Once Google cornered the bulk of the search market, many search marketers stopped optimizing their sites for other engines, but that could change when the Bing-Yahoo integration happens, experts speaking at Search Marketing Expo said. “Now we’re in a situation where we’re going to have Bing powering up to 30 percent of the market,” said Danny Sullivan, a search engine expert and editor of the Search Engine Land blog.

Using current search-market-share statistics, once Microsoft’s Bing search technology starts generating results for Yahoo, Bing will account for about 30 percent of the search market, he said.

“That’s nothing to sneeze at,” said Janet Driscoll Miller, president and CEO of SearchMojo, speaking at the event on Monday in Seattle. “It’s going to be a two-engine world in the future, where you’ll have Bing and Google to worry about as SEOs [search engine optimizers].”…..

She said that some basic optimization techniques work the same for Bing and Google, but Bing has a few new opportunities for search marketers.

For instance, search marketers should make sure to have indexable content if their site uses Flash because otherwise neither Bing nor Google will display any metadata about the site in search results.

But Bing has a couple of unique features that marketers can take advantage of. For instance, on Bing, when users roll over results, a preview box pops up offering more information about the Web site. Site marketers have some control over what pops up there, she said.

Bing will display the H1 tag — an HTML element — in the preview box if it doesn’t match the title tag. So to control the headline in the preview box, a search marketer can simply make sure that the title tag and H1 tags are different, and then include the wording of choice in the H1 tag, she said.

Bing then displays the first paragraph of text on the page, she said. It will also display contact information for the site if an address and phone number appear on the page. “Bing is really good at understanding what are addresses, phone and e-mails,” she said.

The preview box will also display YouTube videos embedded in the site and will play the video in the preview box, she said. “It’s a compelling reason to put videos on YouTube,” she said. Only YouTube videos — not Bing videos or any others — will display and play in the preview panel, she noted.

Marketers can also shut off the preview by embedding a metatag on their pages, she said.

Bing has another unique feature that could turn into an opportunity for search marketers. On some search results people may see buttons that let them share a result on Facebook, Twitter or via e-mail. For instance, a search for “polar bears” reveals images that a user can share.

Currently, however, the images link back to Bing, not the original site. That makes it less interesting for a search marketer looking to drive traffic to their site. “It may not be ideal yet, but I’d keep an eye on it and see if that changes,” she said. If it does, search marketers might be able to take advantage of getting additional traffic from such social sharing on Bing.

Once the integration with Bing and Yahoo takes place, marketers may consider whether it’s worth it to optimize their sites for Bing. While Bing offers some interesting new features, it’s not yet clear whether the optimization work will pay off, she said. “The biggest problem I have from Bing now is I can’t get enough traffic from it,” she said.

Predictably, executives from the search engines encouraged marketers to build their sites around quality content, rather than around how the search engines rank them. “Ideally, it’s the content and the relevance of what users like that matters,” said Sasi Parthasarathy, a program manager at Bing.

Business Insider is reporting that, given Google’s new rise to smartphone rival, Apple is now in talks with previous-generation frenemy Microsoft to replace the iPhone’s default search engine with Bing.

“Apple and Google know the other is their primary enemy,” says one of the people, who’s familiar with Apple’s thinking. “Microsoft is now a pawn in that battle.” Apple is also working on ways to manage ad placement on its mobile devices, a move that would encroach on Google’s ad-serving business, the person says.

The iPhone is a monster on the mobile internet, and default search engine status is worth monstrous amounts of cash to those who get to serve ads along with the results. But let’s slow down a moment here…

First, they’re basing this on the usual anonymous sources which could be right, wrong, or trying to manipulate the Apple/Google/Microsoft situation by “leaking” this. Hey, we’ve seen that happen when Apple negotiates with carriers. Second, Business Week further states the deal could still fly apart, or could take a long time to be reached. Third, right now Google is the default search engine on the iPhone but users can still switch to Yahoo!, so if Bing gets added to that list, even if it becomes the default, presumably users could still switch to Google (or Yahoo!… or is that already Bing?). And then there’s the nu-cu-lar option……

The person familiar with Apple’s thinking says Apple has a “skunk works” looking at a search offering of its own, and believes that “if Apple does do a search deal with Microsoft, it’s about buying itself time.” Given the importance of search and its tie to mobile advertising—and the iPhone maker’s desire to slow Google—”Apple isn’t going to outsource the future.”

