Twitter has been identified as the next fighting ground for search engine supremacy, but has Bing jumped the gun and what does Google have up its sleeves?

Bing, Microsoft’s latest search engine, was launched last month to challenge Google and Yahoo in the search engine ratings war. It has to be said that Microsoft have done an excellent job, Bing offers its users a great service and it seems that although shrouded in a little controversy, Microsoft have improved their share of the marketplace.

Hot on the heels of their launch success, Microsoft is continuing to apply pressure to their competitors by being the first search engine to index “Real Time” Twitter Posts. Twitter posts offer an amazing source of real time opinion based information which will enrich and improve the relevance of a search engine’s results. But have Bing jumped the gun?
Bing is not indexing every Twitter post, only a selection of prominent celebrity Tweeters. Have Bing rushed the technology to market, offering only a partial solution?

Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft’s search technology centre, wrote on his blog: “Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres.

“We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search.”

Prominent Tweeter like Ryan Seacrest, Al Gore and Guy Kawisaki are all indexed in the Bing search engine. Twitter results can be seen by using the keywords “Tweet”, “Twitter” or the @ symbol as part of a search query for the name of a twitter user. The results will include the user’s latest tweets (we have seen between 1 to 3 tweets being indexed so far per user) and a link to “see more tweets”. Currently this service is only working in the US version of Bing.
This all seems very impressive but Bing are not offering their users anything new, all of this information is available in Twitter itself and using Bing to search a partial database of twitter users will not offer users an accurate level of results. Search terms from within the Tweets are indexed within Bing, but a prolific Tweeter might Tweet 20+ times a day, which means that only a 1-3 of the users Tweets will appear indexed in Bing and only for short periods of time. We have not seen any evidence to contradict this.

Bing’s attempt to integrate Twitter content into its indexed search results seems to be more of a test than a usable new “Real Time” search facility. Let’s hope this was not a marketing and publicity exercise or just an attempt to beat Google. Bing needs to continue to develop this product, increase the number of indexed tweets and index the entire Twitter database in order to make this a viable addition to the search engine. It’s an exciting technology and it does seem a shame not to launch a fully working product.

Google have been reportedly in talks directly with Twitter and have shown a massive amount of interest in integrating Twitter directly into its search results. Not a lot of information has been released about Google’s current position which leads us to believe that something could be on the cards. We will just have to wait and see but let’s hope Google learn from Bing’s initial mistakes.

Article By Creative SEO UK

Technorati Tags: Bing, bing integrates twitter, bing real time, bing twitter, Google, real time search, Twitter, twitter bing, twitter integration, twitter real time search

As the recession continues travelling abroad might not be an option this year for many families. More and more holiday makers are choosing to stay at home, planning their own holidays in their own countries. This is where Google has stepped in, yet again, with the launch of a new experimental product called Google City Tours.

It’s very evident that this product is in an early stage of development, there are many bugs and a few browser errors. What’s important is to look at the concept which looks to be very strong. The idea would be to allow a user to plan a holiday itinerary, directly onto Google maps, setting up travel times, visits to attractions, hotels and more. The system will print an itinerary which can be used on your holiday.

City Tours offers even more, it will analyse a destination and plan an itinerary based on the destinations local attractions and landmarks. Potentially City Tours could use search popularity to recommend the most popular attractions in any given destination.
Google City tours has the potential to become a very useful and popular product, its still very early in its development but it is well worth a visit. Click here to visit City Tours.

Article by Creative SEO

Technorati Tags: city tours, Google, google city tours, google labs, google labs city tours, google maps

Google has announced the launch of a New Google Adwords API which has been designed to replace the existing version and improve web services. Thereplacement Adwords API is completely new and has undergone a fundamental rewrite. The changes are as follows:

1) New web services for managing Campaign targeting options and campaign- level criteria
2) All web services share a consistent, data-centric interface with two operations: get and mutate.
3) A secure authentication token replaces the login credentials required in v13 request headers
To find out more about the new Adwords API click here.

Technorati Tags: Adwords, adwords api, Google, google adwords, google adwords api

Google’s immense popularity has resulted in Google News having an industry leading presence in the News Industry. In a shock move to promote “Citizen” Reporters, Google owned YouTube launches a YouTube Reporters’ Centre encouraging members of the public to become active Journalists. What impact will this have on the Newspaper and News Industry and is this the beginning of the end for traditional journalism?

Google News aggregates news stories from all over the world, stories are published within minutes making Google News an extremely powerful channel for news and communication. One of Google News’ unique properties is that news stories can be from leading news agencies or public blogs. Google actively promotes important news content from any source and does not discriminate from user to user. As long as the story is unique and important Google will actively promote, index and list.

YouTube have created the YouTube Reporters’ Centre for one unique reason, to actively help and promote the reporting of news from around the world by members of the public. The centre offers help and advice including videos from internationally renowned journalists including CBS’ Katie Couric, New York Times’ Nick Kristof and legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward.
The concept of real news stories from real members of the public from all around the world does have its appeal. The potential network alone would be huge and the actual stories would not be governed by political spin or government censorship. If this technology was to grow in popularity the potential political waves could be huge. Members of the public from all over the world could provide news stories based on real life experiences, but there is a problem. News agencies have always taken a potentially impartial view of a News story, effectively reporting both sides without bias or judgement. Will public based news stories be opinion based and potentially not offer an impartial overview of the story itself?

News agencies have nothing to fear from this new technology, if “Citizen” based reporting was to increase in popularity news agencies could only benefit from the growth. Although the role of the news agency would change, more time would be spent aggregating news stories and piecing together different reports from individual reporters on the same news topic. Effectively editing “Citizen” based news to provide a more appealing and relevant story to the news agency users.

Citizen based reporting offers an exciting opportunity for the news industry to evolve and grow with the increased popularity of the internet. What the future holds has yet to be written, but with Google’s immense power and exposure “Citizen” based reporting is sure to grow in popularity.

Article by Creative SEO

Technorati Tags: citizen based reporting, Google, google news, public news, reporter, YouTube, youtube news, youtube reporter, youtube reporters centre

Google Personalised search has not received much press recently but the service is very real and is still being developed and improvements are being made every week.

Personalised search results currently show and increase in search engine position based on user historical search popularity. So in other words the more a user visits a website from Google’s search results, the higher the site will rank within the search results of a future keyword search by that user. We have also noticed an increase in the ranking of pages which are on the same domain as popular search results. Personalised search also allows users to increase the rank of a page manually, to assign their own level of importance. The service can only be used while signed into a Google account. It is also interesting to note that Google is currently displaying a list of search terms which have been used by the personalised search user, to find that specific page and listing. This leads us to surmise that Google is recording this information but for what purpose?

It does seem possible that when Google has enough user data, from personalised search, it could potentially use the data to assign a level of importance and popularity to a website which could then be added into the Google Page Rank algorithm. This could potentially mean that for the first time Page Rank could be based on real time user generated popularity. But this does ask the question “Will this be the death of Page Rank as we know it?” and “Will Search Engine Results be different for each user or will Google amalgamate the data?”

Article by Creative SEO

Technorati Tags: Google, google pagerank, google personalised search, google personalized search, page rank, pagerank, personalised search, personalized search