting it. Will we see someone out of the blue show up and take a chunk of the search market? Not bloody likely. I suppose MS’ relationship with FaceBook might turn into their biggest asset in the search and social game. We shall see…

Ben Bisco

I don’t think there will be a competitor in the traditional search space. Instead, we should think about how search may evolve and look for competitors there.

For instance, Facebook. Google are obviously twitchy about them and this is ostensibly because they trumped Google on traffic and have a more interesting display offering. However, more scary for Google is what would happen if FB strayed towards search territory. We have already seen a tendency for consumers to turn to FB for answers and it the information contained within Facebook is becoming increasingly varied (company pages, fan pages, interest groups etc. And have you noticed how Wikipedia information pages are making an appearance?) so this isn’t that far-fetched.

Also, the growth of really clever remarketing technology using intelligent attribution modelling (Ad Exchanges and Demand Side Platforms etc) will mean that Display has the potential emerge as one of the best ways to reach consumers when they are in the market to buy specific products.

These aren’t so much competitors to Google, as competitors to Search as a whole. I’m not sure what this will mean for search specialists, but it’s great news for us as an integrated agency.

Paul Reilly:

Google own Search, and I don’t believe they will be beaten although the alliance between Yahoo and Bing have made “advertising elsewhere” much more palatable, I do however believe the we’re now in the dusk of the Search Era at least in the sense we’ve know it to date, and I also believe that the dawn of the era of discover is well and truly upon us.

How well Google fair in these new days is likely to depend on how they position themselves over the coming months. They’re already in a very enviable position with Android and are clearly winning the smart phone war, you could argue that they are well positioned to dominate location and hyper local due to the integration with Maps, Latitude and Places.

In terms of threats to Google, Facebook is an obvious one, but we’re living in accelerating times and there’s nothing to stop a threat from gaining adoption from absolutely nowhere and throwing the online world a curve ball.

Nichola Stott

Nope. Not in 2011.

Judith Lewis

Yes and no. I think Bing is a seriously good search engine in the US but it rather sucks in the UK (sorry Bing). I feel if Bing could roll-out world-wide the kind of valuable data in search that it has in the US it could become a contender but unless you start looking at search volumes in Facebook I don’t think 2011 will be the turning point for Google.

Andy Beard

Yep… it is called Google – they are their own enemy now.

Andy Redfern

A viable competitor to Google core search function? No – but in other areas like mobile search, news aggregation, PPC, local advertising will all face increased competition. Google has competitors on many fronts and whilst Google is looking to grow the “mobile” arm of its business in a growing market – other areas will no doubt lose focus. I predict that Google will remain the dominant search engine in the UK (Predictable, Never!) , although Bing and Yahoo will claw back up to 2% of the market share through the course of the year.

Shaun Anderson

Facebook is obviously a big question mark – what FB does this year will probably impact search in a big way but I actually think people are going to get annoyed very quickly with Facebook – I know I am – perhaps falling out of love with it in 2011/2012 because of privacy issues etc. I think Google is the most valuable traffic in the world for the types of clients I work for, and I’d be surprised to see that changing much in 2011. There are other ways of driving traffic to a site, but for me, the main focus for most businesses in 2011 should be and will be Google. I will compliment that by using Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin – oh and Bing.

Peter Young

In my opinion, no. We may however start to see the likes of Bing start to take an increasing stake out of the Google market share both here and across the pond however at this stage Google are still in control of their own destiny to a certain extent. Google’s main concern however will be to see search market share translate into domination elsewhere – perhaps mobile, social or TV. The spectre of Facebook still looms large however I can’t help thinking some further form of consolidation with the likes of Bing may see greater breakthrough within the industry.

Google has launched a new feature that scores websites for reading level – categorised on Basic/Intermediate and Advanced levels. These aren’t turned on by default however should you wish to view the reading level of a particularly result these can be activated as follows:

1. On the search results page, click Advanced Search below the search box.
2. Next to “Reading level” within the “Need more tools” section, select your desired reading level (basic, intermediate, or advanced) or choose to show all results annotated with reading levels.
3. Click Advanced search at the bottom of the page.
4. At any time, you can click the X in the right corner of the blue bar beneath the search box to go back to seeing all results.

