These are the questions on everyone's mind. What is BING? How will it affect my SEO strategy? What does this mean to all of the hard work I have put into my content and optimization?

Here are some of the guidelines we have seen pop up so far with regard to Bing and how it categorizes search listings. 

First of all, there is much talk that Bing, as an engine, is smarter or "more aware" than Google bots are. (Oh my God, this is it. The robots have become self-aware. This is my ultimate nightmare.)

Bing appears to not only "find" your content, but it makes intelligent decisions regarding what your content is, which are driven by a slightly different set of rules than Google uses. (Be aware that this is speculation. I have no hard facts or proof.)

Bing appears to weigh the "age" of a domain more heavily. The longer you have been around, the more street cred you carry as a website.

Bing likes content. But not just some content, loads of content. Bing appears to respond better to pages with at least 300 words of text or more.

Google has not placed as much weight on bloggers in the past. It is said that Bing is a friend of bloggers and may weigh blogs quite heavily.

Bing appears to like great titles that are directly relevant to your content. So don't phone in your titles, you lazy shlub.

Keep your URL's simple. Bing hasn't got time to read your URL manifestos. He is a busy guy with places to be.

Lastly, Bing likes outbound links, contrary to Google that has, in the past, prevented websites from posting too many outbound links out of fear of lowering their rank.

Make sure your website allows MSNbots to crawl your content. If you don't know how to do this, go find your IT guy. Those guys are magical.

GOOGLE DIED YESTERDAY! Or, at least acted really sluggish and crashed for a sampling of users early yesterday. Looking at the headlines of the incident, one would think that the Four Horsemen were gearing up for a trot.

First, the story. According to the Official Google Blog, an internal error resulted in 14% of user web traffic being rerouted through Asia. This slowed things down a bit. That’s it. The problem was identified and fixed within an hour. Urs Hoelzle, SVP of Google Operations offered his apologies, claiming, “We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again.”

Now, the inappropriate overreaction:

• Reuters: Google Blackout: The Fallout (ed: What, like after a world-ending atomic blast?)
• Computerworld: Google Down! (ed: RUN!)
• Hispanic Business: Google Down, World Stands Still? Google Outage Shows Site's Ubiquity, Our Overdependence (ed: To answer the question, no, the world didn’t stand still.)

And Twitter… Oh boy. It was on fire with #googlefail tweets. Or, should I say is on fire. Some people apparently still think Google is down a full 24 hours after the problem was corrected.

So to answer the question posed by the title: What does one do when Google fails? Apparently, complain about it on Twitter and write hilariously over-the-top headlines.

What should one do when Google fails? Use Yahoo.

Got to hand it to Michael Arrington for this great scoop. His site, TechCrunch, is reporting that Google is in talks to purchase Twitter. According to "two separate people close to the negotiations," the deal is in late stages.

Besides complete and total Internet domination, why would Google bother with the micro-blogging service that has yet to even unveil a business plan? Perhaps it's because of Twitter's vaunted “real-time search” of Tweets. As Arrington explains:

More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually (The W Hotel pestered me until I told them to just leave me alone), or simply gather the information to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.

And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer.

People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That’s valuable stuff.

How is Twitter's search different from Google's? In a word, simplicity. Twitter is only searching and indexing 140 character tweets, not scouring and ranking whole websites based on complex algorithms. Therefore, Twitter's search results are more immediate, or available in "real time."

Beyond marketing, others claim that the Twitter search function can provide a unique insight into news and events, a thought that Valleywag's Owen Thomas throws cold water on:

Williams's Twitter, which lets users post short updates about whatever thought crosses their minds, is being hailed by the Valley's groupthinking bloggers as a revolution in "real-time search." Much as a stopped clock is right twice a day, occasionally one finds some bit of timely news posted by a Twitter user. (It's hardly a threat to established newsgathering operations, because more often than not, what's posted on Twitter is just a link to some page on CNN.com or nytimes.com.)

The fact that Google is in cost-cutting mode and has engaged in significant company layoffs also seems to belie any major purchases. However, Google has a history of purchasing hot web properties with no real revenue model... they bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.

For what it’s worth, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone addressed the rumors on the Twitter blog.

It should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects.

That’s certainly not a denial.

I was going to write about the release of IE 8 and all the hoopla accompanying it, but my good friends in Mountain View upstaged their rivals in Redmond (in my eyes at least) with the release of the infinitely more useful Gmail Undo Send feature. The name couldn’t be more apt as it allows quick-triggered e-mailers a five-second window to “unsend” any unfinished or inappropriate e-mail message.

Why five seconds? Is that enough time to identify any potentially embarrassing e-mail mistakes? As Google product manager Keith Coleman explained to CNET’s Rafe Needleman:

…internal testing of the feature, which was created by a Google engineer in Japan as a side project, indicated that five seconds was an appropriate compromise between the ability to recall an errant message and the need to not introduce lag to e-mail conversations. "Adding a delay could be potentially frustrating," Coleman said. …but Coleman also told me there's an option to increase the un-send time window to 10 seconds. "We may decide to add longer options," he said.

I’m guessing this will be a popular option with job hunters who forget to attach their resume, which has happened to your humble blog poster on more than one occasion.

Lest you drunk e-mailers out there think that Google has forsaken your “unsend” needs, Google’s proactive Mail Goggles feature released last year has you covered. From the Gmail Blog:

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?

By default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as that is the time you're most likely to need it. Once enabled, you can adjust when it's active in the General settings. Both Mail Goggles and Undo Send can be activated by logging into Gmail, clicking on “Settings,” and selecting the “Labs” tab.

Turn it on and try it out. Send an ex a confession of love. Send your boss an expletive filled e-mail. Send that Nigerian prince your bank account info. (Really, don’t do that!)

