Bing has re-launched its search engine with a ‘social’ face. In the coming days the users in the United States will see and experience the ‘New Bing’; and the changes will roll out globally in  the coming few weeks. Those wanting to experience the changes can head here.

In a nutshell, this re-launch of Bing is to incorporate social into search in a seamless manner. That is why the results will show up with a new sidebar area teeming with social elements. The thought behind the New Bing, as stated by Microsoft is, “The new Bing introduces brand new information architecture with a three column design that focuses on bringing you information from the web to help you take action and interact with friends and experts without compromising the core search experience.”

1. The Social Sidebar

Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Quora, LinkedIn, Google+, Skype, Blogger- you name the social platform, it is there on the new social sidebar. This is the center of ‘all things social’ on Bing search. Your searches can be completely private as Bing has explained, “The sidebar will appear as part of every query, but it will remain off to the right, allowing searchers to decide when and how to interact with it. We’ve moved most of the social content out of the main search pane and put it in a dedicated place where people can always expect to find it.”

The sidebar will have four features:

• Ask Friends
• Friends Who Might Know
• People Who Know
• Activity 

Ask Friends:

This ‘Ask Friends’ functionality is powered by the Bing-Facebook partnership. Now, users can literally ask questions from their Facebook friends from the Bing sidebar. For instance, if you put in a query about a country, then Bing would give you suggestions if a Facebook friend would know the answers to it. You can also share the question on Facebook and your friends can answer on Bing or on Facebook. You can post a question to get help from your Facebook friends as you search. You can also tag those friends specifically who are suggested by Bing as probably knowing the answer/issue.

Friends Who Might Know:

As can be gathered from the name of this feature, Bing will suggest friends on Facebook who might know about your search query. For instance, if you search about- ‘California’ then suggested friends will be those who have ‘Liked’ the pages related to California on Facebook or they have something to do with California (live there) or have California photos. The idea here is to get advice from friends as you search. Privacy is secured here as you and your friends can only see information you could already see about each other on Facebook.

People Who Know:

Want to know what the experts think about the new mobile phone you like? Then the third feature- ‘People Who Know’ can help you. Here Bing will show the names of experts, enthusiasts, and influential writers who have blogged or tweeted on the topic you are searching for. You can click on the expert’s name from the sidebar and go to their blog or follow them on Twitter.

Activity:

In this feature of the sidebar, you can see all activities happening in real time. This means you can see the posts, answer friends' questions, and Like posts. Your string of activities will be shown on both Bing and Facebook.

2. Core Web Results:

Bing recently got a new search results page which aimed at de-cluttering the entire results page. Now the ‘New Bing’ will show ‘Relevant, comprehensive and trustworthy’ results. So, when you are looking to get work done seriously, Bing will present you with un-cluttered and relevant results to focus on. These results will not have any social signals and will be relevant organic results.

Here, users will find core listings without the “unnecessary links” and social network results.

3. Snapshot

The search results have a Snapshot column which will tell searchers about certain places like restaurants, hotels, businesses, and movies. So type in a movie name and you will get all the details- of the shows, timings, bookings, phone number, maps, and reviews. This venture is supported by partnerships with companies like Yelp, Open Table, and Fansnap.

As Bing further explained their purpose, “We’ve run thousands of experiments to determine the types of tasks most frequently attempted in Bing, and in snapshot we help you take certain actions when we determine that the intent of your search matches these tasks.”

Bing has also released a video about the three columns of search and the new features.

What do you think of these changes? Do share your views.

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Presenting the ‘New Bing’ With a Social Sidebar & 3 Column Search Results!

The Bing search results page has a whole new design. Bing’s new design goes for a de-cluttered clear look so that users can scan results easily without being distracted. The design is a result of Bing’s experiments on the same post user feedback. The clean new look aims for better search experience.

As Bing says, "We’ve tuned the site to make the entire page easier to scan, removing unnecessary distractions, and making the overall experience more predictable and useful. This refreshed design helps you do more with search – and gives us a canvas for bringing future innovation to you"

The new look is somewhat like this:

And here is the old look:

As you can see, there is no left sidebar in the new look. This bar had related searches, search refinement options and search history settings. In the new look, you can find related searches in the right-sidebar and at the bottom of the results. Images, Videos, Finance and Maps have been placed in the top navigation along with login information. There is also a 5-pixel high fragment of the Bing home page image in the top margin.

