Has Bing Hurt Google's Market Share?
With the release of Bing, Microsoft's new upgrade to its existing search engine, there are rumors that Google executives are worried about the potential impact it may have on the popular search engine. According to comScore, Bing has increased Microsoft's share of the search market from 8 percent in May to over 12 percent in June. In May, Google still occupied 65 percent of the search market, but comScore didn't update Google figures for June. comScore competitors Compete and Statcounter's paint a different picture. With figures updated for both engines in June, they show that Bing's market share went up 1% while Google's was up 0.43%. Despite Google's obvious advantage over the new engine, executives are rumored to be engineering further improvements to Google's offerings. Additionally, Google's home page now contains links to its additional search capabilities (that it has always offered) in an effort to compete with Bing's similar home page links. Although Bing has not come close to impacting Google's market share as of yet, Google executives are said to be preparing for that possibility.
Bing, Google and Yahoo! Now Supporting Larger Sitemaps
It was announced earlier this month that Bing, Google and Yahoo! (all engines that make up Sitemaps.org) will now support sitemaps with up to 50,000 references/links to page URLs. These references can also point to child sitemaps, which themselves can hold up to 50,000 links, for a possible reference of up to 2.5 billion site map links. Additionally, the Sitemaps' XSD schemas have been modified so that developers are now able to validate content through defined types as opposed to a random string of letters or numbers as was the practice before.
Bing's Features
Bing, Microsoft's new search engine upgrade, was released this month. In creating Bing, Microsoft engineers focused on \"information overload,\" \"search failure\" and \"complex tasks and decision making\" to better understand how people are using search today. The new engine is designed to help users sift through the excess of information on the web on any given subject to find the result they are looking for. Bing technology also seeks to reduce the amount of time it takes for users to find answers and to cut out excess navigational clicks (ex: using the back button), thus helping people learn from their searches and make important decisions. Bing has many new features, most notably InstantAnswer, which translates any query from one language to another, and Bing 411, a local business search tool that can be accessed from the Web or from your cell phone that provides information such as driving directions and maps, weather reports, movie times, and business ratings.
Ask.com Expands its AnswerFarm to 300 Million Answers
Ask representatives have announced that the engine has used its semantic search technology to grow question and answer pairs from 100 million to more than 300 million. Ask.com's semantics technology uses rephrasing, answer relevance and cloistering to group together multiple questions that all mean the same thing, while filtering out insufficient answers and answer formats in order to provide the most direct, relevant response to a user's query. Ask's AnswerFarm is aimed at reducing the number of redundant or vague answers received for any given search.
New Yahoo! Toolbar
Yahoo! released a new toolbar this month in response to the need for greater customization capabilities. Among the new features are \"Preview and Go\" and \"Search Faster.\" Useful for multiple email accounts, eBay listings, etc., \"Preview and Go\" allows the user to view previews of their most visited websites straight from the Yahoo! toolbar without having to leave the existing page. \"Search Faster\" is a modification to the existing search bar that includes search query suggestions and the ability to recall recently-visited sites or directory search reference websites based on a given query. The toolbar is currently available in Internet Explorer 6 and as a beta for Firefox.