On Google.be “Bing” was not even showing up: Why ?
If anyone knows the answer, please drop me an email

In the first full month since Microsoft launched its new search engine, Bing, the number of Web searches people did there increased an average of 25 percent each week. But Bing’s market share dropped 7 percent from May to June.

Wait. What?

Bing

It’s true. According to numbers Hitwise released Thursday, Microsoft’s search engine – first Live Search and then Bing after the June 3 launch – fielded 5.64 percent of Web searches in May and 5.25 percent of them in June.

But within June, Bing’s market share jumped up an average of 25 percent per week. Here’s a nice chart:

Hitwise

You’ll notice Bing’s share steadily increased. But Danny Sullivan, search-engine guru and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, wonders whether that is sustainable.

The question is, will Bing maintain that type of share through an entire month? We’ll know when July figures come out. The bigger question is whether Bing will maintain that type of share when Microsoft’s ad spending ramps down.

Hitwise also put out the May-to-June and year-over-year numbers for the four top search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.

Hitwise

From May 2009 to June 2009, Google’s market share increased by about 0.5 percent up to 74.04 percent. But from June 2008 to June 2009, it was the only search engine whose market share increased, jumping 4 percent.

Yahoo’s and Ask’s numbers took a nosedive, dropping 17 percent and 22 percent respectively. Microsoft’s search engine – again, Live Search then Bing – saw its share decrease 4 percent year over year.

So, yes. In the short term, Bing grew at a rate of 25 percent in June. But looking at the month-to-month and year-over-year numbers, it seems Microsoft and the Bing marketing team still have a lot of work to do.

Source: Hitwise

I have tested Wolfram|Alpham and want to share the results here. Test it and let us know.
I think that Google can not be compaired with Wolfram Alpha because WA makes “systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone.”.

Search: distance brussels to istanbul (Wolfram|Alpha)

Search result Wolfram Alpha

Search result Wolfram Alpha

Search: distance brussels to istanbul (Google.com)

* Each country awards the finalists 1 to 12 points.
* Search query data is updated every day for all countries participating in the contest.
* Countries can’t vote for themselves – so search data from the participant’s own country is excluded.

Source: Google

How does it work?

Each business listing in Google Maps is in fact a giant ‘cluster’ of information that we get from a few different places: Yellow Pages, for example, as well as other third-party providers. However, the basic information that you submit through the Local Business Center is the information that we trust the most. This means that it will appear instead of any basic information that we get from anywhere else. To make sure the basic information you submit is accurate, we’ll ask you to verify it first by contacting you at your business address or phone number.

You can add other information to your listing too — such as a description of your business, for example, as well as photos, reviews, or information about hours and parking costs — that will also appear above similar information from other providers.

Before you get started, there are a few things to keep in mind:

* Right now, the Google Local Business Center is available only for businesses in certain countries.
To find out if your country is one of them, check the drop-down menu in the top right-hand corner of the Local Business Center sign-up page.
* It’s free.
Adding your listing to the Local Business Center is free, and Google doesn’t accept payment to include particular listings or sites in our search results. However, we do offer locally-targeted advertising through our AdWords program.
* Every business listing must have a mailing address.
Usually this is the physical address of your business, but certain businesses may wish to use a PO Box. For example, if you wish to keep the physical location of your business private, or if your business provides a service at various locations (like a cleaning service).
* There shouldn’t be more than one listing per physical location.
Even if you’re a doctor who is a cardiologist and a chiropractor or a service that covers multiple towns, you shouldn’t have two listings. Instead, use the description of your business or categories to explain the different services your business offers.

Its a good idea to read the Local Business Center quality guidelines to make sure that your listing will be approved to appear in Google Maps.

To start creating your free listing, go to the Local Business Center and sign in with your Google account. If you don’t already have a Google account, click Create a new Google account to get one. You can also use an AdWords login and password, if you have one.

What if I already see my listing in Google Maps?

If your listing is already in Google Maps, claiming it through the Local Business Center will give you full control over how your listing appears. In other words, once you verify that you are the business owner, the information that you submit will replace the information from third parties that already appears in Google Maps. You’ll be able to make your listing better with more useful information, as well as photos and video. Other users will no longer be able to edit your listing.

To claim your listing, search for it in Google Maps. When you’ve found it:

1. Click on the name of your business in the search results in the left-hand panel of Google Maps.
2. Click Edit in the white info bubble that appears on the map, and then click Claim your business as pictured below.

3. Three options appear. You can:

* Edit the information in the listing.
* Suspend it to stop it from appearing on Google Maps.
* Add your business as a new listing, if you realize that the business you’re trying to claim isn’t yours.

