LBi London

Bing now powering Yahoo! results in the US & Canada

Posted by Ian Macfarlane August 26th, 2010

Yahoo! is dead, long live Yahoo!

The “Binghoo” search alliance is finally coming to fruition. After some initial testing Yahoo! and Bing have announced that Yahoo! has completed the Bing transition and its search results are now being powered entirely by Bing.

This initial rollout only covers the US and the English-language version of Yahoo! in Canada, with other countries set to follow. Given the relative maturity of Bing in the UK compared to many other countries we would be surprised if the next rollout didn’t include the UK, although when this will happen is anyone’s guess. Yahoo! has said that the full worldwide rollout may be as late as 2012.

One country that might not be transitioning to Bing-Powered Yahoo! is Japan – the one country in the world where Yahoo! is a market leader. Yahoo! Japan is only partially owned by Yahoo! and has said that it is planning to use Google to power its search results instead of Bing, a move which Microsoft has slammed as anti-competitive.

Tags: acquisitions, antitrust, Bing, Google, search, SEO, yahoo!

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Google manually editing ‘Organic’ search results?

Posted by Simon Howland August 11th, 2010

Upon the recent launch of our new LBi.com site we were alarmed to notice that Google was sending visitors to the wrong site!

As you can see below, at the time of writing, a search for [lbi.com] in google.co.uk will display a result for the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, a site about the history and culture of German speaking Jewry hosted on the domain ‘lbi.org’. The ‘sitelinks’ underneath the top result also erroneously refer and link to pages on the lbi.org domain:

This is badly wrong. As it happens, this is not a major disaster for LBi, but it could be much different for our natural search clients, who could lose significant revenues as a result of this kind of error.

So why did this happen?

There are no configurations or logical connections between the “lbi.com” site and the “lbi.org” site which could have mislead Google, leaving only two options; an error in Google code, or an error in a manually edited result – the latter of which we believe to be the most likely reason.

This is a very rare occurance that gives us an insight into the world of Google, in particular how some results are so well positioned, despite there being no ‘apparent’ reason for them to be performing so well.

We do see this from time to time, although it should be stressed that the overwhelming majority of sites will never see this kind of manual intervention, and usual best practices still apply.

One reason this result may have been singled out is due to Google’s recent focus on branded search. We suspect that brand results are one of the items currently being identified and prioritised by Google for search quality purposes.

Why would Google be manually editing search results in 2010?

Manually editing SERPS is more common than you might think. It happens for numerous reasons, from legal requests for removal of content, to handing out “black hat” SEO penalties, to delivering expected results for high volume navigational queries where, for example, a user is searching for a branded website.

Search engines have a conundrum, in that they need websites to be included in their index to attract searchers. If they remove websites for infringing terms and conditions no matter who they are, search engine users would soon get fed up and find another search engine. Likewise, if a search engine doesn’t surface expected results for a query because the site a user seeks is not optimised well enough to naturally be top of the search engine results, search engines reserve the right to manually edit results.

This introduces the potential for human error, which we believe is the case for the erroneous result demonstrated here.

Digging a little deeper:

The cached copy of this page, shown below as indexed on the 7th of August, clearly shows “lbi.com” in the cache URL, but “lbi.org” in the cache description. This is only the case for the homepage, for the phrase [lbi.com]:

The same error is evidenced with a search for [lbi.com] on the google.com site:

The same is also true for a “site:” operator search, which should only return pages from the “lbi.com” domain:

A search for [lbi] shows the expected results, including the correct ‘lbi.com’ homepage, so this is definitely included in the index:

The Leo Baeck Institute website (lbi.org) has no such error, showing that there is not a plain switch of site home pages:

We’ve dropped Google a line and will post further updates here when we hear any news back from them…

Update: Once we highlighted this, Google’s own John Mueller provided a response in the comments below, and within 24 hours the result for [lbi.com] has now been changed to display the expected results, with an LBi.com title, snippet and sitelinks appearing at the top of the page. We would like to extend our thanks to Google for ensuring a swift resolution.

Tags: Google, LBi, search, SEO

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Google and Facebook gear up to fight for social search

Posted by Adam Russell July 2nd, 2010

Recently it seems that Google can’t make enough enemies – once their primary target may have been Microsoft but if Google’s attitude to Apple is anything to go by Redmond’s lot seem positively irrelevant these days. And if the rumours surrounding Google Me are anything to go by it sounds like Facebook just made the top of the hate-list.

Me is allegedly Google’s attempt to move on the ‘full service’ social network space that is Facebook (yes, I did just coin a social media description) but despite rumours proclaiming this as a major deal it is difficult not to be just a little bit cynical.  We have already seen Google launch both Wave and Buzz to ridiculous hype rapidly followed by almost laughable silence weeks after their respective launches – why should Me be any different? And more importantly, why is Google not focusing on joining up all of their various social hooks into something that makes sense? At present they have a variety of different social offerings yet most of them act like the others don’t exist – from Google Voice and Chat through to Buzz, Wave and even Google Reader (with its built in sharing settings) the graph may usually move between them but little else does.

So maybe that is all Google Me really is – a platform to pull together all of Google’s other platforms. Yet it is already being labelled a competitor to Facebook – this despite the fact that having to rebuild a whole new social graph on a new social network is about as enjoyable as actually being forced to converse with most of those forgotten school friends you could passively ignore before the days of Facebook.

So why bother? Well it probably has something to do with the fact that Facebook overtook Google in the US earlier this year to become the biggest site in terms of visits and it shows no sign of slowing. Whilst Google’s core offering (adverts served against search results) doesn’t currently directly compete with Facebook’s (adverts served against personal content) Google have to be more than just a little bit conscious that it wouldn’t take much for Facebook to make a move into their space.

What makes Google great? They have vast amounts of data about sites, the relationships between sites and the ways in which people access those sites. And what do Facebook have? Vast amounts of data about people, the relationships between people and, since the introduction of the ‘like’ button, the ways in which people access and share sites.

Facebook have recently started including sites with ‘like’ functionality into the search results a user receives when they search for anything on the Facebook site. But to be brutally honest, it’s horrible – there is no relevance to the results and it doesn’t fit with the user behaviour for people on the site. Yet it isn’t inconceivable that Facebook could buy a search engine and if you began to lay social graph data combined with content consumption habits you could have the next evolution of search: results that are socially aware. Imagine a result page where the sites your friends visit frequently get a little boost in the results for your searches.

The social search engine has seemed an obvious next step for years and yet still hasn’t happened – probably partly because no single company has had the relevant data sets, they have typically sat in separate businesses.  Of course let’s not forget that privacy concerns are likely to be a huge factor too, since search is just so personal. Yet packaged in the right way, whereby both sharing and privacy controls are simple and straightforward, it becomes a tantalising prospect.

Facebook have said search isn’t their focus (but they would, wouldn’t they) yet Google’s continued focus on building relationship data certainly suggests that social search may be the future.

Ultimately Google Me will still crash and burn if it can’t offering something unique that Facebook doesn’t – trying to move a population of 400 million to a new home is no mean feat – but if Google spies a threat to their core search business then you can be sure they are about to throw everything they can at the social space.

This story was originally posted at The Wall.

Tags: Facebook, Google, personalised search, search, social search

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