Organic SEO Blog

Often someone tells me that Bing is good, and each time I go to Bing and ckeck if it is true… and each and every time Bing disappoints me…

I dont understand why bing.com includes twitter often among its top search results whenever I try searching for something:)

Having failed to acquire Yahoo, Microsoft has now apparently set its sights on a new target, and is rumored to be eying a $100 million acquisition of powerset.com, a natural language-based search engine that is only usable on Wikipedia and Freebase.

One has to now wonder how much of a boost in the search market the acquisition will net them over time :), as we know that Google has been a bit dismissive about semantic search and it didn’t do much for Ask Jeeves either. Anyways, this could at the very least help Microsoft distinguish itself in the search space, but with all the hundreds of millions they’ve already spent beefing up their search engine perhaps their problem isn’t technological as much as it is a branding issue.

Microsoft has launched an experimental search site Tafiti.com that uses Silverlight 1.0 to display Windows Live search results. The search experience is unlike most of other interfaces that are currently found on the Web, and the graphics on the home page have a similar look and feel to the GUI of Windows Vista.

The result page also includes a box for entering a search topic on the left hand side of the screen, which is created to look like the top of a piece of looseleaf paper, with a blank white section in the center with the heading “Web” where search results appear.

On the right is a notepad-like application that Microsoft calls a “shelf,” with thumbnail-sized screenshots of what look like Web pages.

The aim of Tafiti just seems to showcase the power of Microsoft Silverlight, and there is no improvement in the awkward search results returned by Windows Live Search

In the latest report from comScore, Google has maintained its lead on other powerful search engines. According to the report, Google captured just over 50% of U.S. searches in May.

comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, recently released its monthly qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines.  It reports that, in May 2007, Google Sites captured 50.7 percent of the U.S. search market, gaining one full share point from the previous month.  Yahoo! Sites maintained its second place ranking with 26.4 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (10.3 percent), Ask Network (5.0 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.6 percent).

Though many users have begun inputting their information directly into address bars, it is clear that most prefer to use their favorite search engines to find needed information. It is clear from these results that paid search is still a good option for online marketers. Paying for higher placement, utilizing search engine optimization to get organic search placements is a good way to increase traffic to websites.

Microsoft is said to be willing to pay the heavy price it would cost to acquire Silicon Valley’s most successful Web portal, Yahoo! And this deal would do more good for Microsoft than anything else the company has done in its efforts to catch up to Google in that market. But an acquisition like this would be a monster deal for Microsoft. Even before getting to the potential integration challenges, Yahoo wouldn’t come cheap.

The renewed talks comes in amid growing threat by search engine and online advertising giant Google for both the companies. In fact, Google replaced Microsoft as the world’s top brand only last month.

Microsoft Corp. is offering financial incentives to large enterprise customers to encourage their employees to use the MSN Live Search service. “Microsoft Service Credits for Web Search” a Powerpoint overview of the program contains the following.

“Employees search the web daily with tools from Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo. OEMs and web sites are already earning credits based on searches that their users bring. Now, your organization can earn credits for Microsoft web searches and redeem them for Microsoft or preferred partner deployment and training services. More searches earns more credits towards the services you value.”

The cash being offered is not exactly small - between $2 and $10 USD per computer per year, along with signing bonuses. Though that may not sound like a lot, when you consider it going over thousands of computers in a large corporate network the figure really begins to mount. Even if these credits can only be redeemed for more software or training, it is certainly an enticing offer.

Business looking to optimise their websites efficiently should not neglect Microsoft’s Live Search and Yahoo, even though Google can sometimes seem like the be-all and end-all.

Despite a lack of visible progress in catching up with Google, Microsoft still believes that it will eventually turn the tables by improving the quality of its search results and by changing the way computer users search.

Susan Dumais, a veteran Microsoft search expert, has built a tool to help determine relevance called Personalized Search. It pulls together several hundred results and then compares them with the index that Windows users can build of the documents on their hard drives, a feature called Desktop Search.

Microsoft researchers are exploring other ways to exploit clues about the context of a search as well as conversational-style interfaces that will be more powerful than the way users now enter and modify search terms.

Microsoft seems to be researching a lot trying to figure out how users will search 10 years from now, and are planning for it. However, as of now, the Winsows Live Search results are still burried under spam for most of the terms, while Google seems to have reached a position to attract more and more online searches conducted worldwide.

Microsoft’s YouTube style site came out into public beta this week. It is called Soapbox. It is not terribly distinctive but it helps round out MSN’s set of blogging and other personal expression tools. It is expected to be a crucial part of Microsoft’s new Live.com initiative and is not using Windows Media but used Flash
An upstart video search site called ClipRoller has invented a very customizable results page. Say there are six topics you are interested in. You can set up search-term channels, and bookmark the page. Every time you wish, you can get a picture of what’s new across multiple video sites.

Soapbox lets users upload video to share, as well as tag them so that others can find them easily. Unlike YouTube, the site lets users watch videos on one side of the screen, and browse and search videos on the other half.