Bing has also revealed that they plan to bring in further changes based on user feedback- “The new experience is more than skin-deep. You will also notice faster page-load times and improved relevance under the hood. After all, our goal is to help people spend less time searching and more time doing. And changing how we look is the next big step in doing just that.”

Do you like the ‘uncluttered’ look? Or do you think it reduces the relevancy of the page? Do share your comments.

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Bing Search Result Pages Gets A New Look!

Bing has revealed in a Bing Search Quality Insights blog how the search engine cleans its search results of junk links. This is another information insight in the new series started by Bing to provide users with search quality insights and the workings of Bing.

As Bing is quoted “It is annoying when you end up on a page for a domain that was just registered and is plastered with ads without any useful content. These are different types of junk links that we refer to as dead links, soft 404s, and parked domains. Let's explore how Bing detects and removes these sites from the search results.”

The search engine has given an in depth view of how they handle removing bad links and empty snippets from the search results.

Junk links have been categorized as:

1.) Dead Links – Dead link is the one when the pages return a 4xx or 5xx error code from an HTTP request of the page. If Bing has not crawled the page for some time, it will be unaware of any dead links there. But the crawler often detects the page quickly and then Bing takes the required action. Quoting Bing, “If we think there is some suspicion about the page in question we may boost its re-crawl priority and frequency to help us make a determination as quickly as possible. There is an important tradeoff we make here between aggressively removing dead links and the relevance of our search result is returned from an HTTP request for a page.”

2.) Soft 404- In case of a Soft 404, the server returns a normal HTTP 200 code with a webpage that informs the searcher of the non-existence of the original page on the site anymore. In this case, Bing tries to estimate whether it is a 404 or not. Quoting Bing, “Our high precision classifiers in this area use page content such as key phrases in the page’s title, body and URL to determine if the page is a soft 404; and whether to remove it from the search results.”

3.) Parked Domains- The sites that have placeholder content after a new domain registration are parked domains. These pages monetize traffic with ads directing to the domain before it has been properly setup by the new site owner. Bing says, “Like the techniques used to identify soft 404s, we look at the patterns in page content to determine if a page is a parked domain. By collaboratively mining many different types of pages against our large index of web data we are able to create signatures that allow us to identify parked domains when we see them and to remove them from our search results.”

Junk or Empty Snippets include:

• Junky Snippets - With the use of techniques to improve their encoding classifier, document convertor, garbage detector, and HTML parser, the search engine has been able to reduce junky snippets.
• Empty Snippets – In the case of empty snippets, Bing uses dynamic crawlers and document processors. Also with a number of classifiers Bing knows the right snippet for search results.

What do you think of this insight of Bing’s working? Do share your views.

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Steps Bing Takes To Remove 'Junk' From Search Results!

Bing has taken a clear stance on mobile SEO with its post on the Bing Search Blog. Bing is going ahead with the "one URL per content item" strategy. This means there will be no different URLs for a website for a computer or a mobile phone. In fact they will prefer producing lesser versions of URLs as webmasters will avoid underperforming results this way.

The benefits of a single URL were brought to light by Bing:

• "You have more ranking signals coming to this URL. Example: the vast majority of mobile URLs do not have inbound links from other websites as people do not link to mobiles URLs like they link to regular web-situated URLs.
• This is also less search engine crawler traffic coming to your web servers, which is especially useful for large websites. Fewer URLs to crawl reduces the bandwidth our crawlers consume.
• Less work (and potentially less cost) building, updating and maintaining a stand-alone mobile-focused website."

Bing has not said that each and every mobile URL should match to a desktop URL and be that desktop URL. If sites have landing pages specially for mobile searchers, Bing advices to "opt to block from us via the usual methods (robots.txt, webmaster tools)."

Now all eyes on Google whether it will take a direct stand or not!

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Bing Proposes to Follow “One URL Per Content Item” strategy in Mobile SEO!

Close on the heels of Google’ "Search Quality Highlights" series launched in December 2011, Bing has now come up with their own "Search Quality Insights" series. This was announced by Bing as a way to provide users with details on the working process of Bing. Following this launch, a comparison between the reasons of why both the search engines are doing it, is quite natural. Let us explore.

Why Does Google Share the Search Highlights?

