A recent report from analysts Citigroup has compared the search results for Google, Yahoo and Bing in an effort to determine which search engine produces the most accurate results.

The study compared 200 queries and concluded that Google was significantly better at returning the most relevant results compared to Yahoo and Bing. The results are very convincing with Google returning the most relevant result 71% of the time, compared with Bing at 49% and Yahoo! 30%.

Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney explains their methodology for the study:

“Over the past two weeks, we conducted 200 queries across the three major Search engines – Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Most of the queries we picked came from Google Zeitgeist, Microsoft’s xRank and Yahoo! Buzz, along with some personal queries. These queries spanned multiple categories, including Entertainment, Health, Local, News, Retail, Sports, Travel and Other.

After conducting the same query across all three search sites, we picked a winner based on: 1) relevancy of the organic search results; and 2) robustness of the search experience, which included factors such as image and video inclusion, Search Assist, and Site Breakout.

It’s interesting to note that Bing actually beat Google in 2 categories: Health & Travel, while Yahoo really struggled”

Google should be pleased with this result but shouldn’t be complacent.

Bing is well on the way to becoming a big competitor. With this weeks announcement that the much hyped Microsoft/Yahoo merger has now been finalised and the apparent decision for Yahoo to be powered by Bing, it will be interesting to see what happens in the search engine war over the next 12 months.

What do you think?

Is Google still your favourite search engine of choice or do you prefer the new search experience provided by Bing. As ever, your comments would be appreciated.

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Here is the third Google video from their webmaster educational series - “Speeding up in a Slowdown”.

In this video Howard Steinberg, Director of Business Development at Urbanspoon, describes how he tested Google AdSense for mobile applications.

If you develop iPhone or Android applications, Google are keen to let you know about the beta launch of AdSense for mobile applications. Participants in the beta will be able to display text and image ads in their mobile applications to earn revenue.

According to Google they have seen positive results in the trials, and are excited to roll this out to new developers to continue supporting the growth of mobile applications.

Visit Google’s New Microsite to learn more about AdSense for mobile applications, see their beta requirements, or Sign Up. If you’re selected to participate in the beta, Google will be in touch with you shortly with next steps for getting started.

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But only for a day, before falling to just over 3% market share, according to new Hitwise data.

Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, was officially launched on 3rd June.

According to Robin Goad, Research Director at Hitwise UK, “traffic peaked on June 3, when Bing was the eighth most visited website in the UK (ahead of all BBC properties, but one behind MSN UK) and the third ranked search engine, accounting for 10.8% of the UK market.”

“Since the initial launch hype, traffic to the site has declined. However, one positive sign is that average visit time has increased to eight and a half minutes. This is half of Google UK’s number but only slightly below Yahoo! UK Search, implying that the people are actually spending time on the site and using it rather than just visiting out of curiosity.”

Have you tried Bing yet?

Your comments would be appreciated.

Does Microsoft’s new search engine have the ability to challenge Google?

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing, has just been launched. Bing is now available at www.bing.com and is a direct replacement for Live Search/MSN.

Microsoft is expected to spend $80 million to $100 million on marketing Bing and is more likely to take market share from Yahoo rather than Google.

Whether Bing will ultimately succeed or not, it will help to push Google into continuing to develop their search engine product, and the new pay per click competition will ensure that Google doesn’t get too greedy.

According to Microsoft’s, Steve Ballmer, “Bing is a new kind of search that goes beyond traditional search engines to help you make faster, more informed decisions. It will do this by combining a great search engine (with powerful new features to improve your results for any query), more organised results, and unique tools to help you make important decisions. We think of Bing as a Decision Engine.”

“So why did we pick Bing as the new brand name? We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. It needed to be like the product — optimised for the Internet. A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world. We like Bing because it sounds off in our heads when we think about that moment of discovery and decision making — when you resolve those important tasks. And frankly, the name needed to clearly communicate that this is something new, to invite you to come back, to re-introduce you to our new and improved service and encourage you to give it a try.”

So, how is Bing different from Google?

• Bing is not dramatically different from Google, but some people have found its results more accurate.
• In addition to the standard search results, Bing shows more detailed information about a specific web page when you hover your mouse pointer at the right side of the search results. This is a great feature.
• Bing will display fewer results if it is certain that it has understood your intent. The search for “Facebook”, for example, brings up just one result.
• Some search results are divided into categories. For example, if you search for “Elton John” you will be offered results in the categories Photo, Songs, Lyrics, Tickets, Concerts, Musical, Las Vegas and Albums.
• Bing features a different background image every day.
• Bing’s video search lets you watch videos without leaving the search engine.
• Bing appears able to handle misspellings reasonably well and returned the correct results for our test.

All in all I think this is a great effort from Microsoft and a major improvement on the previous Live Search/MSN versions.

Why not see for your self and take a test drive now at www.bing.com.

If you would like further information on how you can improve your search engine results, visit our Professional SEO page now!

Sitemaps are an ideal way for website owners to help search engines crawl deeper and index more pages on their sites.

A lot of websites have a dedicated web page that contains links to all of the sites internal pages. This is primarily used to assist the user in navigating around a website and can be very useful, especially on large websites containing hundreds of pages. Additionally this type of Sitemap provides additional navigation links for search engines, which will help them to find more of your sites internal pages.

However in 2005 Google announced an ‘approved’ XML Sitemap format as the preferred method for indexing websites. This was quickly adopted by Yahoo and MSN. An XML Sitemap is actually a source file which is uploaded to your server. This file will be found by the search engines and used as their preferred navigation route, when indexing your web pages.

I review many websites where a number of internal pages have not been indexed by Google and installing an XML Sitemap will help the search engines to find these non indexed web pages.

Until now, there has been very little research to determine how effective XML Sitemaps really are. However, Google have recently published a detailed XML Sitemaps study, which provides us with an insight into their effectiveness.

The purpose of the Google study was to measure XML Sitemap usage over the last few years in order to determine how Sitemap files have improved the following:

• Coverage - how effective are Sitemaps at assisting Google to crawl the web deeper and find new content that it might not have found previously
• Freshness - do Sitemaps assist Google to crawl new or updated content faster, when compared to the normal crawl.

The study was based on three large websites, Amazon, CNN, and Pubmed.

Amazon’s sitemaps include around 20 million URLs. They also make every effort to indicate the best URL versions, of product pages in their XML sitemap.

CNN’s approach to XML sitemaps focuses upon helping search engines find the many new URLs which are added daily.

Pubmed contains a large archive of URLs listed in their XML sitemaps, however these are only updated on a monthly basis.

This is quite a detailed study with the final paper being 10 pages long. It is a great read if you are interested in understanding how Google Sitemaps work and how they can benefit your website. Download a copy here.

Some interesting facts from the study:

• Approximately 35 million Sitemaps were published, as of October 2008.
• The 35 million Sitemaps include “several billion” URLs.
• Most popular Sitemap formats include XML (77%), Unknown (17.5%), URL list (3.5%), Atom (1.6%) and RSS (0.11%).
• 58% of URLs in Sitemaps contain the last modification date.
• 7% of URLs contain the change frequency field.
• 61% of URLs contain the priority field.

If you are not using XML Sitemaps on your website, then this study highlights the need for you to consider adding them.

If you would like help adding an XML Sitemap to your website please Contact Us or alternatively visit our Professional SEO website for further information.