Its interesting however seeing this put to the test, particularly given this does not appear to be down to user feedback (at least at present).

How it is worked out I would like to work out – given the example below for Holistic Search’s most influential SEO in the UK Shaun Anderson. Its certainly page-level centric  rather than domain level, looking at the results below.

Result for search - 'hobo web'

Hoboweb result for search - 'hoboweb'

Further to this, it would appear this isn’t just confined to news related sites.  Results for other sites such as the search engines can also be broken down in terms of their reader level:

Google reader level

Bing reader level

However strangely enough, the Yahoo result was slightly different

Yahoo reader level

I have to say, its an improvement to the results pages something that hasn’t always been the case with many of the recent updates to the results pages. Further to this the ability to refine these by the nature of the content is a nice addition,something which should it be rolled out to a wider audience could really take off.

Interesting news coming out of the US tonight with Facebook announcing a eye-opening partership with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Whilst we have got used to Google announcing a number of improvements during the course of the last 12 months – such as the recent Google Instant announcement – we haven’t heard alot from Bing until now…..

The Facebook relationship is interesting for a number of reasons

1. Google can’t quickly reproduce this
2. Facebook represents a far bigger potential audience set than Twitter – which is currently integrated into Google’s real time search results.
3. This would appear to be a reasonably sized step into the socially integrated search engine – something I guess we are expecting more from with Google.me.

Whilst many in the industry would suggest this is by no means a Google killer its a reasonable step in the right direction particular in the US where the Bing market share is far higher than here in the UK or in Europe. It should be added the integration of Facebook is mere usage of data rather than full scale integration of Facebook into Bing.

It should be noted that for any of this to work you need to integrate your Facebook account into Bing. Bing becomes the latest site to make use of Facebook Instant Personalisation, effectively this means if you’re logged into Facebook, when you arrive at Bing, you should see a message telling you that it is going to personalize your experience based on your Facebook profile. It should be noted that Bing works perfectly fine without Facebook, and both companies stress that using Facebook personalization is totally optional.

The results themselves appear prominently within the mainstream results highlighted below (This is where I am going to have to use reference to some of Danny Sullivan’s very good post over at Search Engine Land, as this would appear limited in rollout to US users at present – certainly I am logged into both Facebook and Bing and not seeing much apart from the traditional integration)

Source: Search Engine Land

Source: Search Engine Land

From the analysis done by Danny, results would appear to be based on the responses within your social network – however much of this is still open to debate.

Its interesting in itself that Facebook have decided to partner with Bing rather than Google – and even more so I would suggest are the quotes by Mark Zuckerberg himself:

“The thing that makes Microsoft a great partner for us is that they really are the underdog here, and because of that, they’re in a structural position where they’re incentivized to just go all-out and innovate,” said Zuckerberg, via webcast. “And when you’re an incumbent in an area, no matter how smart you are, there’s just always this tension between trying to innovate and push new things, and trying to preserve what you have. And we’ve never felt that with Microsoft.”

As we mentioned earlier, this is by no means a Google killer. It is however a big step in the right direction in my opinion and in Facebook I think Bing have the perfect partner, certainly given Google’s recent behaviour I can’t help going with them may have been a mistake. The Facebook data is not used to influence the search results (at present) and is merely at present used to enhance the results than influence them – they leave that to the other 1000 factors that influence Bing.

Where Google go from here – I think its wait and see time. Whether this has any impact on their plans for Google.me – again one will see. As I have said before though – more competition for Google is only a good thing….

According to reports coming out from TechCrunch & Search Engine Land, the so-called ‘Google Killer’ Cuil is currently now offline and faces a very uncertain future. Reports on TechCrunch reported that Cuil went down after last minute acquisition talks failed. They said “Cuil was in the final stages of an acquisition as of last Wednesday, and everything was in place except the final signatures. Then the deal fell apart for some reason.”. The net result of this is that the servers have been taken offline and the site is currently not receiving queries.

