Bing To Integrate Facebook Features in Search Engine Soon

You may start seeing some familiar faces in Bing search results soon.

Microsoft deepened its corporate friendship with Facebook Wednesday, announcing tighter integration with the social network into Bing's search results.

Bing will display data from Facebook, such as user profiles and pages your friends have "Liked," to complement Web searches.

For example, if you search Bing for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 26-year-old chief executive, you might find a link to his personal profile, with buttons for sending him a message or adding him as a friend. That's in addition to the standard links to Wikipedia articles and news stories.

A link on that same results page to the website for "The Social Network" could show pictures of your friends who have inidicated on Facebook that they "Like" that movie.

The new Bing features will also show up in searches made from Facebook's website.

Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi was unambiguous about his excitement for the Facebook partnership.
"This is going to profoundly change how we search," Mehdi, the company's senior vice president for its online audience business, said at the news conference.

Last week Yahoo added new features to its search results pages, which are powered by Bing. In addition to slideshow enhancements and a new shortcuts feature, Yahoo began pulling in some photo albums from Facebook.

Despite advancements by rival search engines, market leader Google continues to gain.

Google was used for 66 percent of internet searches in September, according to market research firm comScore. During that period Yahoo had 17 percent and Bing had 11 percent, the report said.

But Google has struggled to form partnerships with Facebook. The search giant says it wants to tap into the social network's 500 million users.

Google Website Blocking Feature for Search Engine

Google has announced a new feature in its Search Engine called Website Blocking. Through which users can easy block any website which they think is not suitable for them in search queries and then website will not appear in search results in future for them. Users who use the search engine will start to see a new option, 'block all results', that means any future searches will not show any items from the desired domain name.

Users will also be able to change manage their settings with more detail using a new option within the Search Settings screen. From here new sites will be able to be blocked and existing preferences managed and updated. The blog continues to say, "We’re adding this feature because we believe giving you control over the results you find will provide an even more personalized and enjoyable experience on Google."

Google also claim they will be using this information to evaluate the blocks and see how relevant the selected domains will be to future rankings. The new feature is available to all English language searches on Google.com but only if you are using Chrome 9/10, Internet Explorer 8+ or Firefox 3.5+. Other languages and domain extensions are presently being rolled out and will be available soon.

Enter Into Microsoft Speller Challenge & Win $10K

Microsoft have started a new competition between users knows as "Speller Challenge". In this competition people have to correct incorrect spelling of Bing Search Engine for better search results and the top five winners can win upto a prize of $10,000.

Bing feels that there is a lot of room for improvement in this area of their search engine as they are teaming up with Microsoft Research to offer a reward to the team that develops the best spelling alteration technique. They are calling it the Speller Challenge and goal is to "develop a spelling alteration system suitable for large-scale statistical data mining-based web search."

A common approach to spelling alteration is the noisy channel model, in which the received query (q) is treated as a noise-corrupted version of the target query (c). In this model, the spelling alteration system alters q into c and returns the latter's results. The techniques to best identify query/target pairs and best estimate these statistics are the active research problem that underlies this challenge. But that's just the foundation. Place the spelling alteration task in the context of web search, and you have another dimension to consider. The effectiveness of using a fixed lexicon is a known problem because it can lead the speller not only to miss "real word" errors but also misrecognize out-of-vocabulary tokens as errors.

If this challenge sounds like something up your alley Microsoft is offering a sample dataset for developers and researchers to use, a similar dataset will be used to test the effectiveness of the spelling alteration engine. There will be five winners with the first prize winner getting $10,000.

Click here to Enter into Challenge!

Google PageRank and Algorithm Update for January,11

Everything you want to know about Google Update for the month of January, 2011. Your every question would be covered in this Matt Cutts official video regarding Google Update Process for January, 2011. Matt Cutts (Google Software Engineer) have shared some useful information of Google Updates covering following topics.

• When Google update Website Backlinks?
• When Google update Website PageRank (PR)?
• Google Fluctuation Update
• Google Algorithm Update

Check out Matt Cutts Official Video of Google Update Process for the month of January, 2011.

Google PageRank, Backlinks & Algorithm Update for Dec,10

Everything you want to know about Google Update for the month of December, 2010. Your all answers should be cover in this Matt Cutts official video regarding Google Update Process for December, 2010. Matt Cutts (Google Software Engineer) have shared some useful information of Google Update covering following topics.

• When Google update Website Backlinks?
• When Google update Website PageRank (PR)?
• Google Fluctuation Update
• Google Algorithm Update

Check out Matt Cutts Official Video of Google Update Process for the month of December, 2010