Internet experts see Google’s decision to share Search Quality Highlights via a special series, as an attempt to deal with the anti-trust accusations. Of all the accusations, the one Google may attempt to answer specifically is the claim that Google’s search is hidden so that it can favor Google’s own properties.

Google, when it launched its series, aimed the main purpose behind the exercise to be more transparent. Quoting Google, "We’ve been wracking our brains trying to think about how to make search even more transparent. The good news is that we make roughly 500 improvements in a given year, so there’s always more to share. With this blog series, we’ll be highlighting many of the subtler algorithmic and visible feature changes we make. These are changes that aren’t necessarily big enough to warrant entire blog posts on their own."

Google uses the series to post about Panda Updates and other algorithmic changes.

The Reason Bing Has Come Forward to Share

Now, there are no anti-trust allegations against Bing. So quite unlike Google, it does not seem to need to prove a point of sorts. The reason behind Bing’s move is to attract user attention. If users know what Bing is doing and why, they will use Bing more. Bing aims to gain visibility by sharing more. As Bing is quoted:

"Today we are launching a new blog series we’re calling "Bing Search Quality Insights" aimed at giving you deeper insight into the algorithms, trends and people behind Bing. This blog is the first in a series that will take you behind the search box for an up close view into the core of the Bing search engine. Quality improvements in Bing are often subtle but often those little changes are the result of years of research. In the coming weeks and months, you will hear from members of my team on a range of topics, from the complexities of social search and disambiguating spelling errors to whole page relevance and making search more personal."

The Takeaway – Good News For Google

The launch by Bing is a good thing for Google as it will support Google’s practices. The anti-trust allegations against Google will lose their punch as Bing is now doing the same thing as Google. Search is no longer a black box any more. What do you think? Do share your views.

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Bing Launches Search Quality Insights!

Webmasters using the Bing Webmaster Tools can now access the application with additional features. Three new features have been announced by Bing, and this includes the Bing Webmaster Tools API.

• Bing Webmaster Tools API- With this new feature, you can use Bing Webmaster Tools data in other locations quite easily. The prominent exceptions to this are the messaging and keyword research data. Bing adds, “You will need to either login to your account to use the keyword research tool presently, or set up email alerts to see any messages we post to your account.”
• Keyword research tool- Now webmasters can do a keyword research on any word or phrase they choose to enter. They can also research on related phrases, across many different countries and languages.  Once you click on the keyword, you can further explore query volumes on keywords too. Bing will provide you with a history of 6 months for all the phrases. Bing adds about cpc data, “adCenter CPC data is shown to help you understand associated costs if you choose to buy paid ads on the phrase.  Hover over any phrase to see more data appear in a box to the left of the list.  We also provide a small graph which details the query trend for the previous 6 months.  This graph  gives you an idea, at a glance, of query volume fluctuations.”
• Markup Validation Tool. This feature allows webmasters to enter any URL and see what the markup looks like on the page, within the code.

You can access API below the Preferences option in the left hand navigation of the Bing Webmaster Tools API main page. The support documentation of API is a useful resource for developers to review.

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Bing Webmaster Tools Now Has the API!

Bing has launched a new feature titled Linked Pages. This feature is designed to give users an opportunity to better the search results for their own names as well as that of their friends better and more personalized. Here is what Bing says about it, “With people search being such a high volume pastime, we're taking it a step further letting you have more control in how you show up on Bing. Beginning today, with Linked Pages, we’re letting you link websites related to you in search results. Now your friends looking for you online can find what you want them to find. You can also link pages to your friends to help them shine on Bing as well”

This is how you will appear on Bing if you had your profiles linked:

Linked Pages is the way users can inform Bing the pages in search results are specifically about the person being searched for (your own name or your friend’s). Users can “link” search results to their person profile which means your Facebook profile, LinkedIn profile, company profile, blogs and so forth. The result of this exercise is more relevant search results for your name or your friend’s name.

Linking the Pages:

To use this feature, you need to login to Linked Pages with your Facebook account. The next step is to allow Bing to post to Facebook on the following screen. After this Bing will show you a search query for your name. As you scroll through the results, all you have to do is click “link to me”.

In case you have linked to a wrong result, then you can easily remove the link too. As Bing says, “You have full control over what results you’re linked in. Simply follow the link notification from Facebook or go to bing.com/linkedpages to remove links you added or links your friends added about you. Once you remove a link, you are the only person that can go back and relink yourself to that page.”