This might not be quite the end for Cuil – however one would suggest that we may not see Cuil as it currently stands moving forward and that any potential buyer may be more interested in their algorithms, index and technology.

Once hailed by many in the industry as a potential Google Killer, Cuil has never quite fulfilled that billing – well to be honest has never got close to living up to that label. With the likes of Yandex and Baidu waiting in the wings, and the Yahoo/Bing alliance showing some early promise, perhaps this was to be expected. Our poll last week suggested many saw Bing as the only viable alternative to Google – and given the amount of budget available to Bing to push their search product I would suggest they are right.

Gone are the days when a search engine can rise from relative obscurity, from the rented garages and $100000. Search Engines are big business, with big rewards and ultimately simply having the biggest index is simply not enough any more – a modern day search engine has to be far more than that.

Over the course (since we did the post on ‘Has the Bing Advertising campaign been worth it?‘) of the last month or so we have run a poll on the site, as to whether or not Bing was a viable competitor to Google.

The results made interesting reading

• Under half of respondents (41%) felt that Google could not be moved from their perch at the top.
• Surprisingly 37% of respondents felt that Bing could become a viable competitor to Google.  Interestingly nearly half of these respondants came in the last couple of weeks, and particularly since Neilsen announced that Bing was ‘officially’ the second biggest search engine in the US.
• Only 21% of people thought that the threat would come from elsewhere. This is suprising to me in two ways. One Yandex and Baidu are massive entities in their own countries and should they decide to diversify into other markets do have their where-with-all to make things interesting. Yandex in particular had some very positive feedback from ‘twitterati’ such as Rand Fishkin.
• 24% of the respondants to Bing as a viable competitor came in the last week

Given that the number of respondents was under 50% I thought this made quite interesting reading, albeit with a very small (and very targeted audience) – however I would suggest it does show an increasing consideration for Bing, and that we can perhaps see some competition to Google (well lets face it – some competition to Google would be good wouldn’t it)

I was watching television over the course of the weekend and noticed the seemingly ongoing Bing adverts.

These were part of a multi-million pound advertising campaign by Bing – and further to those months of testing I revisited the market share data to see whether this has been effective.

These were the stats from March this year (from Hitwise/Experian data)

Rewind back five months and Bing were very much the third in line, sitting behind both Google and Yahoo, with just under 3% of the UK search marketing spend, estimated according to the IAB (as of March this year) to be worth around £2.15 Billion pounds (£2,000,000,000).

Now lets fas forward this to the end of July and take the latest data published by Experien which highlighted a significantly different picture, and one which would which sees, Bing now as the second largest search engine in the UK, however whether this is due to the continuing decline of Yahoo as a search player or the effect of the promotion Bing has undertaken, is open to debate.

I say significant but its not immediately apparent from the images above – however the following were interesting

1. Bing is now the second largest search engine in the UK – ahead of Yahoo (thats not really surprising) but still way behind Google
2. Bing has seen an increase of 0.16% market share – you may say thats not much but consider the size of the market
3. Yahoo has seen a drop of 2.91% with Google seeing a further 1.46% increase in market share
4. That would thus suggest any increase in market share has been at the expense of Yahoo rather than Google – which ultimately is going to hit revenues again given the Yahoo/Bing alliance.

This may not sound like much until we factor in the potential return of these increases. The figures released by the IAB were for the UK paid search spend of around £2.15 billion, which means every percent means around £20 million revenue to the search engines, so every percent does count have a significant impact in these instances as the table below highlights.

It would seem therefore that the amazing budget allocated for the Bing advertising campaign has not had a hugely significant impact – and would only really break even if they took the entire Yahoo budget into account. That said, it has continued to make gains into the search engine market share over the last year. My personal feelings is that I can’t help thinking Bing may be a little disappointed not to have more of an indent into the search marketing sector at this stage, particularly given the level of awareness.

One has to take into account the 100 odd million advertising budget deployed at the start of the campaign (albeit globally) and when you look at just an incremental return of just over £3 million pounds, one would suggest questions are going to be asked sooner or later.

