In a Q&A style interview, Barbara Quint in Information Today (she’s also the editor of Searcher) sits down and talks all things bing with Stefan Weitz.
Here’s just a small portion of what Barbara and Stefan talked about.
Q: What are the differences between Bing and the previous Microsoft Live Search?
A: They’re pretty significant. With Bing, we looked at what customers are actually doing when they search. We’re No. 3 in a three-horse race. People didn’t know our brand, not nearly enough to try and adopt it. So we looked at what searchers were doing and saw the issues people were having. The first is that they were only successful a quarter of the time. That is staggering when you look at the high satisfaction, when you look at the data click algorithmic link, and they don’t come back. They may have gone off to Google. What happened to the query page is that a quarter of the time they were back in 30 seconds. That means they probably did the query, clicked on a result, realized it wasn’t what they wanted, and used the back button. The core issue is relevance. We didn’t have enough information on the results page, so it was easier for them to go after the query again.
The other two things we found out were that people do not necessarily have distinct queries when they navigate to a page or site. The last conclusion is that more people are adding more tasks on search engines to make complex decisions that the current search engines were never designed for. With Bing, we want to first make clear which links for standard core searches are the good ones. We want better relevancy. We use the “hover” preview for results. Where we’re better is in organizing the results and then adapting a user interface that depends on the task the user is performing—different grammars.
Source: Information Today
See Also: Just How Many Terms Are Web Searchers Using These Days? See this Post with Numbers from August Hitwise Experian.
A chart that’s provided shows percentages for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight or more term search queries. A one search term search was number one in August with 24.21% (up 3% month over month) , two words at 23.71%, (up 1%) and three words at 20.74% (down 1%). For four words the percentage drops to 13.78%.
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on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 and is filed under Information Industry, Web Search.
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