A recent press release from Experian HitWise (one of the best global information services companies) disclosed some interesting facts related to Bing and YouTube. The press release revealed the results from UK Search Engine and Social Analysis report made by HitWise and it seems Bing is gaining more and more popularity within the UK.

Although over 90% of all searches from UK pertain to Google, Bing increased its market share with 0.28%, thus becoming the fastest growing search engine between February and March 2011; but on the other hand, Google lost about 0.66% from its market share. Speaking about yearly figures, Yahoo!, Google and Ask lost up to 0.61% of their market share while Bing has gain a whopping 1.43%, showing that it is starting to become more popular among the UK users.

However, when it comes to social networking, there are no surprises here: Facebook has over 56% of all visits to social networking websites (although its market share declined in the last month with 1.22%) while YouTube increased its visits with over 18.32% in one month. Yet again, speaking about monthly figures, Facebook has grown with 4.16% and it does not show any signs of stopping its growth.

Conclusion of this study is that each and every brand should look more into optimising for Bing while Google is not the single player on this market (although its market share is huge). With Facebook’s huge growth, not having a presence on that social networking website can mean nothing more than lost customers. Waiting for some more advertising options though…

It seems they have indeed started a war, or at least a “war of words”. First, Google accused Bing of copying its search results – they say Microsoft search engine is spying on what people search for on Google, then they use that information to improve Bing’s search results. That is the explanation of Bing’s relevancy improvement, according to Google accusations.

Google’s Amit Singhal said “I’ve spent my career in pursuit of a good search engine, I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book.”

It was just a matter of time for Bing to reply to these accusations and Harry Shum, Bing’s Corporate VP said about Google that it is a “spy-novelesque stunt” and furthermore, Bing uses over 1,000 different signals in their ranking algorithm and what Google did is just a “creative tactic by a competitor”.

It was again the time for Amit Singhal to step into the spotlights and in response to Harry’s statement he said that “Bing’s search results are just a cheap imitation of Google’s. However, he added that Google wants to stop Bing from using customer search data from their search engine in order to influence Bing’s “recycled” search results. Strong words from Google!

“We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google.” he added.

These words come yet again from Mehdi, published on Bing blog:

“We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop. We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting.”

We all know that competition is always a good thing, we always look forward for new search engines to come into this battle for supremacy and we will definitely follow-up with future posts related to this “war of words” between Google and Bing.

As we wrote a few days ago, Bing and Facebook have partnered for what some are saying to be a new search results era: the integration of social networking from Facebook to organic search results from Bing. It was just a matter of time for Google to strike back and display their search results details from a social sharing “environment”.

Basically, Google seems to test the waters by adding a “Shared by number+” next to number of related articles, in their news section. This move from Google will show how popular a story is on Twitter or other social sites and it seems to perfectly respond to users’ demands, in simple words: if a story is so popular it really is worth clicking and reading it.

For now, the results come only from Twitter but it can become very helpful while trying to see which Twitter users are quoting or making comments on a particular link in their tweets. When clicking on the “shared by” link the user is taken to a window displaying real-time sharing activity from Google Updates.

This experiment showcases a great feature that every Google News’ user might use and we look forward to seeing how this will evolve in time. Latest signs from social networking and search engines world reveal that sharing becomes a very important part of the search engines results, the web designers from WebCreationUK are keeping an eye on this particular subject as it might be a new step forward for the online environment.

It was just a matter of time before the incredible amount of data from Facebook was to play a major role in search results and it seems that Bing figured this out first. Bing is now showing Facebook-powered results for people search, while the “Like” button will play a great role in search results, for now Bing is one step ahead of Google.

Over several years, with Facebook becoming more and more popular among people and social media playing an important aspect for the online environment, numerous voices were considering it a new Google killer. The impact would have been major, “specialists” say. With their “Like” button, it would have been an easier task for Facebook search engines to rank a website according to how popular it is instead of ranking it according to how many links point to it.

But in the end, it seems that another major player is taking advantage of the “like” button, and this is Bing with the “Liked by your friends” new feature. First and foremost, we must mention that any user that would like to benefit from this feature must connect the Facebook account with Bing. Basically, when someone that has their Facebook account connected with Bing, anytime they are doing a search like “laptop cases” among the organic search results there will be results showing what friends like, only related to this search query. We have tried to do some searches for different terms, however not many revealed Facebook powered “Like” results, so maybe our friends did not “Like” any product related to our search or Bing is showing only highly targeted results when it comes to results triggered by Facebook.

It’s an almost obvious fact that this is just the beginning and social will interfere more and more in the search results, while let’s be frank, people’s opinion matters most, more than the amount a link of a website gets, right? By getting results that in a way your friends recommended by liking, this is a fantastic change in the search experience.

However, by searching for a person’s name on Bing one can find Facebook powered results, and with over 500 million folks registered this is like a great step forward in seeking people you might know.

Will this affect SEO? This is a natural question that comes to mind, whatever business we might run. The simple answer, for now, is no. There will be no top 10 re-rank, no drops in ranking, no sudden movements. All the powered by Facebook results will not influence in any way the organic results.

The web designers from WebCreationUK like this new feature and this is a fantastic sign that social is getting deeper and deeper into search results, so from now on we should all be more cautious on what products/services etc we “Like”, not to mess with our friends from Facebook results. We definitely believe social will get involved more in more in the search results, so keep an eye on our website design blog for more news related to this.

If you’ve not already started to look at your Bing search engine strategy then the latest news from America offers a good prompt. It was recently announced that in the coming months Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft’s mobile organic and paid listings in the US and Canada.

Just now they are in a testing phase but it could be that the first organic search listings are rolled out in September. Yes, this is in America and it’s not happening today, but it means that Bing is likely to become a much bigger player in the search engine market and so it’s vital that all businesses being a Bing optimisation strategy.

Why not speak to WebCreationUK, a specialist in SEO and web design, to find out what they could do for you and your website?

A new report has revealed that Bing recorded the biggest search growth last month. The search engine, owned by Microsoft, showed a 7% month-on-month increase and now captures almost 10% of the US search engine marker.

The Hitwise survey also found that while Google still reigns supreme with almost three-quarters of the entire search market, the giant did see a 1% drop month-on-month.

Yahoo’s share of the search market stayed around the same at just less than 15% while Ask captures just more than 2% of the market, representing a growth of 2%.

Hitwise also looked at which search engines were used for searching various categories.

•    Google was revealed to have the most visits to automotive, health, shopping and travel categories.
•    Yahoo saw gains in the automotive and shopping categories.
•    Meanwhile, Bing saw triple-digit growth in three categories – automotive, shopping and travel – including a 199% increase in the Shopping category.

If you want your website to be part of the search market then maximise your websites performance, speak to WebCreationUK about our advanced SEO package.