LBi London

Weekly Social Media Update

Posted by Sinead Doyle February 1st, 2011

Facebook Places Deals Arrive in the UK

Three months after the initial launch in the US, Facebook Places Deals have finally launched in the UK and Europe (Germany, France, Italy, and Spain). Initial partners include Starbucks, Yo Sushi, Mazda, O2, Argos, Debenhams, Alton Towers and Benetton. If this can bring the ease of Foursquare-style promotions together with the group discount appeal of Groupon, Facebook could well be onto a winner.

Gesture Control

Last week’s Truman Session explored the future of connected TV, and got some of us thinking about the new user interfaces it might require. Microsoft’s Kinect, recently named the fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history, has the potential to be used as an input device, though most current Kinect hacks are more for entertainment than utility, such as this Kinect controlled robot:

Here’s an installation at the Yahoo! headquarters, showing how such technology could be repurposed as a usable interface:

Minority Report is only a matter of time!

Social Media and the Egyptian Crisis

Social networks continue to play a vital role in times of crisis. Despite internet outages and attempts to block Facebook and Twitter access, inventive users have been finding ways to circumvent these problems using proxy servers and third-party apps. Google has launched a Voice-to-Twitter service to help protesters make their voices heard, and the BBC is following the situation live, supplementing its coverage with user-submitted videos, images and tweets. The number of tweets mentioning #Egypt peaked on the 26th of January, with over 250,000 messages.

#Egypt on Twitter

To show their support, other Twitter users have been retweeting messages that highlight the themes of censorship and oppression.

Censorship Tweet

Tags: connected TV, Deals, Egypt, Facebook, Facebook places, Facebook Places Deals, foursquare, gesture control, Google, Groupon, installation, Kinect, Minority Report, robot, Social Media, social networks, Starbucks, Truman Session, Voice-to-Twitter, yahoo!

0 comments Share

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!

0 comments Share

Social may be the key to innovation as competition in search heats up

Posted by evakeo July 19th, 2010

As reported around this time last year Yahoo and Microsoft have signed a $700 million deal which meant that Bing would provide Yahoo’s search results leaving our friends in Sunnyvale to run what will effectively be a content based web portal, one far more popular in the US than here or the rest of Europe. Clearly, this is all part of Microsoft’s offensive against Google, which has also included taking a stake in Facebook, thus leading a conglomerate of brands against Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s search giant. But now the competitive scramble for users in the search space seems to involve almost every trendy brand in digital.

However, regarding the specific Yahoo/Bing deal, things just started to get a little more real. Last week an update was sent to advertisers stating that Yahoo would being serving natural search results from Bing from “August or September onwards”. Moreover Yahoo will integrate its PPC ads to Microsoft’s AdCenter by the beginning of the ‘holiday season’ (that’s Christmas to us limeys) but may delay that until 2011 if it decides that would “improve the overall experience” for both advertisers and users. “If organic search results are an important source of referrals to your website, you’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change,” so the email said. Well sure, 80% of internet journeys start with search and these two new found friends are important to the search market, though Google is still leading by far, more so in the UK than most places.

According to ComScore’s latest figures from last month, Google have 91.7% of the UK search market with Bing and Yahoo on 2.98% and 2.55% respectively, figures largely unchanged from the last quarter. In the US it’s a different ball game with Google on “just” 63.70%, Yahoo on 18.30% and Bing on 12.10%, with slight rises from the last two against Google over the last quarter.

So many hope that this deal will have a positive effect on search in terms of innovation. For a start, Google will have to try harder, especially in the States, something which will have a knock on affect to the rest of the world. The biggest reason for this is that the merger obviously means increased market share to around a third for Bing/Yahoo. Such an enlarged competitor means more advertisers who may have previously only used Google may experiment with AdCenter, meaning that Google will have to try harder to keep users using their brand, something they have managed quite well in the past from free applications such as Maps and Gmail, to paid for models like the mobile operating system Android and even a rumoured hardware rival to Apple’s iPad.

As SEO industry guru Danny Sullivan said last year, “If Microsoft can adopt a passion for innovation and push the envelope, Google will have to respond in kind. The search experience will evolve more rapidly, hopefully kicked out of the revenue obsessed stasis that it’s currently in. Stagnation benefits no one except the analysts and bean counters who insist that quarter over quarter performance is the only metric that matters. We’re way too early in the game to be that cautious and boring.”

In what form might this innovation come? Well, social could be the key to that. For over a year now it has been speculated that Google use more than PageRank to determine the rankings of web pages. Many search analysts believe that inbuilt into the algorithm are signals from offline media and social networks, even those, such as Twitter and Facebook, that have their links set to ‘nofollow’ (so no link equity is passed on). These links would not carry as much weight as a “regular link” but evidence has been recorded of increased natural search ranking even when no links have been involved. Most famous of these is the recent Magners example from eConsultancy.

Personally, I think it’s fair to say that nothing is certain at this stage, so little is with Google’s algorithm, but there is definitely more emphasis being put on social activity, mainly because since October last year Twitter’s main revenue stream has come from sharing data with Google and Bing, a process that began when Tweets started to show up in natural search results as the engines clambered over themselves to show more ‘real time’ information to the user.

