The Ever Changing World of Search

More changes in the world of search are under way, and this is going to have implications for your SEO campaigns.

Microsoft unveiled its new search engine, Bing, last Monday (1 June), which replaces its Live search engine. Microsoft is challenging Google with Bing in that it produces more relevant results and higher conversions for websites. The Daily Telegraph has a more in depth review on Bing, which you can read here. However, with about 85% of UK users regularly using Google, are they really going to change the way people search? Habits die hard and those who have been using Google for years aren’t suddenly going to switch their search habits that easily.

So what does this mean for your search results – well, it’ll take time for Bing to gain ground, but keep an eye out for referrers in your log file stats and do the occasional check to see how your site is ranking there. I hope Bing is going to be quicker to index websites than Live, which I found to be one of the slowest at indexing new sites and changes to websites. Just to add a bit more into the mix, Bing is also affecting the way information is delivered and may ultimately force marketers to change the way they measure results.

Later this year, Google Wave is due to be launched. With the popularity of sites such as Twitter and Facebook, Google realizes that real-time search is becoming increasingly important – we’ve all heard how fast news spreads on sites such as Twitter before they hit the mainstream media, such as the emergency landing in the River Hudson earlier this year, which Louise posted on. Google hopes to address this need for real-time search with Wave. You can sign up to be notified when it goes live.

Another search engine I recently read about is Aardvark. Rather than working like a traditional search engine such as Google or Yahoo whereby the search engine retrieves web pages relevant to the search query, users connect to friends via email or instant messaging to find answers. This is much more a social search engine, but seems to be the way the web is going – the interaction and recommendations from friends and contacts is the way more of us use the web. Seeing the number of people using Twitter and Facebook for recommendations means that the social media is having a huge impact on the way some of us now search for products or information.

With all of this going on, not only is it vital that your website can be easily found online, you need to be participating and interacting more and more in your favourite social networking sites. Relying on traditional SEO to bring visitors to your website is no longer enough and clever businesses are really harnessing the power of the social web.

Are you finding that your search habits are changing? Are you turning to your social contacts more and more for information and recommendations? Let us know as we’re always interested in how people use the web!