Search, SERPs & Bing.com.au

There have been a number of changes hitting the Internet since May in search. Google has released a number of new tools, and there are now approximately one and a half new search engines. This post is about the new half a search engine.

Bing.com
The search engine kind-of-formally-known-as-but-not-the-same-as Live.com has finally arrived, and it is now called Bing.com. There has already been a lot written so far, and some very good articles covering everything from usability through to SEO. I am not going to try to replicate what has been said else where, just add my own observations.

Bing.com vs Bing.com.au
For a number of searches there seems to be a few differences between the main and the geographically localised indexes. When I did a few brand searches, I found that Bing.com.au was returning a different SERP than Bing.com. The most dramatic difference was where a new site was not listed at all in the localised version, while it was visible in the main, for both a search on the site’s name and using the ‘site:’operator . Site descriptive text appeared to vary across the two versions of Bing.com too. With our own sites, this indicated a difference in the age of the information that Bing.com was displaying. There were also a few interesting things observed regarding the treatment of hash tags in site links.

Bing.com ads & additions
Bing.com’s launch is being supported by a monstrous media budget, and will shake things up a little in the search landscape. I personally do not think this will change things too fundamentally. This is no real reason not to keep an eye on it though, as things can always change, and to completely ignore Microsoft’s search engine means that you are ignoring a significant slice of the market. In terms of search, I think it is going to be interesting to watch the localised indexes once they integrate newer information and watch the effect that this has on the SERPS.