May 12
19
Bing Redesigned For Social Search
Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, was given a new facade last week. The change however, is not just visual, but functional as well. With this new design Microsoft hopes to be able to better incorporate social into their search engine.
Not too long ago, Google introduced search plus your world, in an attempt to make their organic search results more social, on the back of Google+. Bing’s new design uses a three-column format to give their users a more social search experience.
Bing redesigned for social search
On the extreme left is the improved web results column, which provides regular organic search results. The second column is a ‘Snapshots’ column. As the name suggests, this column offers the most relevant information related to the user’s search. It also provides integration with services like OpenTable to allow users to actually take the required actions. The third column is a social sidebar, which includes recommendations by friends and experts related to the user’s search.
Bing director Stefan Weitz spoke to Fast Company recently and said that the change was in response to their need to “reinvent search.”
Bing hopes to be able to use the data available on the net to create apps that will provide instant answers to users so that they won’t have to click through to a Web page to the find the information they require.
The idea of incorporating the social column on the results page is that users would generally rely on the opinion of their friends far more than they would rely on the opinion of unknown people or on abstract search results.
Ultimately the target that Microsoft has in mind for the new redesign is obviously to increase their search market share by making a dent in Google’s monopoly. As of now, Microsoft has accumulated losses of about $6 billion since the launch of Bing about three years ago.
The Facebook Factor
Incidentally, it is the owner of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, who can be credited with helping to create the new Bing design, as he told the developers working on this project “Don’t try to do social by building social on the side. Build it into the experience.”
Bing’s close ties with Facebook will work strongly in their favour in this case. Unlike Google+, which is still a fledgling, relatively unimportant social network in spite of its claimed high volume of users, Facebook is a truly social network and using the social aspects of Facebook to power Bing gives the new social search engine a lot more credibility than Google plus your world.
Users in the United States were invited to try the new Bing interface yesterday. Let us know what you think of it – will this new feature make you leave Google and start using Bing?
May 12
19
Bing Redesigned For Social Search
Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, was given a new facade last week. The change however, is not just visual, but functional as well. With this new design Microsoft hopes to be able to better incorporate social into their search engine.
Not too long ago, Google introduced search plus your world, in an attempt to make their organic search results more social, on the back of Google+. Bing’s new design uses a three-column format to give their users a more social search experience.
Bing redesigned for social search
On the extreme left is the improved web results column, which provides regular organic search results. The second column is a ‘Snapshots’ column. As the name suggests, this column offers the most relevant information related to the user’s search. It also provides integration with services like OpenTable to allow users to actually take the required actions. The third column is a social sidebar, which includes recommendations by friends and experts related to the user’s search.
Bing director Stefan Weitz spoke to Fast Company recently and said that the change was in response to their need to “reinvent search.”
Bing hopes to be able to use the data available on the net to create apps that will provide instant answers to users so that they won’t have to click through to a Web page to the find the information they require.
The idea of incorporating the social column on the results page is that users would generally rely on the opinion of their friends far more than they would rely on the opinion of unknown people or on abstract search results.
Ultimately the target that Microsoft has in mind for the new redesign is obviously to increase their search market share by making a dent in Google’s monopoly. As of now, Microsoft has accumulated losses of about $6 billion since the launch of Bing about three years ago.
The Facebook Factor
Incidentally, it is the owner of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, who can be credited with helping to create the new Bing design, as he told the developers working on this project “Don’t try to do social by building social on the side. Build it into the experience.”
Bing’s close ties with Facebook will work strongly in their favour in this case. Unlike Google+, which is still a fledgling, relatively unimportant social network in spite of its claimed high volume of users, Facebook is a truly social network and using the social aspects of Facebook to power Bing gives the new social search engine a lot more credibility than Google plus your world.
Users in the United States were invited to try the new Bing interface yesterday. Let us know what you think of it – will this new feature make you leave Google and start using Bing?
In a move that might not come as a shock to most industry observers, Yahoo! has fired yet another CEO. Scott Thompson, who was appointed CEO only in January, has been fired after his résumé was found to be “misleading”.
With this, Yahoo! has achieved the reputation of having had four full time CEO’s in less than five years.
Ross Levinsohn has been appointed as the interim CEO. He was earlier overseeing Yahoo’s media and advertising services.
Yahoo! has been having financial problems since 2008 when they refused a takeover bid by Microsoft. The company had appointed Scott Thompson to take care of their troubles. However, a disgruntled stock holder and activist hedge fund manager, Daniel Loeb, recently found that Thompson never received a computer science degree from Stonehill College as was listed in his biodata. He exposed the fabrication in a May 3 letter to Yahoo!’s board.