Likely why they wanted to buy AdMob and ended up buying Quattro Wireless, and why Steve Jobs wants to get involved with mobile advertising.

What would happen to other Google-powered service apps like Maps isn’t discussed (though Apple has bought PlaceBase for map data layering). However, this just further shows what TiPb has been saying for a while now — Apple believes the UI is the application for the user, and controlling the UI means they can swap out the pipes in the background (swap out Google Search, swap in Bing Search) without much problem (as long as the new pipe produces good, visually non-jarring results). When a huge competitor like Google tries to control the interface, like with a Google Voice app, then Apple has a problem because they can’t swap Google out with Microsoft Voice (or whatever), but a user can ditch the iPhone hardware for an Android device and be perfectly familiar with that UI front end.

Via:theiphoneblog.com

Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, could be improved at some point through the use of an online game called Page Hunt, researcher with Microsoft Research, demonstrated in a new paper. The game, called Page Hunt, generates data from users that could be used to refine queries and search results. Bing currently, sits in the U.S. search-engine market behind Yahoo and Google, even as Microsoft pumps between $80 million and $100 million into the initial marketing effort.  Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, could be improved by playing an online game. The game, named Page Hunt, presents users with a random Web page, and then asks them to input the search terms that will put that page within a search engine’s top five search results. Depending on how close to the top of the rankings their queries put the Web page, players are awarded points. In order to sweeten the experience, the game adds animations, a top-score list, bonus points, and other “game-like” features. Page Hunt can be found on this site. It requires Silverlight to run. For the moment, however, it exists entirely as a research project, with no direct connection to Bing…..

“One of the nice things about Microsoft is that engineers frequently spend time with Microsoft Research and collaborate on a number of fronts, which often leads to changes in search,” a Microsoft spokesperson noted in an email to eWeek.

As a single-player game, Page Hunt boasts a simplicity that makes even straightforward shoot ‘em ups such as Gears of War look like championship chess. However, the results it generates could contribute mightily to the extraordinarily complex task of refining the search-engine process: an important task for Microsoft as it seeks any possible advantage over Google and Yahoo in the online search space.

The thinking behind the game is described in a research paper, “Page Hunt: Improving Search Engines Using Human Computation Games,” issued by Raman Chandrasekar and Chris Quirk of Microsoft Research, with Abhishek Gupta of Digital Media LLC and Hao Ma of the Chinese University of Hong Kong listed as co-authors.

“We suggest using human computation games to elicit data from players that can be used to improve search,” the abstract of the paper reads. “The data elicited using Page Hunt has several applications including providing metadata for pages, providing query alterations for use in query refinement, and identifying ranking issues.

The original pilot experiment conducted by Chandrasekar and company involved 341 Microsoft employees playing Page Hunt over a 10-day period, generating 14,400 labels for the 744 Web pages in the system. The researchers then “extracted the queries that corresponded to winning trials, generated all pairs of queries as bitext data, and applied the bitext matching algorithm.”

Presumably, Microsoft could use that generated data to fine-tune the algorithm governing Bing, should they decide that the model could contribute to improving the search engine.

Bing remains in third in the U.S. search engine market, with 8.4 percent, behind Google and Yahoo with 65 percent and 19.6 percent, respectively. Microsoft is backing the search engine, which launched on June 3, with a massive ad campaign estimated at costing somewhere in the range of $80 million to $100 million.

In its first six weeks, according to a report by research company SearchIgnite, Microsoft’s percentage of the U.S. paid search advertising market stayed flat for the second quarter of 2009, at just below 6 percent. This number corresponds roughly with Microsoft’s tally before the launch of Bing.

“Microsoft appears to be focusing its efforts on driving consumer interest and capturing increased search query share,” Roger Barnette, president of SearchIgnite, said in a July 14 statement accompanying the report. “We have not yet seen this translate into more paid search advertising dollars for Microsoft, although typically consumer adoption precedes advertiser adoption.”

Via: Google News