You can turn linking off at any time by disabling the application in Facebook. What do you think of this new feature? Do share your views.

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Bing Launches Linked Pages for Better People Search Results!

The American choice of celebrities underwent quite some change in the year 2011, as pop star Justin Beiber took the number one place among the most searched people. Bing has released a list of the top searches in 2011, and is a reflection of the collective interest of Americans in the year.

As compared to the 2010 edition, there have been some major changes.

The Most Searched People in 2011:
This position was held by Kim Kardashian in 2010 and now Justin Bieber has pushed her to number two and occupied the top position himself. The list of the top 10 most searched people in 2011 is:

1. Justin Beiber
2. Kim Kardashian
3. Jennifer Aniston
4. Lindsay Lohan
5. Jennifer Lopez
6. Britney Spears
7. Katy Perry
8. Megan Fox
9. Lady Gaga
10. Miley Cyrus

According to Bing, “Six out of the top ten most searched people on Bing in 2010 fell out of the top ten in 2011, including Sandra Bullock, Jesse James, Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods, Barack Obama and Kate Gosselin. New to the top ten most searched people on Bing in 2011 include Katy Perry, Jennifer Lopez, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Megan Fox, and Miley Cyrus. Unfortunate news for Barack Obama heading into an election year, the President fell from #5 in 2010 to #49 in 2011.”

The most viral video in 2011 was Rebecca Black's “Friday” video:

The Most Searched Sports Celebrities in 2011:

• Maria Sharapova
• Tiger Woods
• Serena Williams
• Brett Favre
• Caroline Wozniacki
• Kobe Bryant
• Lebron James
• Lamar Odom
• Hope Solo
• Carmelo Anthony

The Most Searched Musicians in 2011:
As compared to the previous year, the searches of musicians showed several new names in the list like Nicki Minaj.

• Justin Bieber
• Katy Perry
• Jennifer Lopez
• Britney Spears
• Lady Gaga
• Selena Gomez
• Nicki Minaj
• Rihanna
• Beyonce
• Taylor Swift

The Most Searched Destinations and Consumer Electronics in 2011:
According to Bing, gadgets really caught the Americans' fancy in 2011, “Xbox was the most searched consumer electronics product of the year on Bing, beating out Playstation and Wii as the favorite games console of the year. Interestingly enough, one of the most searched consumer electronics of the year doesn't even exist yet! Speculations about the iPhone 5 came in as the fourth most searched consumer electronic device.” The list of the most searched gadgets is:

1. Xbox
2. Kindle
3. Playstation
4. iPhone 5
5. iPad
6. Wii
7. iPad 2
8. Nook
9. Windows Phone 7
10. Macbook Pro

Among places, Las Vegas came out as the most searched destination in the world. While Singapore and Paris came on top in Asia and Europe.

The Most Searched News and Happenings in 2011:
Americans seemed obsessed with natural disasters and deaths in the year 2011. This is evident from the list:

1. Casey Anthony trial
2. Osama bin Laden death
3. Hurricane Irene
4. Japan Earthquake/Tsunami
5. Amy Winehouse death
6. Joplin tornado
7. Michael Jackson trial/Conrad Murray
8. 9/11 10 year anniversary
9. Republican Candidates – Herman Cain, Rick Perry
10. Haiti anniversary

The most searched celebrity event was the Royal Wedding. As Bing is quoted, “While the royal wedding was by far the most searched celebrity event of 2011, Prince William didn’t even make the top 100 list, while his beaming bride, Kate Middleton, came in as the number 12 most searched person. And the female focus extended through the Middleton family, as Kate’s sister and maid of honor, Pippa, ranked at number 21.”

The top searches of 2011 include:

1. The Most Searched Movies-Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
2. The Most Searched Morning Show-Today Show
3. The Most Searched Daytime Talk Shows- Wendy Williams
4. The Most Searched Late Night Shows -Chelsea Handler
5. The Most Searched Reality TV Shows- American Idol
6. The Most Searched Regular TV Shows- American Ido

Looks like the year 2011 was spent obssessing with events and celebrities, with not many attempts made to know “how to get quality education and become a better person”! What did you search for most in 2011, apart from – “Panda Update 2011” or “SEO Tips”!

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Top Bing Searches 2011- Justin Beiber Is The Most Searched Person!

