Now that Bing has arrived, hopefully you’ve at least checked it out. Bing certainly has a visual appeal, providing beautiful background images and tidbits of interesting information as you move your mouse around the landscape.

After all of the hype around MSN’s new search engine, I wanted to share with you some of the information that has been circulating as a result of an eye tracking study comparing Google and Bing. The full study can be found here, but below are a few of the main points.

• Google and Bing do not differ in terms of the amount of time searchers spend looking at the organic results.  In this particular study, participants looked at the organic search results an average of 7 seconds.
• The attention given to sponsored links located above the organic results is high for both Google and Bing. More than 90% of participants looked in that area during each search.  Sponsored links on the right, however, attracted more attention on Bing (about 42% of participants per search) than they did on Google (about 25% of participants per search).
• Another difference between the two is the related searches feature. Bing offers their related searches on the left, while Google’s are below the organic search results near the bottom of the page. As a result of the location, Bing’s related searches had greater visibility than Google’s related searches.  Bing’s attracted the attention of 31% of participants per search. Google’s attracted the attention of only 5% of participants per search.

One question that I have been asked frequently is - will Bing affect search engine optimization (SEO)?  My thought is that it’s highly unlikely. Although Google, Yahoo, and Bing’s search results vary, Google is still likely to remain on top.  Google has an incredibly strong brand and searchers seem to be at least fairly happy with the results that are provided.  Google’s strong brand and searcher’s satisfaction with the results (for the most part) will likely keep other competitors at bay for a while. After all, people Google things. Will we soon Bing things? 

Recently, there has been some fuss about Google’s page snippets showing inaccurate and misleading information. Google’s page snippets help the searcher quickly find relevant search results and are the parts of a search engine result page directly under the title of the page (in larger, blue text) in black. Snippets contain phrases from the indexed page, and the phrases themselves contain text that matches the keywords typed in Google’s search box.

In one incident, the first of its kind, someone typed in “Zwartepoorte,” a name of an auto dealer in Europe, and “failliet,” the Dutch translation of “bankrupt.” One of the results was a page from the site Miljoenhuizen.nl. “Failliet” was found in one section of the page and “Zwartepoorte” was found in another section. Google usually notifies the searcher that the snippet phrases came from non-contiguous parts of the page by adding ellipses between the phrases. This was the case in this incident (the ellipses between “BMW” and “Dit”), shown below. However, a legal battle ensued because the resulting snippet essentially said that the auto dealer was bankrupt, when that was not the case. The web master of Miljoenhuizen.nl ended up having to pay the consequences.

Ellipses are probably used to conserve space so that Google doesn’t have to put each phrase on its own line. They are also used to signal a break in text. The issue is that the ellipses are hardly noticeable nor distinguishable from other ellipses that may be in the original text. If they were a bit more noticeable, the average user might then investigate their meaning. Google could even add a helpful link next to the “Cached” link, such as “Composite Snippet.” It might look like this:

Another issue I see is that the definition of “non-contiguous” is left up to Google’s algorithm and their engineers. I’m sure there are known ways of how to deal with this potentially slippery issue, such as separating the text by some large distance (as it appears to Google’s algorithms, i.e. ignoring any Javascript and styling) or by putting them in separate HTML elements. These are simply ideas off the top of my head and not necessarily realistic ways to approach the issue. Especially if the content on your pages are dynamically created, it may be very difficult to circumvent some inaccurate snippet text being shown on Google’s result page.

However, there is a way to cause Google to stop showing all snippet phrases from a specific page on your site on their search results. You can find more information about this on Google’s blog post, The Robots Exclusion Protocol. Essentially, you would add the following meta tag on any page for which you want Google to hide the snippets:

Beware that, in addition to completely removing the snippet, this renders the cached version of that page (and therefore the Cached link) inaccessible to searchers.

With Microsoft’s latest search engine, Bing, launching yesterday, there has been a lot of speculation as to whether their “decision engine” will survive. Even with the heavy marketing onslaught reporting to cost over $100 million, the unveiling of this new and improved search experience may have some tough hurdles to overcome.

For instance, Google still controls a major slice of the search engine pie and while it would not be impossible to overthrow the search giant, it will definitely be an uphill struggle. With Microsoft’s “Live” search engine being replaced with “Bing”, they’ve essentially done some clever re-branding and may be able to pull from third place and possibly overtake Yahoo! in the search engine war.

Launched in 2006, Live Search never became the success that Microsoft envisioned. Microsoft blamed it on branding and its distinct lack of marketing. With Bing, Microsoft has added such features as search suggestions as you type, search history and associated search suggestions appearing on the left side of the results page.

As of June 2nd 2009, Bing has already run into some trouble as they have been blocked in China for undisclosed reasons. While this may have little effect on Bing’s overall success, it could be an ominous sign that it may not be an easy road ahead for the young search enterprise.