Oxford SEO Studies Blog

In its never ending quest to take on every IT player on the earth, Micro Soft launched it’s new (or upgraded) search engine Bing on the world yesterday.  Microsoft said that the name Bing “was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world” and reminded people of the sound made during “the moments of discovery and decision making”.  I suppose a light bulb visual  was discarded as too

cartoon-like.  Bing replaces or upgrades Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search),  and was codenamed  Kumo until Bing’s launch in the US yesterday riding the back of  a $80 to $100 million on line, TV, print, and radio advertising campaign. It was reported that the advertisements will not take on other competitive search engines such as Google and Yahoo! directly by name, however, they will instead attempt to convince users to switch to Bing by focusing on Bing’s unique search features and functionalities. So the idea is to compete with Google and Yahoo on the basis of better functionality.

The first public beta of Windows Live Search was unveiled on March 8, 2006, with the final release on September 11, 2006 replacing MSN Search. The new search engine offered users the ability to search for specific types of information using search tabs that include Web, news, images, music, desktop, local, and the now discontinued Microsoft Encarta. Windows Live Search aimed to make its over 2.5 billion worldwide queries each month “more useful by providing consumers with improved access to information and more precise answers to their questions.”

Bing features a wall paper gallery interface so that users are greeted by a different background pciture each time they access the page which is cosmetically an improvement over Google’s rather stalwarth minimalism.  We’re quite happy with Bing because entering the search terms ‘Search Engine Marketing in Oxford’ and ‘SEO in Oxford’ brought up  Oxfordseo.com as a number one ranking.  Which just goes to show that 5 months of ongoing and updating optimisation does pay dividends.

The additional functionality of snippets of additional roll over info indicates some use of microformats but its too early to tell how much the engine will be riding the Semantic layer of meta format data.  Certainly competing with the recently announced  Google’s Rich Snippets

would seem to mandate a move in the Semantic direction.  We’ll keep you posted.

In other Search Engine news there’s some excitement  astir for Mapumental, a new visual search engine that launched today in private beta, which in this iteration helps you work out where you might want to live if you wanted an easy commute to central London.  Register and tell us what you think of it, here.