The festive season has kicked off with Thanksgiving, and search engine industry has launched their Thanksgiving logos and themes. Google went ahead and launched its doodle a few days ago. The rest of the engines- Yahoo!, Bing and Ask have also gone live with their logos.

A very happy Thanksgiving to all our readers from PageTraffic!

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Search Engines Bring Out Thanksgiving Logos And Themes!

In an effort to make the users' search experience better, Bing has launched a new search feature called- Editors' Picks. This feature will furnish the users with a list of Editors' Picks for the searched query.

Do not think that the Editors' Picks will have any effect on the ranking or relevance of ordinary search results. The feature will have no impact on ranking at all, in fact, it will offer a different angle on search- those results will be featured that have been chosen by editors rather than any algorithm.

As Bing says, “We’re launching Bing Editors’ Picks. Editors’ Picks were designed to enhance Bing results by bringing editorially selected sites to your search experience. Our goal, whether delivered by algorithm or by editors, is to help you find what you’re looking for faster and to get stuff done.”

With the new feature, at present 140 topics have been chosen ranging from “Free E Books” to “Photo Editing.” Now searchers looking for any of the 140 topics will see a set of editorial picks and a new option at the top that links into the specially made page for the topic. The link will be in the top-rail and will read "editors' picks," in standard searches, while in the case of instant answers, it will show the entry at the top of the search page.

The editors' page has visual navigation and brief descriptions for the selected sites. As of now, there is no clarity on how the pages were selected by the editors.

This has led to speculations whether the editors won't favor any content (be it from Bing or advertisers). What do you think of this feature? Will editors do a better job than algorithms?

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Now Bing Search Results To Include Editors' Picks!

Bing has introduced a major upgrade in its Webmaster Tools, with the focal point of the update being more sharing of data. As Bing says, “Continuing our commitment to help publishers do more on Bing, today we’re announcing our biggest updates since Honey Badger, by focusing on three areas: To share more data, to increase transparency and to bring you more useful tools.”

Bing Webmaster Tools now have the following upgraded features:

The key updates and changes include:

• Expanded Crawl Details: Now webmasters will be able to see all inbound links to a given URL regardless of the heading. This means that anything that comes under the 300, 400 & 500 codes will display inbound links to the URL by each URL. The data will be shared in the same way by URLs listed under the Robots.txt and Malware headings. Crawl details have now been expanded and webmasters will not be limited to seeing inbound links pointing to pages that return a 400 header response code.

• Improving Email Alerts: Get informed pronto via email if there is any malware alert placed by Bing on your account. Bing will send an email if they want you to see your crawl rate settings, so that you may increase the crawl rate and give a chance for your content to be crawled faster.

• URL Normalization Suggestions: There are URL normalization tips being offered by Bing, but they will all be disabled by default. Webmasters may customize their elements they need to include for normalization, which is why Bing is also increasing the number of query string parameters per site from 25 items to 50 items. This will be a help to webmasters looking to fix any canonicalization issues at the source.

• Deeper Data In Index Explorer: Now the traffic data will appear within the Index Explorer tool.
• DNS verification: Bing has now made it possible for webmasters to verify their website via DNS for domains in their account.

• adCenter Data Integration: Now the Avg CPC column will show up on the left of the traffic data. Further details will be on the left of the column and you can see the effective keywords faster.

What do you think of these updates? Do share your view. To learn how to use Bing Webmaster Tools, see this. For SEO tips on Bing, see this.

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Bing Webmaster Tools Updated With New URL Normalization Tips And Crawl Details Expansion!

The Bing team announced that Bing for mobile is now using HTML5, to support better browsing experience. The new version of the Bing for Mobile app for iPhone and Android was announced on the 2nd of November and Bing is quoted as saying, “the updated version uses HTML5 to blend the mobile browse experience with the app experience so you get a consistent and fast mobile search experience whether you’re using m.bing.com from your browser or the Bing app.”

This updates Bing for Mobile app is available in versions that are fit for Apple iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch) and also support the Google Android run smartphones and tablets. The announcement led the tech experts’ attention to the fact that the app was built on HTML5 instead of Microsoft’s own Silverlight multimedia display technology. It is to be noted that Silverlight is equipped to run on iOS and Android, still Bing Mobile chose HTML5 as the platform.

