I can safely state that almost the whole search world (for webmasters at least), which responsible for most of the traffic to websites online, in general surrounds around Google. However, it may be a bit unjustified as Bing holds nearly 30% market share in the U.S. (combined with Yahoo).
This is why in this post i want to put the spotlight on Bing. I can’t say that Bing search results has improved drastically recently, but it seems that the Google-related controversies lately (Search Plus Your World, new privacy policy) might work for the benefit of Bing.
In an interview to AllThingsD Bing’s search director, Stefan Weitz, has related to the integration of social signals into Bing search engine and to the latest events in Google briefly. In addition, Bing has announced on adding markup validation tool to Bing Webmaster Tools. Let’s begin with a summary of the important issues from the interview:
Integrating Social Signals Into The Search Results
Stefan is beginning the conversation by saying that although that Bing has been mixing social signals into the search algorithm over the last year and a half, these kind of signals still haven’t integrated significantly as Bing is taking this process slow to understand better the amazing complexity of social signals.
When relating to dealing with social networking services for data (Bing has deals with Facebook and Twitter), Stefan is stating that in order for a search engine to work properly he must have all components (the social data) and if necessary, make a deal for this data (unlike Google that currently doesn’t has deals with Facebook and Twitter).
Another interesting statement came when Stefan discussed about the user’s level of engagement with social search results. Whenever social results appears on Bing (using Facebook integration) the user’s click-through rate is increasing significantly as the user experience improving tremendously.
New Markup Validation Tool In Bing Webmaster Tools
In another related news, Bing has announced that a new section has been added to Bing Webmaster Tools under the “Crawl” tab called “Markup Validator” which designated to verify valid markup codes from pages of the webmaster’s website. After the webmaster has installed the code on his page, he can simply enter the URL of the page into the box, hit “Go” and if it has been implemented correctly the codes will appear on the screen.
If the code doesn’t installed properly then an error message will appear, indicating that the code is not accurate. The tool can scan the following markup languages: HTML Microdata, Microformats, RDFa, Schema.org and Open Graph.