Undo Send seems like such an obvious feature, it’s amazing it wasn’t available until now. Actually, it was. Old timers might remember that during the dinosaur dial-up days, AOL allowed users to delete unread messages they had sent to other AOL users.

Owen Thomas of Valleywag picked up on something interesting regarding Google’s new contextual ad technology. Essentially, Google is leveraging user privacy concerns as a means to acquire more information about users.

Let me explain. On Wednesday, Google announced via the Google Blog new “interest based” ads that associate users with certain categories, all to display tailored ads that are more relevant. Basically, if a user browses multiple running blogs, the next time the user goes to, say, Amazon’s sporting goods section, Google will know to display ads about running shoes instead of any run-of-the-mill sportswear.

Make sense? Google is essentially tracking users browsing habits via modified cookies stored on the browser in order to serve up the most relevant ad possible.

Of course, knowing that the privacy alarmists will cry foul, Google makes it extremely easy to opt out of the program. Google is also kind enough to let users see which categories they are aligned with based on their browsing habits and delete any the user feels are irrelevant.

This is where Owen Thomas spots shenanigans:

Google is making it easy to modify the interest information Google stores. You can opt out, but then the "ads will be less relevant to you." (The horror!) What Ghosemajumder, Wojcicki and the rest of the Googlers are really hoping you'll do is add or subtract interests to the list rather than opt out — and thereby give Google even more information about you.

The ads are still in the beta stage, meaning Google may still tweak or scrap the program. But what do you think? Are you concerned about what Google is doing here? Do you really need ads that are more relevant? Do even click on Google ads anyway?

The New York Times reported Thursday that Google has begun running relevant text ads on Google News, a practice the search giant avoided for nearly six years.

So why is this news? Because initially, newspaper publishers were weary of Google’s news aggregator (a service that collected headlines and clips of major – and minor – newspapers, linking users to the online story’s respective site), thinking that Google was essentially building a competing news site using the newspaper’s existing content. To help ease publishers’ fears that Google was stealing money from the newspapers, big G refrained from placing ads on Google News search results.

And that just changed, owing to what Google claims, via the New York Times, was an approach that delivered contextually relevant ads. I’m guessing they also thought it would turn a profit.

Google long maintained that its use of headline and snippets were in accordance with fair use copyright laws. Do they undercut that claim once they start making money through their “fair use” of the content? Will they share a piece of the profit with the ailing newspaper industry? After all, Google depends on a thriving newspaper industry to keep Google News viable.

That all leads to the confounding and circular chicken/egg logic behind the issue. To be a success, Google News needs fresh content from newspapers that in turn need pageviews via aggregators like Google News because no one is buying the print product that ultimately feeds the beast.

The fact is that both Google and the news industry is trying to make money off of something the news industry is giving away for free. Only now, Google may have figured out a way to do it.

AdWeek runs a story titled, There's Still Room for Google Killers, Study Says. CNET News counters with the commentary piece 'Google killers?' I don't think so. So, which is it?

AdWeek bases its claim on the fact that general search-engine brand loyalty is almost non-existent, and the cost of switching brands (or search engines) is low (in fact, free). Meaning that Google has not yet cemented #1 search engine status. AdWeek quotes a survey by Forrester Research revealing that only 20 percent of respondents use Google exclusively, with a full 80 percent of Web surfers either tied to other search engines or brand disloyal.

CNET counters that the survey doesn’t exactly show an open playing field. 59 percent of searchers use Google most often (up from 41 percent in 2006). Also:

…while 53 percent of consumers who set Yahoo as their home page most frequently select Yahoo for search, 91 percent of consumers who set Google as their home page most frequently use Google for search.

Finally, the analyst who wrote the study didn’t draw the same conclusion AdWeek trumpeted. In an email exchange with CNET’s Charles Cooper, Shar VanBoskirk claimed, “I'm definitely not trying to say that the 'nascent search field is wide open.” Her point was that marketers should concentrate on more than just Google, as users may turn to different search engines for specific types of content. For example, Google may provide the best sites related to information, but MSN is better for news content.

Funny how AdWeek completely missed the survey’s marketing spin.

(Credit: Forrester Research, via CNET)

Hey everyone - long time no see. It's been awhile since my last post, but something so monumental occurred in the search world yesterday that I had to come out of hiding and share this news with those who may or may not be aware. Yesterday, Google officially launched its new SearchWiki feaure available to those who have a Google account. In a nutshell, Google's SearchWiki allows users like you and me to edit search results. You can re-order, remove, or add web pages to the search results for any query and even more interesting, you can also add notes to specific listings. I could go on and explain more about how it works exactly but for that, take a look at this article; they've already done it.

Now I know this has nothing to do with writing or keywords or anything that we normally discuss really on this blog, but for anyone who uses Google when searching for stuff (everyone), or for those SEO's out there, this is really, really big news. I was playing around with this new user interface today and I must say, it's pretty cool. I'm curious as to what everyone else out there thinks about it, or if you have even noticed it. I personally think it has huge implications for SEO, not so much in terms of rankings at the moment, but users will be able to see all of the notes other searchers have made about a page or a site, and they will also be able to see what results other users have re-ordered, removed, or added. Google's product manager, Cedric Dupont, added that he "wouldn't completely rule out the possibility that user data from SearchWiki may someday impact regular search rankings." This too, would have huge implications on the SEO world because, as of now, rankings are more objective, decided upon by the many factors in the search engine's algorithms. This would bring a much more subjective element to it. Very interesting stuff..........

Remember, you have to have a Google account and you also must be signed in to be able to use SearchWiki. Try it out and let me know what you think!