The reason for the same is as quoted from Bing, “Using HTML5, our goal is to build a mobile experience that leverages the unique capabilities of the different platforms, including camera support and voice search, while making the functions the apps can provide consistent across the platforms and in the future callable by engines to help people get from search to doing.”

What Does The App Do?

The new features that come with the app update are:

• Maps/List Split View: This will give the users a cool way to view business listings and directions and a map in a single view. Consequently the location of the search query will become really easy to see. This split view also works for driving directions and transit.
• Deals: For the shopping fans, the app will support one-stop deal shopping and convenient mobile phone access for local deals. This is supported by more than 100 dealers all across the USA.
• Video Domain: This was introduced in October on m.bing, the new video domain is now available on iPhone.
• Transit/Real-Time: This is an Android specific app that will show transit routing/real-time transit and news. All features that were previously only available on m.bing.com.

Who Gets The New App?

The new app is at the moment available for iPhone and Android devices across the United States. To get the updated app, go to the Android Market. The Verizon Android users need to go here for the app. The Apple users can go to the iPhone App store to download the updated app for better mobile browsing.

Why Was Windows Phone 7 Left Behind?

This question has been doing the rounds that Microsoft brought its Bing for Mobile app for Android and iOS first and not for its very own Windows Phone 7. Bing is quoted as saying that the app for Windows platform is coming soon, “We're working to release the same consistent experience for RIM and Windows Phone 7 devices in the future, and will share more details as they become available.”

This decision by Microsoft seems sensible as Android and iOS, comprising the bulk of the smartphone market need apps first. In order to get Bing high on the choice of mobile users, Microsoft let go of the OS wars and launched the app for its competitors first.

What do you think of Bing’s move and the app? Share your views with us.

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Bing For Mobile Goes HTML5 For Android And iOS, Windows Phone 7 Waiting In Line!

It's official now. Yahoo search is powered by Bing, whether it is a desktop search or a mobile one. Yahoo has given the lead to Microsoft Bing. The only exception is of Korea where this algorithmic transition has not yet happened.

As Yahoo declared that the transition process is complete, and also explained why Korea remains outside the loop, “Yahoo! has completed the algorithmic transition to Bing in all global markets (except Korea), across desktop and mobile, for all Yahoo! and syndication traffic. This has been a huge effort spanning 20-plus months involving many people across Yahoo! and Microsoft. Only Korea, which involves a three-way integration between Yahoo, Microsoft and Daum, remains, and is expected to complete by the end of the year. ”

This process of transferring the search algorithms started in August 2010, when Yahoo Search stopped providing their own algorithmic search results in the USA and Canada. The process of transfer has been slow and they have moved one country at a time, whilst Yahoo handing over their search technology and search engine to Microsoft.

The transfer process has not been easy, as Yahoo explains the process, “We had to confirm Bing could handle Yahoo’s capacity across multiple global datacenters, including new ones that were brought online to serve the needs of the Search Alliance. The fact that all the cutovers went remarkably smoothly and were essentially non-events from an operational perspective is a testament to the thorough job both teams did. ”

Now, the transition is nearly complete, with the exception of Korea. And that too will be done by the end of 2011. The transition wave reached Australia, Brazil and Mexico, and then Yahoo UK was powered by Bing. The Bing Yahoo Search alliance reached Asia markets in September, and now it is nearly done.

This transition is for organic search only. Paid search transition is still mid way. Do you think this search alliance will impact Google in any way? Do leave your comment.

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Now Bing Powers Yahoo Organic Search All Over The World Barring Korea!

Bing has announced the launch of a new deals site. However, bing.com/deals is a partnered venture between Bing and other deals sites, such as Groupon, LivingSocial, Nordstrom and Target.

But why did Bing decide to set up a deals site?

Well, Bing has said that a comScore data reveals a 24% growth in the deals audience last year, while a recent Bing/Impulse survey shows 61% of people to have become more dependent on daily deals in the last six months. But an overabundance of deals is getting these people exposed to irrelevant deals, thus finding a proper deal a painful experience. Nevertheless, 87% of people have told Bing, as per the latter's claim, that they will be more dependent on deals provided they can find a one-stop source of all relevant deals.

Bing claims to have tried to address this need of daily deals sites users by setting up this new deals site.

Bing has said that it has gathered deals from prominent providers and retailers to ensure that the target users can locate all the best deals in one central location, instead of wading through a crowd of deal sites. Bing has also promised the rolling out of more money saving features in the coming weeks.

