The partnership between Bing and Yahoo has been much talked about in the industry over the past couple of years with the companies working together to chip at Google’s massive market share of Search. Which is why it comes as no surprise that Bing are now integrating search data from Yahoo into its webmaster tools. (more...)
Last week the big three search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing, announced a collaboration project called Schema.org. The project is a collection of schemas of html tags that webmasters can use to mark-up web content in such a way that it will be understandable to search engine spiders. Search engines might be able to read text, but they cannot understand it. By marking your text with html tags, you provide categories and tags that they can associate with your text in order to give better search results. For example, if you write a web page about the movie Casablanca, by marking up the page with a schema you can tell search engines which bits are about the movie, what the director’s name is, the names of the actors and actresses and so on.
The point of this? It allows search engines to then provide more accurate search results for users looking for movie reviews, or films by that director etc. Additionally, it means search engines will be able to create vertical search functions based on the mark-ups. So, for example, in a similar fashion to Google's recipe search, they could allow users to search specifically through movie reviews. Users get more relevant search results for their searches, and webmasters potentially get more prominence in results and traffic of a higher quality. (more...)
