Yesterday was a big day in the search engine world as Microsoft and Yahoo have signed a ten year partnership deal. To be brief about the, Bing is going to be the search engine for Yahoo! and Yahoo will focus on its portal.

Bing Yahoo! - Deal

What does this deal means for SEO?

Firstly, the Yahoo search engine will disappear pretty soon. So you will not have to worry anymore about the Yahoo ranking report. You should start checking where your ranking on Bing is and take it more seriously because with this deal we can expect a bigger market share for Bing search engine (probably 15 to 20% in Europe, 30% for the US). Good news for reports

If Bing is bigger that also means that our company or your SEO agency should update and create new Bing recommendations and not only focus on Google. Now you should understand Bing and how it is working.

After more than five years of SEO recommendations focused only on Google, the rules will be a little bit different now. SEO recommendations should now include Google and Bing best practices and try to see what Google and Bing have in common as well as their differences.

The good thing about it is that Bing and Google are probably very similar and your SEO strategy should not really change.

Bing has some new challenges, for example the pop-up that opens when you have your mouse on the result. This will need to be covered to make sure it is attractive to the user.

In a way, by having one less search engine more SEO work should be created, because we will no longer focusing on one search engine.

Microsoft is the top Superbrands 2009/2010 and has dethroned Google, who was the top Superbrand in 2008.

This Superbrands ranking is defined by the product quality, the brand trustworthiness and brand characteristics. The top five UK Superbrands 2009/2010 are:
1.Microsoft
2.Rolex
3.Google
4.British Airways
5.BBC

SuperBrands Ranking 2009/2010

This ranking is a little bit different to Top brand, organised by BrandZ where the most valuable brand comes up top. Superbrand is more about the idea/image of the brand in the business.

Anyway, the war between Google and Microsoft has just started…

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing,released on Monday, is trying to respect the Indian law regarding online pornography. In India it is illegal to transmit or publish any pornographic material.

 
When you are using the keyword ‘sex’ in India, Bing will refuse to display any search result. Maybe it is a little bit too drastic; why not use a parental filter in order to display other websites without any pornographic content but still relevant to sex (e.g.: medical websites).

Bing - Sex in India

Google did not bother with this measure and displays very easily pornographic material on its results page.

 
Also any promotion of abortion is illegal but both search engines provide information on the topic. As far as I know none of these companies as been legally penalised for these practices…

 
Anyway, all these different local laws are a big issue for the global search engines. This probably why in some countries the local search engines have still a big part of the market.

Today is the release of the new search engine from Microsoft ‘Bing’. Bing is supposed to compete with rival Google on the search engine market. This new search engine was internally tested few months ago under the name Kumo.

Bing has a similar presentation to that Live.com. The Web search is quick and clear. The results and look are very similar to Google; Microsoft has finally filled the gap with Google in terms or relevancy of the result. The advantage over Google is a little pop-up window when you have your mouse on one result. This little pop-up gives you more information about the website and some internal links; it is a pretty good idea. We can also directly subscribe to RSS feed (if possible) via the result page, once again it is pretty smart.

Bing - Pop-up

Still on the web search section, Microsoft tries to include too many ads on the search engine result page. We can count, for some competitive keywords (e.g.: ‘car insurance’), four on the top, two on the bottom and five on the right side. It is simply too much!

Bing - Ads

On the image search of Bing, it is once again difficult to see any improvement compared to Live.com or Google. There isn’t any duplicate image filter and it is easy to have two or three time the same picture and the image result page. Microsoft has some work to do. The good thing about this section is that when you click on a image you still have the other result on a left bar, which is very user friendly.

Bing - Search Images

The video section is the one that I like the most. Nothing new but it is a lot more user friendly than Google video. On one search video results page you can play a video just by passing your mouse over it, which makes it very easy to see which video you want to select.

Bing - Video Result Page

The News section is unfortunately without interest (does the job but nothing new here) and the Shopping and Maps sections link to other Microsoft websites.

In conclusion, Bing is very similar to Google and the few improvements will not be enough (I think) to really beat Google. However, Microsoft can maybe expect to increase or at least keep the same amount of the market share.

Anyway, it is still very good to see that Google’s competition is doing something!

Today Google launched a lot of new services. A new interface for the Google Webmaster tool, some new options on the search engine results page and my personal favorite, the Wonder Wheel.

This function is really easy to access. On the results page of Google click on on the top.

Wonder Wheel - Google

The Wonder Wheel is a graphic way to search content by linking a topic to different sub-topic (e.g.: football to football training to NFL training).

It is a useful tool when you don’t know the best keyword for a specific subject. Just enter a generic keyword, click on the most relevant suggested link and Google will try to guide you to the right keyword.

This tool is not really an innovation, a few years back Microsoft devolved Tafiti with the same principle, with the exception that Tafiti uses the ‘new’ Microsoft technologies (Silverlight).

Tafiti - Microsoft

At the end of the day, I am not sure that a lot of people are going to use this option but it does explain a little how Google is working at the moment.

Today BrandZ has published the Top 100 Most Valuable Brands. And the winner is Google who has become the first $100 billion brand. With a 16% increase on last years results, Google beat its rival Microsoft to the top spot by 25%.
 

BrandZ -Top 100 Brands

The top 5 brands are:

Google
Microsoft
Coca-cola
IBM
McDonald’s

This is the third time that Google has held the top position, and I am pretty sure that Google will retain this position in 2010.

Over the past few years Google has reached pretty much every area of the internet (Search engine, Map, News, Internet explorer, phone, social media, video…). Although Microsoft is planning many future online projects, it seems unlikely that they can become as popular as Google in a year. The fact that Microsoft is desperately trying for partnership with Yahoo shows that future prospects of Microsoft may not be too good…

Anyway, we are now living in a Google world after a few years of Microsoft world.

Welcome to the Googlelisation of the world.