Schema.org - Google, Bing & Yahoo Joins for Content Markup

Schema.org is a joint effort taken by search engine giants Google, Bing and Yahoo! to improve search results. Many sites about search engine news and updates are talking about this hot topic trending in. The main reason for the rivals joining hands is to create a common set of HTML tags so that search engines can identify, crawl and index websites in same way.
Schema.org provides set of collection from different streams so that webmasters can use to mark their pages in such a way that it can be understood by these search engines. The complete hierarchy for various Schema items contains different categories in which you can add different tags of the website according to relevance (like book, movie, author, person, place etc.)
Marking up the content of the website as much as possible can help search engines to use your information and to present your page to users in most useful way. It is stated in Schema FAQs that one should markup the content which is visible to visitors of the website.

You can learn more about Schema by checking Schema Getting Started Guide or check the FAQs for more information.

Bing vs Google: Anticipation for 2012

Bing has seen a tremendous growth rate in its market share as compared to the giant Google, at least in US. This is seen as emerging of new search engine giant in coming years. The projection done by Mashable suggests that Bing might take over Google in 2012, at least in United States.

Google is still leading the market with more than 60% of market share. Bing, has however seen a rapid growth in these few months. Bing has captured about 30% of market share. In September, Google had controlled about 72% of US market and Bing represented about 10% of market share. In March 2011, Bing’s share rose to 14.3%.

Google has seen a drop in market share of about 3% each month, while Bing has seen a rise in market share of 5% each month. If the constant trajectory is plotted, it is assumed that in January 2012, Bing will overtake Google.

If this happens, there will be all new era in search engine news and updates because users, experts and companies will be looking out for Bing as a benchmark in terms of rankings and advertisings. This can be seen happening since Bing has a real momentum in gain in market share and people will soon see a new search engine giant!

Social Shopping for Bing Search

After many recent updated from Bing, this is a new update from Bing for shoppers. Microsoft said that it is partnering with the Dealmap. This search engine update will offers its US users to get access to more than 200,000 offers in about 14,000 towns and cities across US.

This will help users to find the best bargain related to every possible thing ranging from meals to classes to apperals and many more. This alliance between the companies will let advertisers to reach both desktop and mobile users.

 This new deal will let people to emerge into social shopping and group based shopping. This will allow customers to get benefits from offers and discounts on goods and services.

In the Bing Community Blog titled Bing Launches Deals they said that it was Dealmap made more sense than creating their own program for social shopping. Various updates and search engine news from Bing like Bing Bar, Bing Games, tie up with facebook etc are proving a threat to the giant Google. Both the search engines are trying strategically to improve the experience of users so that they can ive their best to users.

Bing Pops Up On The 2nd Position

In the search engines market all over the world, Microsoft Bing has overtaken Yahoo! for the first time. According to Web Analytics company StatCounter, since the month of January Bing ranks on the 2nd position in the search engines worldwide. Microsoft Bing is striking the headlines in all search engine news. 

 Google's global market share in February was 89.94% -- followed by Bing at 4.37% and Yahoo at 3.93%. There is a decrease in Google’s market share but yet there is a lot difference between Google and its various competitors. Well both yahoo and Bing have to go a long way to compete with Google.

Because of many advancements and initiatives that Bing is taking to give more user friendly results, Bing has started to gain more and more market share. Bing has introduced various features in its toolbar for IE like mail, weather, news updates etc. 

StatCounter tracks the Market Share of Search Engines, Browsers and Operating Systems including Mobile from over 15 billion monthly page views. StatCounter's report is based on aggregate data collected on a sample of over 15 billion page views per month. Hence some kind of contradictory results may appear. Bing is on a rise and hence Google, yahoo and other search engines must be very conscious about their positions. Microsoft Bing is hitting the headlines in all search engine news.

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.

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.

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.