Microsoft’s Bing & Stefan Weitz

June 17, 2009
 

Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, was launched June 1, and in the weeks since its release, Bing has been the source of much discussion. Bruce, Susan and Virginia talk about Bing’s growing search share, findings of an eye tracking study on Bing results, and some initial analysis on the quality of Bing results. Based on Bruce, Susan and Virginia’s initial experiments, Bing results have improved since the days of Live Search. The name of the new engine also conjures up some interesting images and ideas from the hosts.

Bing director Stefan Weitz Bing director Stefan Weitz is today’s guest, and he talks to Virginia about how webmasters and SEOs can optimize for Bing, Microsoft’s strategy for growing search share, and why Bing was developed as a “decision engine.” Webmasters and SEOs will be pleased with the fact that sites have a better chance to rank for broad terms since Bing’s categorized results allow users to refine queries from the results page.


Then Susan, Michael and Virginia look at some news stories because Bing wasn’t the only thing making headlines in the search space. Google Squared gets a rather low review from the hosts, while Google Wave merely confuses them regarding what it will be used for. Then they discuss the newly reported behavior of the nofollow link element, the sole subject of next week’s episode, which premiers June 24.