After initially trying to protect the CEO, by claiming the whole issue was “an inadvertent error”, Yahoo! set up a special committee to investigate the facts. Thompson tried to pass-off the error as having been made by Chicago headhunting firm, Heidrick & Struggles.
Heidrick & Struggles have denied any wrong doing on their part. “This allegation is verifiably not true and we have notified Yahoo! to that effect”, CEO Kevin Kelly wrote to employees.
Five Yahoo! board members, including chairperson Roy Bostock and four other directors who were to step down after the company’s annual meeting, will also be resigning immediately.
Loeb, who has a 5.8% stake in Yahoo! will now occupy three of Yahoo’s vacated board seats along with his allies, former MTV Networks executive Michael Wolf and turnaround specialist Harry Wilson.
Thompson told Loeb in late March, he wasn’t qualified to be on Yahoo!’s board. This had upset Loeb who then found out about the inconsistencies in Thompson’s résumé.
Alfred Amoroso, a veteran technology executive who has been on the board for just three months will now chair the board. The newly reconstituted board hopes to be able to tide over the crisis that Yahoo! has been going through.
If the beleaguered tech giant wasn’t having enough trouble, the new issues have reduced the company to a joke in certain circles. Many tend to forget that in spite of all the public issues faced by Yahoo! the company still drives a tremendous amount of traffic and revenue. However, they’ve fallen foul of the investors and seem to be digging themselves a grave they’re unlikely to ever crawl out of.
In a move that might not come as a shock to most industry observers, Yahoo! has fired yet another CEO. Scott Thompson, who was appointed CEO only in January, has been fired after his résumé was found to be “misleading”.
With this, Yahoo! has achieved the reputation of having had four full time CEO’s in less than five years.
Ross Levinsohn has been appointed as the interim CEO. He was earlier overseeing Yahoo’s media and advertising services.
Yahoo! has been having financial problems since 2008 when they refused a takeover bid by Microsoft. The company had appointed Scott Thompson to take care of their troubles. However, a disgruntled stock holder and activist hedge fund manager, Daniel Loeb, recently found that Thompson never received a computer science degree from Stonehill College as was listed in his biodata. He exposed the fabrication in a May 3 letter to Yahoo!’s board.
After initially trying to protect the CEO, by claiming the whole issue was “an inadvertent error”, Yahoo! set up a special committee to investigate the facts. Thompson tried to pass-off the error as having been made by Chicago headhunting firm, Heidrick & Struggles.
Heidrick & Struggles have denied any wrong doing on their part. “This allegation is verifiably not true and we have notified Yahoo! to that effect”, CEO Kevin Kelly wrote to employees.
Five Yahoo! board members, including chairperson Roy Bostock and four other directors who were to step down after the company’s annual meeting, will also be resigning immediately.
Loeb, who has a 5.8% stake in Yahoo! will now occupy three of Yahoo’s vacated board seats along with his allies, former MTV Networks executive Michael Wolf and turnaround specialist Harry Wilson.
Thompson told Loeb in late March, he wasn’t qualified to be on Yahoo!’s board. This had upset Loeb who then found out about the inconsistencies in Thompson’s résumé.
Alfred Amoroso, a veteran technology executive who has been on the board for just three months will now chair the board. The newly reconstituted board hopes to be able to tide over the crisis that Yahoo! has been going through.
If the beleaguered tech giant wasn’t having enough trouble, the new issues have reduced the company to a joke in certain circles. Many tend to forget that in spite of all the public issues faced by Yahoo! the company still drives a tremendous amount of traffic and revenue. However, they’ve fallen foul of the investors and seem to be digging themselves a grave they’re unlikely to ever crawl out of.
This is one of those short posts that will make you squint your eyes slightly, furrow your brow, tilt your head, and say, “Wait, what? This doesn’t make sense.” Like this:
I have an account in Google AdWords that has had a conversion metric calculation glitch. I first noticed it a few months ago when comparing cost/conversion and conversion rate metrics I calculated in my excel reports with the metrics reported in the AdWords interface. For this account, AdWords consistently under-reports the cost/conversion and over-reports the conversion rate. As you can guess, this has the potential to cause confusion and frustration.
Here’s a screen shot of the summary bar at the top of the data table:
The conversion types are consistent (1-per-click), but the calculations reported are incorrect. These are what they should come out to:
Cost/Conversion = $3,054.09 / 299 = $10.21
Conversion Rate = 299 / 2,190 = 13.65%
You can try calculating them yourselves right now if you’d like: Google AdWords is wrong. Now we know if they ever try to take over the world, math is their weakness.
So far, I’ve only encountered this issue with one account. Have you noticed this before in your account(s)? Let us know in the comments below.