Whether or not they can compete with the likes of Google is open to debate. When asked whether Bing were a viable alternative to Google, our readers suggested no.

Bing has been on a major push over the last couple of months promoting the Bing decision engine as a viable alternative to Google. Fellow professionals appear to have taken a Marmite stance to Bing, some love it, others hate it myself – I would have to unfortunately sit myself still in Camp Google.

Some of this may be done to familiarity with Google. It gives me what I want, when I want and often how I want. Take for example the snippet below

Compare this against similar results on Google and there is a stark difference between the two, and something that in my opinion highlights very well the differences in quality of results between the two search engines. The Google search results provide far more disclosure and relevancy than the Bing results do – something which I feel the addition of Microformats to the Google armoury will continue to provide this usability advantage to the likes of Google over Bing and to a lesser extent Yahoo.

However that said I do like the potential of Bing. Searches such as ‘plasma tv’ highlight they are able to pull similar content elements out to Google. There are a number of nice touches to the interface but one has to feel they still have a long way to go before the Bing system is as intuitive and/or powerful as that of Google. However, this was always a long term project for Microsoft, their first objective was to beat Yahoo – something they achieved before the proposed timescales – and the deal with Yahoo has allowed them to now focus exclusively on taking that market share from Google.

The new bout of advertising is going to draw some people to Bing, however there is no doubting that the major factor to change search engines will be relevancy and usability. Dom Hodgson from Think Visibility put this very well recently at the Sascon Search Marketing and Social Media Conference when he highlighted many people try Bing but go back to Google as they are used to using it.

It would appear breaking this type of behaviour is going to be the hardest to do…

You may have read over the weekend that Microsoft have launched a new multi-million pound advertising campaign to hit UK screens this week aiming to increase its market share within the UK search market.

The three-month campaign, which includes three new TV ads created by the design ad powerhouse JWT, starts on Wednesday and uses the strapline “Bing and decide” – and will be aimed at highlighting Bing’s evolution as a decision engine. The TV campaign will feature ordinary people asking for information and getting their answers from Bing and will run for a month and then on a two-week bursts until Mid-June. This will be supported by an equally massive digital campaign across Microsoft’s network and other media including social networking sites such as Facebook.

“This is a big moment – we are taking out our slingshots and taking on Goliath,” said Microsoft’s UK managing director, Ashley Highfield, adding that he believed Bing met a real desire from both consumers and advertisers. He went on to suggest that people worldwide may have forgotten that there is an alternative search engine to Google.

Whilst its good to see Microsoft putting their money where their mouth is however how much of an impact this will have will be difficult to gauge. Following some significant traction following its launch, Bing market share has stagnated recently. This increase in exposure is likely to cement its position as the second largest player in the UK search engine landscape – however just how much of a bite out of Google’s apple it will take is still to be seen – particularly given around $100 million was spent on the initial launch of Bing.

Given their current position in the UK market therefore it is no real suprise to see some above the line activity come into play during at this stage – and one would suggest that this will result in some pickup of market share – and that market share is likely to come from Google – however the potential return is still open to debate. Given Ask.com undertook similar activity in order to increase their UK market share with limited success , one has to query whether this is likely to result in any significant market gains from Google.

Their best point of attack still stands with their product – however this is something Google have always been very good at competing against. Google have a hell of a head start in terms of their product – however this hasn’t stopped them consistently integrating new products and technologies – and whilst I am not a fan of many of the recent incarnations – it does highlight their consistent drive for better performance.

If Bing are to compete – this is where they will have to do it. There is no point throwing money at something if their is little substinance to back it up – or as one of my colleauges would say – ‘Just because you put on an engine on a set of draws – does not make it a sports car’. Bing need their product to evolve – to provide similar primary features as Google and then some.

They have certainly taken a different tact with one of the primary aims of the campaign to contrast the “visually rich” Bing with the relatively austere-looking Google. “It is a battle not just of mind but of heart as well,” he said. “We are wanting to make an emotional connection – we are ploughing a different furrow here.”

