SEM Wired

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.

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.

Google Official Blog

However, after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn’t have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement.

So Google basically was afraid to be catched by the US Antitrust and bang! they broke the deal. Nice strategy indeed. Now Yahoo is looking to get and agreement with Microsoft, nice move but isn’t it a bit too late?