If you’ve been running a pay-per-click advertising campaign for a while, you have
probably achieved a level of performance that is providing a profitable return
on ad spend — “ROAS.” The next step to
getting the most from PPC advertising is maximizing the percentage of time in which your
ads are showing for relevant, converting search queries.
Lead generation sites are
different than ecommerce sites. They usually sell services rather than
products. The services are typically “considered purchases,” involving
more research than most consumer products. And the
buying-shopping-consideration cycle of a prospect is often far longer
than typical ecommerce products.
A user-friendly website can
increase conversions, such as newsletter signups, service quotes, or
product sales. However, the process of making a website more usable is
non-intuitive. It often involves fully understands what a consumer sees.
Facebook’s frantic quest to monetize everything it possibly can before the IPO is leading to some interesting and some downright surprising product announcements. The latest is a ‘Pay To Promote Post’ scheme that they introduced last week.
The new scheme is being tried out currently in New Zealand.
New Zealand-based news magazine, Stuff, first reported this new service when it was discovered by one of the users in Whangarei.
The user first thought that this was just another Facebook-based con doing the rounds. However, a spokesperson of Facebook later confirmed that this was a genuine service that was in the trial stages.
“We’re constantly testing new features across the site. This particular test is simply to gauge people’s interest in this method of sharing with their friends.” the spokesperson for Facebook further said that a number of new ways of highlighting certain posts were being tried out and this was one of them.
The highest charge for highlighting a post has been pegged at £1.25 ($2) while others cost 25p or 50p. Payments can be made through credit card or PayPal.
The spokesperson also clarified that ways to highlight certain posts for free were also being tested. He however did not clarify how long the tests would go on, and whether they were likely to be tried out in other regions.
Facebook is due to float an IPO shortly and has been trying various ways to increase their revenue generating capacity.
Additionally, the social network has also seen a slow-down in growth in recent months, and this could be one of the ways they hope to be able to make up for the slow-down.
Facebook claims that this new facility could be beneficial to users when they want to publicise a particular post.
Many argue that small businesses or certain charitable organisations might use the service but they find it difficult to see how it would be helpful to the average user of the social network.
Competing with eBay
What these critics don’t realise is that individual users do sell and buy goods in an open market – after all, that is what built eBay into the e-commerce powerhouse it is today.
Facebook could use the same idea as eBay, except here individual users could buy and sell goods from a trusted network rather than absolute strangers, potentially making it a very strong source of competition for the online auction site in the future.
Only time will tell how popular this new feature will become and whether Facebook has the ability to turn their social network into a trusted commerce network, which will in turn dictate how much money Facebook will actually be able to generate through it.
Facebook’s frantic quest to monetize everything it possibly can before the IPO is leading to some interesting and some downright surprising product announcements. The latest is a ‘Pay To Promote Post’ scheme that they introduced last week.
The new scheme is being tried out currently in New Zealand.
New Zealand-based news magazine, Stuff, first reported this new service when it was discovered by one of the users in Whangarei.
The user first thought that this was just another Facebook-based con doing the rounds. However, a spokesperson of Facebook later confirmed that this was a genuine service that was in the trial stages.
“We’re constantly testing new features across the site. This particular test is simply to gauge people’s interest in this method of sharing with their friends.” the spokesperson for Facebook further said that a number of new ways of highlighting certain posts were being tried out and this was one of them.
The highest charge for highlighting a post has been pegged at £1.25 ($2) while others cost 25p or 50p. Payments can be made through credit card or PayPal.
The spokesperson also clarified that ways to highlight certain posts for free were also being tested. He however did not clarify how long the tests would go on, and whether they were likely to be tried out in other regions.
Facebook is due to float an IPO shortly and has been trying various ways to increase their revenue generating capacity.
Additionally, the social network has also seen a slow-down in growth in recent months, and this could be one of the ways they hope to be able to make up for the slow-down.
Facebook claims that this new facility could be beneficial to users when they want to publicise a particular post.
Many argue that small businesses or certain charitable organisations might use the service but they find it difficult to see how it would be helpful to the average user of the social network.
Competing with eBay
What these critics don’t realise is that individual users do sell and buy goods in an open market – after all, that is what built eBay into the e-commerce powerhouse it is today.
Facebook could use the same idea as eBay, except here individual users could buy and sell goods from a trusted network rather than absolute strangers, potentially making it a very strong source of competition for the online auction site in the future.
Only time will tell how popular this new feature will become and whether Facebook has the ability to turn their social network into a trusted commerce network, which will in turn dictate how much money Facebook will actually be able to generate through it.
Learn how to big and profitable relational list of friend that are wanting to buy your products.
