What’s this about?
I like the idea of Apple flinging Bing. Nearly as much as I like this story.
It’s not really happening for Bing, as this story expounds. Getting ditched by Apple & Siri is a bit like getting ditched by someone who used to be really famous, but now…
Perhaps Microsoft will truly “pwn” the desktop search market instead.
And perhaps the desktop searchers can meet in the same clubhouse as the Bing User Group,
This is an extract from TWIS SEO News & Updates w/e 29 September 2017, a very good read if you ask me.
#SEO #SEONews #Apple #Bing #Google #MobileSearch #DesktopSearch
Apple Flings Bing, Nestles With Google
Summary:
- Poor old Bing.
- After last week’s issue when I may have mentioned that Bing Says Links Are Still Important For Rankings was interesting for such a small search engine, Apple goes and ditches it as the provider of Siri search results on iOS & Mac.
- (Although it has to be said, web results are often so far down the list, that “are they really there?” is a valid question to ask).
- Bing / Microsoft has said in response that it will focus on the PC search market. It has no choice, it has no outlet on mobile now.
Actions to take:
- You should keep an eye on analytics if you got a lot of traffic from Bing via iOS to see if it is replaced by Google, but the volumes are so disparate that I don’t see this changing overall numbers significantly.
- If you were focusing on Bing performance specifically to target Mac & iOS users, you should now pivot towards a Google focus.
- Stick your hand up if you use Siri to search on iOS or Mac. I don’t know of anyone who routinely does.
- You can see it in action by using Siri on Mac or iOS and scrolling through the long list of Apple generated results (News, System finds, Siri knowledge, Siri suggested websites, websites – the first few from Google with “show Google results” and finally, “search web” which takes you into Safari’s search results.
- Click here to contact me to discuss ranking content in desktop / system searches.
Discussion:
Bing, apparently, is pretty good as a search engine. Perhaps in the US is it, but down here it is poor. I’ve tried to use it a number of times, and each time I feel like I’m back in an early 2000s Yahoo! nightmare.
Microsoft need to continue with Bing, even if it is publicly unsuccessful. It allows there to be so many avenues and the technology is deployable in multiple streams (Azure search, enterprise search, and system search like iOS).
See the attached images. “when is mother’s day” on Bing yields a US-centric result, even though Bing knows I’m in Australia. None of those results immediately state when Mother’s day is relative to my context. Compare that to the Google result which knows that Mother’s Day has passed and gives the next date of Mother’s Day. There’s the difference between a linear, keyword-based search engine, and a linguistic, intent-based one, and why Google is now on Apple and not Bing.
More info:
Mobile First is NOT Mobile Friendly
TL;DR
- Bing has been ditched by Siri.
- Apple is now pulling search results in iOS and MacOS from The Google.
- MS is going to “own” the desktop market instead. Totally, dude. It’ll be just like the 90s ALL OVER AGAIN.
- Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
- Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.
- Finally, get your content ranking well on Google by starting to understand Find Crawl Index.
Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these changes mean for your web property, or would like to know how to implement them, please feel free to contact me.
