According to a new report by Chikita, Bing users are over 50% more likely to click on an advertisement on a third party website than both Google and Yahoo generated users. According to Chikita the click rate averages are as follows:

Google: 0.97%

Yahoo: 1.24%

Bing: 1.5%

It looks as though Bing has made some good gains since its launch at the end of May. Although growth has been good and Bing has made up some ground on its competitors it is unlikely to directly affect the existing search marketplace. Microsoft still need to strike a deal with Yahoo to broaden the Companies advertising reach and start to make an impact on Google’s monumental popularity. AdAge is reporting that that a deal between both Microsoft and Yahoo is due to be released anytime this week. The article mentions that the payment structure has been the main issue preventing the deal from going forward. Yahoo has requested a revenue share rather than upfront payments and revenue guarantees.

“Execs in Redmond never conceived of the deal as an upfront purchase of Yahoo’s search traffic but as a deal in which Yahoo would be compensated from a share of revenue from the sale of search ads. Yahoo would be allowed to sell search ads on Bing.com as well as its own site, giving it more search inventory to sell and making it a bigger player in the search sales front. It would also immediately be able to save millions by not having to maintain its own search infrastructure.

The latest terms of the deal underscore Microsoft’s devotion to developing and owning technology vs. selling media. The deal won’t make it a bigger seller of online advertising but it would allow it to eliminate a search-technology competitor in Yahoo and consolidate roughly 30% of the search marketplace on its own platform — a large enough share, CEO Steve Ballmer seems to believe, to dent Google’s dominance”

If the article at AdAge is correct then Yahoo would still be able to sell search and display to its existing advertisers. Let’s hope the article is correct and deal is announced this week.

Article by Creative SEO UK

Reuters is reported as saying that Yahoo is currently seeking to sell its Job Search website, HotJobs, to one of its competitors. The Rumour currently surrounds Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com.

The past week has seen many rumours floating around about Yahoo and Microsoft. If we were to consider these rumours as true then the sale of HotJobs would make total sense. But this does lead to the possibility that Yahoo is considering getting completely out of the search engine game. HotJobs would not be an asset that would be of interest to Microsoft and therefore would potentially be sold before any agreement was made.

We can understand why Yahoo would want to concentrate on advertising but moving away from search would be a very big move for Yahoo.

What do you think, Leave your comments below and share your opinion!

Article by Creative SEO

Hotmail has added some new Bing featured to its email interface allowing users to add content to outgoing emails. The feature is called “Quick Add” and allows you to include a variety of Bing content including images, videos, maps, restaurant reviews and movie times. The new feature is available to Hotmail users in Australia, Canada, China, India, US, and the UK.

The feature is simple to use, just start to compose a new email message, select the content you require from the quick add box which is on the right hand side, search the Bing search box and then insert your results directly into your email. “Bing!” it’s that simple, although can’t we do this already with cut and paste?



Actually it is a handy feature and it does speed up finding content to add to an email you’re composing but normally a user would have already found what they wanted to send to someone before writing an email. Not really sure how useful this feature is but it works great.

Article by Creative SEO News

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

Speculation has been high, will Microsoft’s new search engine have enough features and offer users a better more refined and user friendly experience? Is this the search engine to take on Google and will users change their allegiance?

Microsoft’s new search engine, called “Bing”, has been launched as a beta version. The search engine optimisation community has jokingly labelled Bing as “But It’s Not Google” but it’s still too early to judge just how the beta version will grow and adapt. There are some cool features which are very user friendly. The video search uses Adobe Flash and allows you to see a preview of the video just by hovering over the thumbnail. The Image search features some nice “filters” which allow you to search for images by size, layout, colour, style and people.

Bing will grow and adapt over time, let’s hope that Microsoft listens to feedback from its users and develops the search engine along with their needs, taking a leaf from Google’s book. Weather the brand is strong enough to draw die hard Google users across to a new search engine platform is yet to be determined. It will be interesting to see how Bing progresses but in the mean time why don’t you check out “Bing” and see if it rings your bell. www.Bing.com

Article is written by CreativeSEO, Search Engine Optimisation Consultant.