Search Engine Optimization

Microsoft blog announced a new feature on Bing search.

The feature is very very neat, but is somewhat limited. You have to really land the words such as “translation”, “how to say”, etc. My guess would be they are still testing the feature (it rolled out few days ago) and it is currently limited. As it gain recognition (most likely) Microsoft will expand from single word translations to actual sentences.

The default language it translates to is English. It is logical to assume that the language is selected based on the country you’re in.

Microsoft is spending close to $100 million dollars to promote its search engine and already has over 15 commericals.

Here’s is the list:

• Bing: Decisions = You
• Bing: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
• Bing Search Overload Syndrome: Pregnant
• Bing Search Overload Syndrome: Bar
• Bing: The Cure for Search Overload Syndrome
• Bing Search Overload Syndrome: Cell Phone
• Olivia Munn Bing-a-thon Promo – Stand In
• Olivia Munn Bing-a-thon Promo – Shut Up
• Olivia Munn Bing-a-thon Promo – Relatable
• Olivia Munn Bing-a-thon Promo – Hotdogs
• Olivia Munn Bing-a-thon Promo – Coolest Cat
• Bing Search Overload Syndrome: Hawaii
• Bing – Search Overload Is Over
• Bing – A New Way to Search, Explore, & Decide
• Life Before Bing
• Life After Bing
• Introducing Bing – A Decision Engine from Microsoft

There’s a new impressive search engine on the scene – http://www.hunch.com.

The search engine is a real decision engine maintained by a group of 40,000 volunteers who manually craft questions and match answers. According to Catherine Fake who is the cofounder of Flikr and a past employee of Yahoo Answers:

it’s a hybrid of several different ideas, similar in some ways to both Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers, but different in others.

The search engine is truly a decision engine as it can help you make a decisions on the topic you’re not familiar with. For example, if you’re new to SEO, you can type in “how to hire an SEO company” and Hunch will give you pre-crafted questions that closely relate to yours. After you pick the question, Hunch will ask you more questions in order to find out details about what it is that you want to do. After it has enough information, you will be directed to several answers / options which Hunch found most suitable.

So far the search engine is limited in the amount of questions it can answer, however just like with Wikipedia – as the user base grows so does the amount of content. In case of Hunch it is not the content that gets added, but rather questions that are answered.

“It might take five years for Hunch to reach maturity. Right now, it’s like Wikipedia circa 2002,” Fake says. “To me, what makes social software great is that it improves over time. Hopefully, Hunch’s knowledge accretes.”

Learn more about Hunch:

• Hunch.com
• Hunch: A Real Decision Engine
• Hunch: Your “Personal Decision Maker”