Also, as blogged about by my colleague Johnny Gedye, location based social networking site Foursquare are in talks with Google and Microsoft for a similar deal to Twitter’s:

‘Speaking to the Telegraph, [Foursquare co-founder] Crowley said Foursquare was discussing partnerships with “everyone” – which would include search kings Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! – to “enrich” their search engines with trends generated by the location-based data.

“We can anonymise data and use it to show venues which are trending at that moment,” Crowley explained, voicing the example of Twitter, “Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about,” he continued. “Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of place people are going to – and where is trending – not what.”’

And this isn’t the only area where location based networks are springing up. Last month Twitter itself launched Twitter Places whereby users are able to tag tweets to specific places (such as venues) and clicking on those location names will bring up recent tweets from those places. Whether this will become part of the data fed to Google and Microsoft remains to be seen but there is certainly a scramble to make location an integral part of the search experience. Facebook is also rumoured to be developing a similar offering, not to mention anything that may be being thrashed out with Gowalla.

No one knows who will come out on top of this but one thing is for sure, search is only going to become a richer channel over the next year and it looks likely that the brands that make best use of the social space will be the ones that benefit the most.

Tags: Bing, Facebook, foursquare, Google, SEO, Social Media, twitter, yahoo!

1 comments Share

Bing to launch updated, renamed web crawler “Bing Bot”

Posted by Ian Macfarlane June 30th, 2010

Microsoft is to launch its new spider later this year. Here’s what site owners need to know.

Microsoft’s search engine wasn’t always called “Bing” and its web crawler, “msnbot”, hasn’t kept up with the name change. When Microsoft renamed Live Search (formerly MSN Search) Bing, we have to admit to being mildly disappointed that it didn’t take the opportunity to rename its spider “Bing Bot”.

There are many good reasons not to change the name of a spider, especially one as widely used as Microsoft’s search spider. Many software packages look at the name of visiting browsers and spiders (known as the User-Agent) to perform a variety of functions, and it’s possible that problems might occur for a time on less well-configured websites if this were to be changed. For example, Yahoo! maintained the User-Agent “Slurp” for its spider, which it inherited from its acquisition of Inktomi, to “ensure consistency and minimal disruption”.

It appears that Microsoft has decided that the branding “Bing Bot” is too good to miss, however, and has announced that its next generation spider will indeed be renamed when it comes out of beta.

Here’s what site owners need to know:

When is this happening?

This will happen on 1^st October 2010.

This is also when Microsoft’s new spider will officially come out of beta.

What will the User-Agent be?

Microsoft’s current User-Agent is:

msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

The new Bing Bot User-Agent will be:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

In addition to the “bingbot” branding, there are two other changes to note. Firstly, Microsoft is switching to the “Mozilla/5.0”-style User-Agent. Google made this change more than six years ago because it wanted web servers to treat its spider more like a real web browser. The second, more minor, change is that the “b” (meaning “beta”) in its version number has been dropped.

Any other changes to the spider’s requests?

In addition to the User-Agent change, Microsoft has also change the “From:” HTTP header field, so the old value of:

From: msnbot(at)microsoft.com

will become:

From: bingbot(at)microsoft.com

Will my old robots.txt entries still work?

Thankfully, Microsoft has decided to make its spider respect the User-Agent field which it currently recognises in robots.txt, “msnbot”. However, the way in which it will work from October is somewhat subtle, so deserves a brief explanation.

Whilst existing directives will still work, Microsoft is also going to recognise a “User-Agent:” robots.txt entry of “bingbot”, and it will give precedence to an entry of “bingbot” over an entry of “msnbot” (which, in turn, has precedence over the catch-all User-Agent entry of “*”). This means that, if you add robots.txt rules for “bingbot”, it will ignore all other rules, including those for “msnbot”.

Whilst adding conflicting “msnbot” and “bingbot” entries hopefully isn’t too likely to happen on most sites, in a larger, more complex organisation in which many different people or departments are able to make changes to robots.txt files, I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone accidentally trip up and add a new “bingbot” entry which doesn’t match up with the already existing “msnbot” entry (for example, where a separate “crawl-delay” value for Bing is specified).

Microsoft clearly wants site owners to update their robot.txt files with the new User-Agent, and we’d definitely recommend that you do this – but don’t forget that the new Bing Bot only launches on 1^st October – until then, you should still use the old “msnbot” terminology in your robots.txt files.

What should I do now?

Firstly, if you currently have a separate robots.txt entry for msnbot on your site(s), make a note on your calendar on to change it to “bingbot” on October 1^st.

Secondly, make sure that your website doesn’t do anything else special for Microsoft’s crawler or for visitors which don’t identify themselves as ‘Mozilla compatible’. This could include tools such as analytics packages or software which performs anti-spam functionality such as request rate-limiting.

Other than that, there shouldn’t be anything to worry about! However, in the (hopefully unlikely) event that you do experience any problems come October, Microsoft has set up an email address (bingbot@microsoft.com) to help to resolve any issues.

Tags: Bing, Google, Microsoft, Robots Exclusion Protocol, search, search engine, spiders, technical, yahoo!

0 comments Share