Another day and another step forward in what seems a common trend now-a-days for Microsoft. This time it’s for their very own search engine, Bing, who is getting an update that will put back the local results pages.
The whole epic tale is a bit of a mouthful, but basically originally there were none, then they put it in, they took it away and now it’s going back in. There were lots of commotion about the search providers doing things for their own benefit, which generally all goes back to advertising revenue. It seems no matter what they do, if they create a change there will be a barrage of people waiting to criticize them. This lead to them going back to the normal way of just keeping the search open.
Since then, Microsoft has received a lot of people wishing that it was the other way around and that the local results are displayed in Google because it is better for their business, even if it is to the dismay of many others who once were reaping in those traffic rewards. It’s as much the swaps as it is anything else that seems to jerk website owners the wrong way. At the end of the day, it should all be about quality of content and the Redmond company shouldn’t think any other way.
Because this is now the second time we have seen this happen, it likely will be the last for a while at least. It’s bad enough we have seen this much changing, and it would have been thought about in-depth before they did it to make sure we don’t see any more swaps in the near future. It could well be a long time before it changes, if at all.
This news comes not long after we have seen Bing for Android updated. Following on from that we then saw Bing for Windows Phone 8 updated the very next day to go along with a translator. You can also use this way of browsing the web with Siri for all of your Apple iPhone users.
Bing food and drink has also just started inside of Windows 8.1. This came around the same time that Verizon started using this as its default search provider which was sure to boost numbers across the board.
The Redmond group of developers also started a Scroogle campaign designed to make people dislike Google. It seemed to have worked in their favor too, with 50% of people admitting they have started to think about using the MS search more often than what they would have.Take those numbers with a grain of salt, however, because we believe it was the same firm that did the poles. Not to call anybody a liar though.
Source: WP Central