Tag: bing

Microsoft Tests Chatbot Integration In Bing Search Results

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Microsoft is planning to add chatbots to the search results on Bing.com to drive conversations. The company has been testing this integration in Seattle. Local users near the Redmond, Washington Microsoft headquarters began to see a bot button in search results for local restaurants, prompting them to learn more about the restaurants via a chatbot.

What Brands Need To Do
Putting chatbots into local search results is a great way to allow customers to quickly connect with businesses for additional information or making reservations. This replaces the need to call the restaurants, thus relieving the workload in customer service for the local businesses. A recent study found that most consumers now prefer to use messaging to interact with businesses rather than calling. As Twitter continues to make its platform more brand-friendly with new messaging features, we expect to see more brands utilize the tools to provide better customer service.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive knowledge about reaching consumers on mobile messaging apps and building branded chatbots. The NiroBot we build in collaboration with Ansible for Kia delivers comprehensive product information about the all-new Niro model via friendly chats. If you’re interested in reaching your audience on messaging apps and better serving them with a chatbot, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Barrett ([email protected]) for more information or to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: VentureBeat

Yahoo Enlists Google To Help With Its Search Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier today, Yahoo announced it has reached a non-exclusive deal with Google to display the latter’s search results and ads in its own services, both on mobile and desktop devices. Yahoo has a similar arrangement with Microsoft’s Bing in place, but it states that the new Google partnership will only be supplementary to its existing deal with Bing. Yahoo will have near total control over when or where to pull in Google’s search results or ads, but it remains unclear whether advertisers would have the option to opt out of having their Google search ads shown on Yahoo sites.

Market Impact
According to a comScore report released in August, Google dominated the U.S. desktop search market with nearly 64% market share, whereas Yahoo’s search network trailed far behind with only 12.7% market share. Therefore, it makes sense for Yahoo to team up with the biggest search engine on the planet in order to leverage some of Google’s search technologies and ad products to better manage search queries and serve ads. For Google, this deal helps to further expand the reach of its search ads, which in turn increases its revenue. Overall, the search market now faces the challenge of losing search to apps on mobile devices, and we expect to see more consolidating partnerships like this as search giants continue to battle with this issue.

 

Source: Business Insider

 

Report: Search Driving Smaller Proportion Of Site Traffic

Posted on by Lab Team

According to new research by sharing platform Shareaholic, search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are driving a dwindling share of total site traffic across the Internet. Over the last six months, all top five search engines in the US drove a smaller share of overall traffic to sites that Shareaholic tracks. Conversely, there has been a spike in social referrals, suggesting that social traffic is far more valuable to websites looking to generate traffic than search engines, at the current juncture. 

Social searching is trusted searching

Posted on by Lab Team

Bing and Google integrate Twitter into Search Social search, that is, search aided by our friends or online connections, suggests that being able to search your friends’ opinions, interests, and actions would create a better search experience. We already look to our friends for recommendations on movies, restaurants, and vacation spots, so doesn’t it make sense that our favorite search engines would be aided by content from our social connections?

Although companies have recognized the significance of using trusted contacts as filters and have approached this in various ways, so far, we haven’t realized the promise of social search. But recent announcements have made it clear that social media’s influence has made its mark with the big search players. In the past few weeks, both Bing and Google announced programs which will bring real-time updates from our social circle to search results, perhaps transforming search as we know it. Enter Bing Twitter Search and Google Social Search. Continue reading “Social searching is trusted searching”