Google Fights Against Content Farms

Google is making drastic changes in its algorithm for search engine results. It has decided to demote the ‘low quality’ or ‘shallow websites’ from the search engine results. After getting to know this action it is been updated in various search engine news.

Google is mainly targeting “content farms”- a company that generates large amount of textual content through various articles, which is created to generate traffic and advertising revenue. The changes, which will affect around 12% of Google search queries in US.

"This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites – sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful," said Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, and Matt Cutts, head of the company's spam-fighting team in the blog post titled - Finding more high-quality sites. This implementation will definitely benefit the high quality sites which have original content and information on various related topics to improve their rankings.

After all this Google is in poor health because of black hat SEO practices and content farms complaints from users. As and when Google implements this new change, the high quality website owners will be very much satisfied and google will also be able to gain more faith from its users all over world.

Bing Bar for Internet Browsers

Recently Bing has introduced its new Bing bar for Internet Explorer 7 and higher versions. Bing bar runs on Windows XP SP3 and higher versions. Because of various options and user friendly interface it offers, Bing Bar is hot topic in search engine news and social media updates. Here are some of the features of this new Bing Bar.

 Bing News: Bing news to keep you updated with all the latest happening across the globe. This includes news from entertainment, business, politics, international and other streams.

Bing Maps: Helps you to get road maps from your location. YOu can also set a default start location for the map.

Bing Weather: Bing weather is a compact weather forecaster for your location. You can get weather map for your nearby locations, hourly weahter forecast for your location and if you want, you can also add multiple locations for Bing weather map.

Bing Mail: You can access multiple mails through this single tab. You can access gmail, hotmail and yahoo mail all through single bar.

  

Bing Search: A search bar helps to search whatever you want. it also keeps a track of your searches to optimise your search.

You can also stay updated with Facbook account. You can post comments, make 'likes', comment and do other various activities right from the Bing Bar.

With all these features, users may find this Bing toolbar very friendly. You can also download Bing bar for free. Bing's navigation through arrow keys, reduced number of clicks, user friendly interface are some of the features users may find useful.

Google Social Search Update

Recently Google announced an update for Google social search. This new update needs the user to get logged on to Google before he/she searches a term. Google has started making and is supposed to appear in the coming week.

When you search a term in Google, search results will also show content that are shared by your friends. For example, if you search the term 'climbing Kilimanjaro' and your friend has a blog about the same, then the search results will show the blogpost results from that friend.

This also includes updated from sites like Twitter and other social sites. Google will include all those updates that are public and are easy to crawl. However, this update excludes the sites like Facebook because status updates and other posts are not public.

This search engine news have however created some concern about publicising some content on these social sites. Many people would not like everybody to know what they have posted publicly. Google has however enabled an option for user. This will help user to control their Google profile and allow them to connect or disconnect the accounts that they want.

Bing more Accurate than Google

A recent study was done by Hitwise showed that Bing and Yahoo! Search have higher success rates as compared to their rival search engine, Google. This study was done in US for 4 weeks in the month of January. About 10 million users were surveyed for this data.

The results show that there is a significant rise of about 21% in MOM (month-over-month) percentage change for Bing users. The share of Bing increased from 10.6% to 12.81%

  

 Also the success rate for Bing and Yahoo! Search are highest for the month of January. The success rate, according to Hitwise is measure of visit to a website after the search query is done. For both the search engines,


Bing and Yahoo!Search, more than 81% of the searches executed resulted in visit to a website, whereas, Google achieved a sucess rate of 65%.

Also there is a shift in the trend of the search keywords used. The long term keywords were up 5% from December 2010 to January 2011. The short keyword phrases, i.e. one, two or three words keywords shows decreasing percentage of searhces, as compared to long term keywords like five, six, seven or eight keywords term.





After the data was released, Matt Cutts, from Google seemed skeptical about the survey. On Google Buzz, he stated that 'successful search' was less accurate term to use as compared to 'left the site after searching'.

Recently Bing being accused by Google, new releases of Games on Bing, and Hitwise statistics, it seems that Bing is all on the search engine news this year. But for a giant competitor like Google, Bing still has a tough task to compete Google in terms of searches and market share.

Search Engines to use History for Better Search Results

According to two new papers that were presented at WSDM (Web Search and Data Mining) Conference 2011, it is said that search results can get personalized. These papers were presented by researchers from Microsoft. This means that by if you are interested in Orange, a brand of France Telecom, and not in fruit, and then you will see results accordingly. This will ensure that you give more clicks on search results as these results are more oriented to your needs.

Some personalized data is already been in use by search engines like the device a user is using, geographical location of the user etc. One of the researchers, Jaime Teevan at Microsoft, says that this can be started by using personalization of searches so that users can be directed to those websites which they have already visited. Search engines could also follow with braver personalization that would suggest related keywords and search results.

One of the findings conclude that instead of using Bookmarks for websites, visitors like to find sites through search queries, even if they have visited these sites earlier.

According to search engine news from internet, Bing is experimenting with the search results so that they can collect data through user’s Facebook account to improve this personalized search. To test this system, researchers used volunteers who were part of this experiment for two months. There was increase in click through by 2.7 times in this period.

However, personalising a result will have its own drawback. For example, personalised searches can narrow down search results too much - only giving pages relevant to the search. And many people will be unreceptive to search engines for these narrow searches. Moreover, user does not want to share all their information with search engines.

This all will need more time and research so that personalised search can be more promising without any flaws.

