A few days aho I wrote a post about the rising importance of real-time search and Google and Bing crawling content from Twitter.
Now Microsoft has just released an interesting search tool called BingTweets: it’s a real time Twitter search engine with a pretty crowded front panel showing all cross references between standard and dynamic real-time search.
It’s definetely something Google should think about. It’s also interesting how the mixed the standard search results with the Twitter search results, giving a complete feedback over search on different sources.
What people has predicted since Twitter start hitting the news has become true: Twitter is not turning into a search engine but its content is considered valuable by search engines.
Despite all the Twitter-mania-hype (absolutely unnecessary but media needs something to blabber about right?) I guess Twitter is slowly finding out its real nature: a real-time updated source of “what’s going on” in the world, reflecting the current vibe of the net, an extremely dynamic and constantly updated source of useless content. That’s it. There’s nothing really valuable in most twitts: the thing is the reflect what’s going on in the world.
That’s why a real-time search is growing day by day. It’s the vibrating pulse of the net, and being able to rummage through all this garbage gives the advantage to know the present and the very next future of the net.
It seems that search engine are digging through Twitter more and more
. In the past few days a came across a few episodes which made me think about how much search engine are considering Twitter content as valuable enough to be included into their own search results.
Let’s take a look at Bing first. Try looking for Al Gore this query on Bing: the very first result will be it’s Twitter page with is real time twits. This entry comes also before his personal website. This has been also confirmed by a public statement from Bing published on its community page.
Something interesting happens with Google as well. A few days ago I posted a link to one of my websites I found and I wanted to share with my Twitter followers. Analytics record show the following as the very first visit on the website right after the link was published on twitter:
216.200.55.83 invx.com [01/Jul/2009:02:49:01 +0200] “GET /a HTTP/1.1″ 404 136 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)” “-”
Clearly the page was just being crawled by Google. The link has not apperead anywhere else and it is not a fronpage or entry page for search engines on the website.
This it’s just another proof on how important Twitter is becoming in terms on search value. It’s not going to take long before Google itself will either buy or create its own real time search tool.
It’s basically the Bing version of Google Webmaster tools. According to Microsoft, Bing Webmaster Toolbox development will aim toboost user engagement and traffic to websites and web-based application. The Toolbox is an organized set of tools for the entire Bing community, plus links to Webmaster and Developer community blogs and forums.
Compared to competitors like Google and Yahoo, I guess the community its the real bonus of the toolbox. The collaborative and collective help of users is way more valuable than any webmaster toolbox, especially when it comes to SEO and content optimizacion, considering how recently Bing has been released.
A new search engine has just been launched and it’s time to update our analytics software.
Google hasn’t released any major update to automatically recognize traffic coming from Bing into Google Analytics but I guess it is not gonna take too long.
In the meantime we can easily tweak Google Analytics just playing around with our tracking code.
In order to add Bing as a search engine we need to use the addOrganic function: _addOrganic[domain, search query]
AddOrganic Function: how it works
The addOrganic function has two parameters: domain and search query. It basically tells the Analytic engine to consider some referrals as proper search engines, hence appearing on keyword statistics.
This two parameters are embedded in every search query we forward to a search engine:
Google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=[searchquery]
Yahoo:
http://us.search.yahoo.com/search?p=[search query]
So let’s take a look to a standard Bing query:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=[search query]
As you can see, the right AddOrganic sintaxy would be the following:
pageTracker._addOrganic("bing.com", "q");
We just need to add this line right before the trackpageview() call into our Analytics code.
I think there’s an obvious update on the way but if you are already getting some decent organic traffic from Bing just add this line and see what happens.