At the end of May Microsoft announced its new search engine, Bing. As data from Bing’s first full month becomes available, I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at the current market share enjoyed by the major search engines in the US and a “typical” European market, Italy. The real test of Bing’s success will to be to check back in a few months to see if Bing has picked up traction with users or not. As the folks from Cuil can attest, a burst of publicity doesn’t necessary translate into loyal search users.

Search Engine statistics, USA vs. Italy

Most web intelligence services are currently US centric with very little worldwide reach. Unless stated otherwise, the data which follows is for the US market. Where available, I’ve also provided data for the Italian market, which for search engine usage is rather typical of most west European markets.

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It may seem like a cliché but on the web no website is an island. Any site worth its salt will have accumulated inbound links and will most certainly contain outbound links to other resources on the web. Indeed, one can easily say that without links to interconnect websites, there wouldn’t be a worldwide web.

For search engines, such as Google, incoming links provide a strong signal as to the authority of a website. If multiple websites link to a specific website for a given topic, there is a good chance the website cited by others is deemed to be highly relevant for a good reason. Google and other search engines identify the theme of a website page by analyzing a page’s content and the text of the incoming links – the underlined text you click on to arrive at a page. Links, especially inbound links, are thus one of the most significant in the over 200 factors Google considers in its ranking algorithms. Inbound links from related sites in a business’ sector are also an excellent source of highly qualified direct traffic.

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At a recent Legal Marketing Italia seminar, the question arose as to why a company’s web site doesn’t rank well, even for the company’s name. In Italy, the most common problem encountered with websites is the use of Macromedia / Adobe Flash to develop most or all of a company’s website. This case was no exception.

Update: Google has announced improved crawling support for Flash sites. Our related article Why Flash is still bad for SEO and the Web explains that nothing has changed – the best websites should still avoid Flash. (2 July 2008)

Italy has a strong history of excellence in visual communication, including graphic design. Indeed, the very successful New York City subway signage was designed by an Italian. Many Italian graphic designers have worked on web sites, adopting Flash as their preferred technology when moving from the printed media to the web. Flash allows “pixel perfect” control over web design, including font specification.

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Each of the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Live Search) have announced joint support of Google’s sitemaps protocol.

2007-04-11: Ask announces support of the sitemap standard. It is not yet clear if they actually use sitemaps. While Google and Yahoo do process sitemaps, Microsoft does not yet use them.

A new site, www.sitemaps.org, has been created to support the sitemaps protocol. While the Yahoo blog indicates Yahoo is apparently already accepting submissions, there is not mention of this on their Site Explorer submission form. Microsoft is committed to supporting sitemaps after finishing internal testing which is currently underway.

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In part one of this article, we set out to document the little known Ask web search API by providing background information. In this continuation, we’ll look at the actual API details.

Update: Ask disabled access to their API on 6 March 2007. We are working on obtaining additional information. Write us if you would like to be notified of further developments.

The following information was determined by observation and conjecture. Write us if you want to be notified when we update this page with more complete information. We are assuming the reader has already worked with REST queries and is familiar with parsing XML data.

Request URL

The request URL is formed by adding query parameter and their values to a base URL using the format query parameter=values. Successive parameters are added using a & before each parameter.

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In this article, we set out to document the little known Ask web search API available at xml.teoma.com.

One of the many aspects of successful search engine optimization (SEO) is the periodic measurement of how well a site is performing in a particular search engine. Dimensions to measure include the number of pages in the engine’s index, the number of other web properties citing the site and the site’s performance for the strategic keywords linked to business objectives. Once raw data is collected, each of these data points is compared with other data to evaluate aspects such as page freshness.

Update: Ask disabled access to their API on 6 March 2007. We are working on obtaining additional information. Write us if you would like to be notified of further developments.

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