NICTA Join Hands with Microsoft Research Asia to Develop Online Video Search

              NICTA (National Information and Communications 
Technology Australia) is collaborating with Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) to enhance technology to improve the performance of online video search engines. This is the first such project between Microsoft Research Asia and NICTA which is being highlighted in all search engine news.

               Dr Jian Zhang, project leader at NICTA said “We want to find the best way for computers to sort and recognise actions in videos”. This project of Online Video Search is basically launched with the objective that search engines can convey more perfect and faster results.

               Most of the search engines support keyword search for video based content, this results into many irrelevant and unwanted videos, but the one's which are related videos are dumped below and doesn’t exist in the main frame.

The major idea of this project is to algorithmically target 'action words' from titles instead of keyword based searches.

                Shipeng Li, MSRA Group Manager of Media Computing at Microsoft Asia, said: "I believe this research collaboration will result in real progress in the area of large-scale database search based on human action recognition.

Bing Introduces Games in Search Results

Recently Bing has announced that ‘games search’ is available in Bing UK Search Engines. According to news Bing introduced nearly 46 games that are available to play. People are taking this search engine news on both positive and negative notes.

If you try to search a result in Bing Search for games like Klondike Solitaire, Carniball, Slingo, Solitaire, Bubble Town, Zuma's Revenge etc, an option of 'Play Now' is available along with other search results, so that you can play these games directly on Bing itself.

You can also sign in with your Windows Live or Facebook account to put up your scores and share it with others. You can thus start sharing your high score with other players or see your friends' game feeds. There are nearly 50 games that you can play online for now. However while playing a game, after a level or two; there are advertisement pop-ups, just like the ones that you can see on many online-streaming video sites.

Bing is expecting to wrest some market share from Google with this new option. Bing spokesperson, Tamsin Todd commented on this new feature saying that since Bing's inception, games had been their popular search term with users. Even though some people might not be very happy with this new gaming concept of Bing, finding it as a distraction for user, many young and old users will certainly find a reason to move toward Bing.

Google Accuses Bing for Cheap Imitations

                Google after its sting operation claims that Bing is cheating and copying its search results. Bing keeps an eye on what people search for on Google, and then they select the sites from Google’s results, and then use that information to improve Bing’s own search listings.

                 Apparently, Google’s engineers set up random results for certain terms like‘hiybprqag’‘mbzrxpgjys’ ‘indoswiftjobinproduction’. Among them was ‘hiybprqag’, a gibberish word pointing to a Los Angeles theater seating plan. Google then observed that their results started appearing in Bing within few weeks.

            Approximately at the end of May, Google observed that Bing was performing quite good returning the identical sites that Google would list, when someone would enter unusual misspellings. Google observed it in some cases like ‘torsoraphy’.

             As Google claims all this charges on Bing, Bing doesn't deny this.

The Bing engineering team has been working hard over the past few years to give the best search results which are relevant as well as of good quality for the users. They even add that this is their chief objective which they look in on daily basis.

             Bing uses over 1,000 different signals and features in the ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is click stream data which they collect from some of their customers, who keep on sharing mysterious data as they follow the web in order to help us show improvements in our search results.

              Although Google and Bing have been in cold war for so many years, by making claims in its blog Google is now in a war front with Bing. Due to this war Google and Bing are the highlights of search engine news.

Foodly: A Search Engine and Social Network for Food Lovers

Foodly  is a search engine and a social network for recipes lovers. Foodly stands for Food I Love You and was launched by two Yahoo! alums - Andrea Cutright and Hillary Mickell. Foodly shortly after its launched, were in discussions all over the search engine news and stories. According to LA Times, Foodly has also picked $5 million of investments from Index venture.

Foodly boasts to be the most advanced recipe search engine in the world. The unique feature of searching a recipe without particular ingredients makes it stand aprat from other websites like Allrecipes.com or Yelp. Moreover, it is added with heavy social network aspect like Facebook. Users can like recipes of Foodly and check out with their friends and their dishes. Also a user can plan a menu and invite their friends for their recipe. You can do this by creating an event on the Facebook page.

The interface of Foodly is beautiful. When you search a recipe, it gives options to save and like that recipe. You can also see various other details like cooking time, ingredients and the source of the recipe. You also have an option to rate a recipe you like.

Andrea Cutright and Hillary Mickell are happy and are looking forward for this site. Andrea says in Foodly Blog - We are extremely proud to bring this social aspect of cooking to our online lives. Because food — like life — is even better when shared.

Google Launches "Google Art Project"

          Google has launched a unique Google Art Project which gives a detailed view of paintings. It also gives a link directly to art project from Google’s homepage.

           Google announced in their official Google blog that they have bought their street view technology into the art museums sections. You can have an experience of virtually being present at the museums. Google has invented a new vehicle called "Trolley" which helps to move around the museums, streets, interior parts etc. Its gives a maximum zoom feature with 360 degree views.

            You can find a stunning collection at one particular place given by about 400 artists. The superb collection includes high resolution images of famous 17 museums like The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Tate Britain & The National Gallery in London, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and more than 1000 other images.

            Google has also included another feature named "Create an Artwork Collection" feature in Art Project. It allows users to save specific views of artwork they like and can create a personal collection of artwork images which can be shared with family, friends and users. They can also add comments to each artwork.

           Google yet wants to increase this project on a wider level by adding more and more museums and paintings to this art project as soon as possible which would thus create a greater interest of people into it. This would definitely reduce the trouble of going into crowd of people and help you watch the paintings at your leisure.

You can catch with the latest upcoming updates on search engine news.