Bing, Bong, Boom…
First, I apologize for not posting in a while. I have been busy doing some research about RDF/XML, RDFa, and Microformats. More about those topics will come later.
During the course of the research I have been doing, one item keeps poking into the frey. Bing.
Microsoft’s new and improved “decision engine” has been getting alot of hype lately. The question I keep repeating to myself is “Why should I use Bing?”. I have been perfectly happy with Google for years. Sure, Bing is a bit more pretty. It has nice pleasing pictures for you to look at while you try to find information about what you’re looking for. It also has some other nice things like “sponsored links”, “related searches”, and, of course, search results. But, what exactly makes Bing so special that I should stop using “The Google”?
Nothing, not really. After comparing identical searches the results are, more or less, the same. Lets examine:
- Bing search for Paris France
So, the results of my search for Paris France are as expected. The top results are listed along with more targeted suggestions along the left hand side. Of course, the sponsored links are along the right hand side. Nothing really fancy so far other than the nice aesthetically pleasing look to the page.
- Bing search for Paris France
And along the bottom of the page the expected links to more results and some image and video results for the search. Impressive, huh?
OK. Now for Google…
- Google search for Paris France
Hrm…just as expected. The top results are listed, sponsored links along the right hand side. Nothing fancy, just what you asked for.
- Google search for Paris France
And along the bottom the expected links to more results, images, and video. Wait a tick…targeted suggestions along the bottom! Just like Bing? No, these are located on the bottom.
I didn’t point everything out, just what seems to be important. The search results. So the question still remains. Why use Bing?
There really is no reason to use Bing other than “I like it” or “I don’t like Google”.
Me? I’m sticking with ol’ trusty Google. It’s not exactly pretty but it gets the job done, and done well. No time wasted with pretty images to try and make me feel good about using it. I feel fine using it. So what happens when the tech-news is finished with Bing?
Everything will go back to normal. Was Microsoft’s investment into Bing worth it? We’ll see….
Where The Eye Goes
Have you ever wondered exactly what people look at on your website? When you have a human model on the front page does it help your usability? Is a persuasive? There was some recent research performed by BunnyFoot that suggests that a human models eyes will influence your eye movement. This is not a new concept. This sort of research has been well known for many years but what about e-commerce?
In e-commerce, a human model usually appears to be looking at the user. Sometimes the model is looking in the complete opposite direction, or on rare occasions looking at something in particular. If you have a website that uses the human model on the front page I would suggest cycling the main image and then checking which image is displayed when the page view becomes a conversion to a sale. But how would you do this?
I suppose the easiest way would be to track a user’s IP address and record the address along with the image name in a database. Also, you’ll want to track the entire session and keep a record of what pages the user went to. From that point, you could get your hands dirty and do some old-fashioned data mining and analyze which user is purchasing and which image was the last one to be viewed.
Have a look at BunnyFoot and have a glance at their research. While the concept of this type of eye tracking research is not new it is still very interesting.
Comparison Shopping 101
It is a known fact that shoppers that comparison shop are twice as likely to purchase. Why? They have more invested into the purchase than someone who is just browsing and may buy on impulse. This is, sort of, a given. How can you take advantage of this? Easy! Site submission to shopping comparison sites.
Comparison shopping sites, or we should say, comparison shopping engines because, after all, they are indeed search engines, connect surfers to wide arrays of products and services. Surfers will search according to product or service category, price, location, or brand. The big search engines love these sites because they are chock full of frequently updated product and service listings and keywords and they are valuable to surfers because of their features of product comparison and review.
Each comparison shopping engine has its own structure and methodology. That is, each will work differently. Essentially there are four ways to attack…
E-Business Website Success (A Suggestive How-To)
To provide a basis for success in e-business, in particular B2C but this overlaps into B2B as well, the approach taken has to be carefully calculated. In order to achieve success a few goals must be set in how your products or services are presented and later improved upon by some simple analytical review. The first is to provide a design that is easy to use. It is said that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The challenge here is to identify the two points of interest and then remove the obstacles in between. Next, be sure to provide detailed information about your products and/or services. The more information a customer has about what you have to offer the more comfortable they will feel in their purchases. Anytime fear, doubt, or uncertainty can be avoided the decision making process of your visitors will be easier to deal with and the visitor is more likely to purchase. Don’t forget, more information makes your website more relevant in the search engine rankings. Furthermore, pay attention to logistics. I would go as far as to say that additional costs for products or services, such as shipping and handling, should be included within the base price of the product and not shown as an additional fee. The power behind the Internet to level the playing field gives shoppers an easy way to comparison shop. Striving to become a low cost leader is one thing, however, low cost leadership is something that will dissolve as you provide a unique product or service and pricing should reflect that situation. Shoppers will typically feel they have found a great deal when they see the words “free shipping”, even if those costs are really included in the base price. Finally, be sure to analyze Web traffic. Either hire an analyst (here, my bias becomes apparent) or get down in the trenches and find where your Website fails or succeeds. By paying attention to your visitors and making their experiences informative and friendly success should follow.
Spam Trends
From an article posted at Taming the Beast:
MessageLabs recently released their monthly Intelligence report outlining some of the latest email threat trends for February 2009. It certainly seems the spammers aren’t giving up and still have a few tricks up their sleeve.
According to the report, spam made up over 73% of all email during February. That sounds shocking, but it’s actually an improvement over January. It really makes you wonder how much bandwidth spam is taking up at any given time.
One in 304.9 emails in February contained malware (a decrease of 0.06% since January) and one in 190.4 emails comprised a phishing attack (an increase of 0.27% since January).
Of particular interest was a trick that spammers latched onto during February. Instead of trying to add a spam domain URL or redirect link into their blurbs that would likely be filtered faster than you can say “cheap watches”, they used search engine query strings like so:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=kfdljdlkfdl.com&fr=sfp&fr2=&iscqry=
When you run the query, nothing appears except for a link to the site as the domain would be one not yet indexed by Yahoo. The note also contained an instruction to “Click on link after ‘Go Directly To’” once on the search results page.
This sort of query URL *was* getting through spam filters as I guess it would appear to the filter algorithm to be a non-spam site (being Yahoo), but I believe that many anti-spam vendors have now updated their software to weed it out.
Spammers are pretty clever at times.. if only they’d use their power for good. They’ve sure made the job of legitimate email marketing so much tougher and long gone are the days of being totally outraged when one piece of spam hit our inboxes a day.
Spammers more or less ruin email marketing for honest people. To me it seems as though email marketing will not be effective in the future simply because those who spam make it so honest email marketers are now “crying wolf”. That is, it has and will continue to be a habit to delete marketing emails as spam because of high volumes of spam. Good article by Taming the Beast, but I would go further to say that the time of email marketing is over.
