Google incorporates real-time data into SERPs

Google real-time web goes live

Real-time search also called real-time-web results Google has been trying for some time is now being incorporated into their SERPs. This mean in addition to the indexed pages it usually displays on its search result pages, it will also display information from news organisations, blogs, forums, Twitter and other trusted sites as soon as such information is published. The real-time web feature will also index status updates from Facebook, public information from MySpace and tweets.

Google claimed that it is the first search engine to integrate real-time web into its result pages, the feature will also be available in PDA such as iPhone and Android powered PDAs.

The real-time data will be displayed in a constantly updating stream within the regular Google search engine result pages.

Bing.com went offline for 30 minutes

Microsoft’s Bing search engine went offline due to update error

Things are getting very exciting at Bing, the Microsoft search site which aims to be number 2 in the search engine market within the next few years has been experiencing many new tweaks and updates recently, one such update went wrong on December the 3rd when when Bing disappeared from the web completely, visitors to Bing.com got an error message or are not able to find Bing.com at all.

Microsoft apologised to Bing users through a statement that blames the outage was caused by configuration changes made to Bing during testing. The outage and measures taking to address it was clarified better on Bing blog where Microsoft spokes person said “as soon as the issue was detected, changes that led to it was rolled back, which caused Bing to work normally again. This took about 30 minutes to fix from when the error was detected. Bing are looking into how the outage happened and what to do to prevent it happening again.

While Bing was offline, the engineers working on it used Twitter to update users following Bing on twitter. Though the search function of Bing was completely unavailable, the map section of the soon to be number 2 search engine was working fine.

Bing harnesses the power of Wolfram Alpha to enhance search results

In its continuous strive to become a credible competition to Google, Microsoft search engine Bing has just announced that it is teaming up with respected web tool; Wolfram Alpha to improve results in Bing’s search engine result pages. Wolfram Alpha is different to a conventional search engine because it does not send you to page on the web where you can find the information you are looking for but it actually answers you question, this makes Wolfram Alpha describe itself as a “computational knowledge engine” rather than a search engine.

The partnership between Bing and Wolfram Alpha will first be tested out in US and it will be limited to areas such as nutrition, health and mathematics. Wolfram Alpha differentiates itself from standard search engines by answering questions directly, by grabbing raw data from public and licensed databases.

Bing Sitelinks – edging closer to Google in more ways than one

When setting out plans to become the second search engine on the net within a few year in 2008, Steve Balmer Microsoft chief executive said Microsoft has been know for entering a market late and becoming a marketing leader in that field within a short time. This is true of when Microsoft entered the networking Server market which was then dominated Novell, within a few short year, Microsoft over take Novell server. In the console market, XBox is a relatively new entrant to the market when compared with Sony Playstation, it is now a very well established console.

Bing, Microsoft new search engine is slowly but steadily making progress. Most observers argued that the initial blip Bing made on the share of the search engine market was because of the huge publicity that surrounded its launch, that was true, it is also true that Bing is a much better search engine than all the previous search engines Microsoft created and the fact is that people are actually beginning to like Bing and using it instead of Google.

Some of the things that is contributing to the popularity of Bing includes the fact that its SERP is almost identical to Google’s SERPS for some searches, this blurred the lines between Bing and Google. Bing is also introducing new technology like the visual search recently announced and Bing is adopting features associated with Google such as Sitelinks. A quick search for adult dating site Very Naughty show a comprehensive sitelink listing sub pages of the site.

If Bing continues to innovate at the current rate, in no time it will make significant inroad into Googles huge lead in the search engine market.

Yahoo profit up, revenue down and lanches new homepage

Internet search engine and portal Yahoo Inc released a result that did not cause much surprise in the city, Yahoo’s profit fall by 13%, the current economic downturn was blamed for the fall. Revenues into Yahoo’s coffers for the quart dropped to £953m, and reduction of roughly 13% when compared with profile with the same quarter last year.
Cost cutting and efficient management of resources mean that despite the drop in revenue, Yahoo’s profit rose by about $10 million. Shares in Yahoo fell on the back of the result and the forecast that income in the current quarter will be between between $55m to $65m.

New Homepage Launched
Just before the business side of Yahoo released revenue results yesterday, they were unveiling Yahoo’s new homepage to the US users. Yahoo’s portal is the most visited website on the internet, to keep that position the new Yahoo homepage come in customisable format that make integrating other popular sites Yahoo users visit such as Twitter and Facebook into their Yahoo homepage. A Yahoo spokes person was quoted as saying: “There is a destination for everything you are about in just a click or two. Now we are looking at Yahoo holistically, all centred around the user,” Mr Bhat told reporters in a conference call.
Yahoo’s new homepage comes with over 60 applications, users and developers are being encouraged to develop and plug in their own application to enhance their user experience. Users can add their own apps at the moment in the form of a web address they want Yahoo homepage to load, with developers, its more technical and that aspect of Yahoo’s new homepage is now live yet.

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