Ploughing a different furrow they might be however I can’t help thinking gains from this activity will be small in the medium to long term if this activity is not backed up with further developments on the platform itself. However if as Highfield suggests that Bing can make that emotional connection – then we may at last have a fight on our hands. I however won’t hold my breath…..

Strangely enough I was in a meeting with Bing yesterday, where this question was one of the questioned asked. Just as strangely the reps from Bing were kind of shady on the details of any deal, so its good to hear details that the Bing/Yahoo deal is now closed.

Officials in Canada and Australia have already had the deal signed off, so the fact that the US is now a step closer to regulatory approval would suggest getting this signed of in Europe should follow (however I guess one shouldn’t count their chickens before they hatch). This comes on the same day that Google announce yet another major change to their search engine results in the guise of personalised search for all – Co-Incidence? A sceptic amongst might suggest that

In a statement issued by the companies

Microsoft and Yahoo! believe that this deal will create a sustainable and more compelling alternative in search that can provide consumers, advertisers and publishers real choice, better value, and more innovation.

Yahoo! and Microsoft welcome the broad support the deal has received from key players in the advertising industry and remain hopeful that the closing of the transaction can occur in early 2010.

I know Bing have aggresive expansion plans, certainly Steve Ballmer’s forecast is well ahead of time in terms of being the number two player in the market, but getting number one is going to be a hell of a lot harder than an ailing Yahoo.

To read the full press release please click here

Bing has offically launched Bing in the UK following an extensive period of trial and ‘indepth analysis’.

During the last five months – where Bing remained in beta here in the UK – Microsofts European Search Technology centre has been focussing on developing the Bing UK framework to be as UK centric as possible in terms of search habits, user requirements and search quality. This as a result has meant a number of refinements during these period of which the key features highlighted by Microsoft include:

• A localised UK homepage, with unique imagery and ‘hotspots’ – click through information boxes provide users with a wealth of information. A tool for discovery and inspiration
• Visual Search, helps users search (maybe for a new purchase) using visual images and meta data without having to type in keywords
• More Instant Answers, created to give users a quick response options to a search question, such as how is Liverpool doing in the premiership or which tourist attraction should I take my in-laws to at the weekend
• See who or what is being chatted about with global live Twitter feed searching, pulling up Tweets in Bing searches in real-time
• Looking for the best deals? – an integrated shopping experience with Ciao UK searches the Internet to find the best prices, reviews and local availability. Bing supports making the best shopping decisions based on community feedback – not just advertising
• Not sure how to get there? Bing Maps is based on insights from our Multimap users. Bing Maps now offers new map styles, imagery and transit integration as well as draggable routes
• Bing has been built for the UK to help consumers get to key local sites and services in fewer links by including popular links, search boxes and suggestions within best match

According to Ashley Highfield, VP and MD for Consumer & Online, Microsoft UK “Bing is ready for the UK consumer, with our revolutionary way of searching the Internet proving very popular. Features such as Categorised Search, Twitter and Visual Search, are providing a different and intuitive experience, and are enabling us all to make informed decisions and discover more of the web – faster.

However, this is by no means the end of our development. We will continue to innovate and introduce new features on an ongoing basis by listening and responding to what UK search users find relevant. Removing our beta tag is merely the first step to signal Bing is here and already has features that are superior to those provided by other search engines.”

I will be interested to see whether this is enough to see Bing take second spot on the search engines, certainly it still lags a long way behind Google particularly given Googles’ rate of innovation at present. Watch this space….

Why other search engines don’t do this is beyond me, however I would have to put a tick firmly in the Bing box with this little gem.

Using the example above for car insurance provider Hastings Direct, one can see the sites that are hosted on the same box as Hastings. As you can see a number of sites are hosted on the same IP as hastingsdirect.com.

This can be done on any of the other sites you want, for example

Hastings: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ip:213.121.244.3&go=&form=QBRE&filt=all&qs=n

Tescocompare: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ip:155.136.78.78&go=&form=QBRE&filt=all&qs=n

Confused.com: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ip:212.100.253.40&go=&form=QBRE&filt=all&qs=n

To run this on a particular IP simply type the following syntax into the bing query box

ip: [ip address]

[Original Source Blogoscoped ]