ptg16476052How Search Engines Work 69125
Microsoft Bing
Bing is Microsoft’s web search offering. Like Google, Microsoft maintains its own index
of the Web. Bing was launched in May 2009, and as of February 2015, it is the second
largest search engine in the United States.
Like Google, Bing has begun adding “instant answers” into its search results to make
things easier for its customers. If you look up things like sports scores or definitions,
those results will show up right at the top of the search, not forcing readers to go to
another site.
Bing Webmaster Guidelines recommend that your URLs be clean and keyword-rich. You
should not bury your content inside rich media like Flash or JavaScript. Your content
should be fresh and updated regularly. Bing also suggests that you should not put text
you want indexed into images. For example, your company name should appear in text
on your page, not just in a logo.
Yahoo!
Yahoo! has been around since 1994. In fact, it was the first search engine I ever used,
only I accessed it at akebono.stanford.edu. Yahoo! provides both a human-edited direc-
tory of the Web, which I discussed earlier, and web search. Yahoo!’s search engine cur-
rently uses the Bing index for its search results. It is the third most popular search engine
in the United States.
Don’t Forget International Searches
If you are in the United States it’s easy to forget that there are other search engines out
there, but the fact is that the Web is international, and search engines are, too. While the
three most popular search engines in the United States are currently Google, Bing, and
Yahoo!, there is another search engine—Baidu (http://www.baidu.com)—that is second
only to Google worldwide. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s probably because you don’t
read Chinese.
Although Google still continues to dominate search worldwide, it doesn’t reign every-
where. In Russia, Yandex (http://www.yandex.ru) is more popular, Baidu is most popular
in China, South Koreans use Naver (http://www.naver.com), and Japan and Taiwan pre-
fer Yahoo! Japan (http://www.yahoo.co.jp) and Yahoo! Taiwan (https://tw.yahoo.com/),
respectively.
If your site has any aspirations to serving a worldwide audience, be aware of the search
engines in other countries. There are many more than listed here, especially region-
specific sites. Use your favorite search engine to find out more about the country or
region you want to target.