The key features -

• One-Stop Shop- It represents an aggregation of more than 200,000 deals cutting across the USA, which also include local deals. This helps the user to compare the various deals and identify the best one.
• Browse for the Best Deals- Bing has tried to organize the deals in a manner that irrelevant deals do not come in the way. The user is able to browse the deals on the basis of retailer, location, keywords or category, or can simply have a look at the best deals of the day.
• Visual Search Results- Steps have been taken to make the deal search results visually organized on the screen, so that the user can easily browse through the options and identify the deal most appropriate for him.
• Daily Deals- Just one click will expose the user to the best deals in his area, entailing significant savings.
• More Deals on the Go- Availing Bing Mobile Deals at m.bing.com will make the user benefit from those same deals which are accessible on the PC as well.

Bing's decision to set up this deals site comes close on the heels of some other additions/changes/makeovers, such as going for a homepage makeover or incorporating "Action Buttons" to book flights/hotels and rent cars.

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Bing Deals – The New Initiative From Bing To Facilitate Your Daily Deals Searching!

Bing has added a video background which shows changing seasons at Grand Teton National Park. The idea behind uploading the HTML5 enabled video seems to be welcoming the season of fall.

The video  is 13 seconds long, and is of about 1.9 MB.

The step may be part of Bing's overall effort to go for a change in its look and feel. Just recently Bing was in news for going for a homepage makeover, wherein its prime focus seemed to be getting more user/visitor friendly.

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Bing Adds Video Background To Welcome Fall!

Yahoo! and Bing have expanded combined search engine operation service for the Asian users. The markets that will come under the purview of this service include Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan and Vietnam. However, a notable exception will be that of Korea.

In fact Yahoo! and Bing recently completed this algorithmic transition for the European markets of Greece, Poland, Romania, Turkey and Switzerland (in German, French and Italian languages, i.e. the three main languages of that country).

In August the duo announced a similar step for the following countries/regions- Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Russia, the Netherlands, Sweden and MENA (Middle East and North African countries, in Arabic language). And that announcement had again come close on the heels of other similar announcements, wherein Yahoo! and Bing had informed about the launch of this service in various other countries, such as New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, USA, Mexico, France, Germany, India, Italy, Spain and UK.

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Yahoo! Bing Transitions Expand To Asia Markets!

Bing has come up with Action Buttons aimed at facilitating booking of flights and hotels, renting cars, etc. The service entails searching across seven popular categories- airlines, rental cars, couriers, hotels, restaurants, banks and software downloads.

From now onwards, when you will search on Bing under the above categories, the search engine will present you with buttons meant for top actions on the site. For example, while searching for airlines Bing will present you with action buttons like book a flight, check flight status, and check into a flight.

But how could Bing decide beforehand that exactly which options you would be looking for if you are searching for airlines, or courier, or any of the other categories? Well, Bing has said that its algorithms have determined it on the basis of how people search.

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Press Bing “Action Buttons” To Book Flights/Hotels And Rent Cars!

Bing has gone for a homepage makeover, with the prime focus seemingly being how to get more user/visitor friendly.

The change includes some decluttering of the home page, which has given a smart and sleek look to it. Besides, Bing has installed some mobile friendly elements on the page, thus boosting its user friendly appeal.

However, the most notable change is probably the shifting of most of the navigation to the explore bar.

There are some minor changes as well, which nevertheless play some part in giving a different look to the home page. For example, the 'popular now' items now appear to be more conspicuous. Bing has also taken the back/forth navigation arrows and the Facebook "like" button to the top right position.

One question is doing its round in the Web world. Do these changes indicate that Bing HTML5 is on its way? Guess Web enthusiast do not have to wait much to get the answer for that.

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Bing Goes For A Makeover!

In a recent interview by Eric Enge, Bing's Sr. Product Manager, Duane Forrester highlighted important pointers on how your website and pages can rank high in Bing's search results “in my view the priorities for websites are content, social media and link building, in that order.”

Whilst there were many great recommendations made in the interview, the key points noted are:

A complete user friendly experience:

User friendly website and pages, which includes great content, will get you in the good books of Bing. Duane said “when you delight someone with the best user-experience possible, we pick up all those signals that person shares about their delight, and those signals will help influence our perception of your quality.” All in all this means, “The end goal of everything we do at Bing is to provide a better result set for a searcher.”

Additionally in many of Duane’s responses there is reference to how Bing makes use of click-thru-rate (CTR) and user experience on a webpage to help them determine your webpage's rankings in the search results. This suggests that it extremely vital that you develop good landing pages for your visitors to interact with. A high bounce rate will lead to Bing devaluing your page.

The Social Element:

When asked by Eric if “Social media has become an important input to search.” Duane Forrester discussed, “Yes, in my view the priorities for websites are content, social media and link building, in that order. Think of it as a three-piece pie. At some point, social could be more important than content, but that assumes you have excellent content in place.”

This asserts the massive impact of social media on the way that your website performs on Bing. Personally, I think this is the one most important aspect to be considered from the interview. So basically, as part of your SEO plan ensure your website gets more social. For example, get more Facebook Like and Shared, Tweet away, stay active on Google+ and other rather influential social networks.

RSS Feeds and XML sitemaps:

To ensure that Bing views your sites he emphasizes the importance of making use of valid XML sitemaps and RSS feeds “things like RSS are going to become a desired way for us to find content”. As for the site maps he informed that, “Your Sitemaps need to be clean. We have a 1% allowance for dirt in a Sitemap… If we see more than a 1% level of dirt, we begin losing trust in the Sitemap”. So if you want Bing to see your websites, ensure you update your feeds regularly and make sure it done error-free.

The page performance factor:

“Bing does not use page performance as a ranking factor.” While it would appear from what Duane first said in the interview that load time of the page does not play a role in determining the page rank. However later on in the interview he contradicts this assertion by saying, “provide the searcher with the fastest possible answer to their question.”

This suggests that there certainly is some significance on the page performance that is taken into consideration bearing in mind all other factors are equal. Consequently, we would recommend that you make sure that your website does loads quickly because if you don't you are at a risk of loosing out on your Google rankings because you followed Bing’s rather contradictory suggestion.

To learn more about Bing's tips for SEO read the full interview.

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Tips and Tricks On How To Improve Rank In Bing!

Twitter and Bing have announced that they have renewed the deal that lets Bing access Twitter’s information in an amicable exchange on Twitter itself.

Twitter's spokesperson Carolyn Penner used the Storify service to announce the press release via Twitter conversation. Here's what the exchange looks like:

Deal Details?

Whilst there is no official disclosure of the deal out yet, there's been enough buzz around that Microsoft is rumored to have paid out a reasonably large sum for the Twitter services.

In a confirmation from Microsoft a spokesperson told us:

“I can confirm that Bing is extending its collaboration with Twitter. We are not disclosing terms of the deal.”

What about Google?

As for Google, there is no such word, following the dismissal of Google Realtime which was using Twitter data for generating realtime feeds until July. If anything there’s indication of a little slam against Google in the above conversation:

“@bing Totally! Search w/o Twitter = old news. You & @MSN are amazing at using Tweets to make search better & help people stay in the know.”

When asked Penner if there was news from the Google's end, the word was: “Nope.”

The straight up denial combined with the tweet exchange indicates that Twitter and Google can not be anymore further apart?! Also with Google hyping the service when it was launched initially makes you question why such harsh reactions now?

Meanwhile the journalists are dearly missing the tool (Google Realtime), which was powered by Twitter’s feeds mainly. However the discontinuation of the tool has barely had any impact on the ordinary users. Personally I like Twitter's information over Google, however I would not mind settling for Google+ content powering the Realtime Search. Anything is better than being unable to search through content on Google. Google seems to have forgotten that Realtime was now just about Tweets. It also used content from other social networks too.

The Twitter-Bing Story:

Whilst Bing’s had Twitter on its side since October 2009 it does not seem to work any wonders to attract visitors over to Bing. Perhaps because if you looking for feeds from Twitter you can be hard-pressed to find it. For example, in Bing's search on “twitter”, this conversation between Bing and Twitter does not appear at all:

Additionally nor do you get a link to Bing Social Search, the primary way to find tweets on Bing via the Bing menu at the top of the page.

Topsy the Real (time) Winner:

Overall It seems like Topsy is the only real winner. As it is a better resource compared to Bing especially if you are seeking tweets that are beyond a day or more.

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Twitter Renews The Realtime Deal With Bing, Google Deal Still Uncertain!