4. For each of these options, we’ll ask you to verify that you are the business owner.

Even if you don’t search for your business first, when you submit basic information about your listing to the Local Business Center, we’ll let you know if there’s already a listing with the information you submitted. You’ll then have two options, as shown below:

* You can claim that listing, and take control of the information about your business that appears in Google Maps. It prevents you from creating a duplicate listing, which might confuse others trying to find information about your business.
* Add your business as a new listing if the other listing we show isn’t the one you were trying to add.

In both cases, you’ll need to verify your listing before it will appear in Google Maps.

source: Google Maps

Until now, sitelinks have only ever appeared on the first search result, and so at most one site could have sitelinks per query. We’re now launching an expansion of sitelinks: a single row of links can now appear for results that didn’t show sitelinks before, even for results that aren’t in the first position. This means multiple results on one query can now have sitelinks. Up to four sitelinks can show up right above the page URL, instead of the usual two columns below the URL of the first result. Here’s an example where the first three results each have one-line sitelinks:

Sitelinks

These one-line sitelinks have many of the same benefits as the full two-column sitelinks, but on a smaller scale: they show users some relevant sub-pages in the site and give an idea of what the site is about. Comparing the sitelinks that appear for each result can even illustrate the difference between the sites. Just like regular sitelinks, one-line sitelinks are generated algorithmically and the decisions on when to show them and which links to display are entirely based on the expected benefit to users.

For webmasters, this new feature means it’s possible that your site will start showing sitelinks for a number of queries where it previously didn’t. We expect this will increase the visibility of and traffic to your site, while also improving the experience of users. If, however, you absolutely would prefer not to have a particular sitelink show up, remember that you can always block a page from appearing as a sitelink for 90 days through Webmaster Tools. In fact, as part of our ongoing efforts at improving the Webmaster Tools experience, we’re speeding up our response time to blocked pages, so you should see a blocked page get dropped as a sitelink even faster than before. If you need a quick refresher on how to use the sitelink blocking tool, take a look at this previous blog post. Currently you can only block sitelinks on your site’s home page, but we’re working on expanding this capability so you’ll soon be able to remove them from any other page as well.

I just installed a “hello world” Chrome extension from this Chrome Extension HOWTO page. When you surf to www.google.com, the Google logo is replaced with a Lolcat:

1. Install the developer-channel version of Google Chrome.
I don’t know if this is 100% necessary, but new support for plugins will probably show up in the developer version first. You can read instructions on how to switch to the developer version. It takes maybe 3-4 minutes — you basically run a small program to indicate your preference. In case you’re worried that the developer version will crash a lot: I’ve been running the developer version for months and haven’t seen any major issues. The developer version also gets new features (such as pressing “F11″ to get full-screen mode) way before the beta/stable releases of Chrome. I’m using version 2.0.170.0 of Chrome and the “hello world” extension worked fine for me.

2. Read the initial documentation.
This is a brand-new feature, but you can already start hacking. Extensions currently have very Greasemonkey-like functionality: you identify which web pages should be modified, plus JavaScript to be added to those pages. By default, the extension’s JavaScript runs after the page loads, but you can specify that the extension’s JavaScript should run before the page loads. Right now, you can only load one JS file, but that could change in the future. You also can’t currently load Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), but that might also change.

I like several things about the extension framework:
- Your plugin has to have a unique identifier (40 digit hexadecimal number). Given an identifier such as “00123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF0123456″, an extension can include an image such as foo.gif and then easily access that image by using a full path such as “chrome-extension://00123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF0123456/foo.gif”
- The “content script” (the JavaScript of an extension) gets its own global scope separate from the web page, so you don’t need to worry about global variables conflicting. But you can still get access to the web page’s global variables using the “contentWindow” variable.
- Bundling your extension directory into a “.crx” Chrome Extension file is as simple as running a short Python script.
- Chrome also supports binary NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface) plugins.

The Chrome extension manifest, which has metadata about your extension such as name, version, etc., looks much simpler to me than how Firefox wants extensions to be packaged. That’s a big plus in my book, because you spend most of your time writing code and not worrying about packaging up your plug-in. On the down side, I didn’t see any support for internationalization, which is one of the benefits of Firefox’s more comprehensive way of packaging up plugins. Another limitation of the current Chrome extension spec is that you can’t do much other than modify pages via JavaScript. And I didn’t see a way to introduce new widgets into the actual “chrome” of the Chrome browser.

3. Try it out!
If you’re running the developer version of Chrome, you can install the “hello world” plugin from the extension howto page just by clicking to download the .crx file. Then type “chrome-ui://extensions/” and you’ll see something like this:

Once you see how it works, just start hacking around and see what happens. Remember, this howto document is only a few days old. I’m sure the Chrome team is thinking about ways to add more functionality to extensions, but the current developer version of Chrome already lets you do a lot of neat things.

One more nice thing: it looks like installing extensions doesn’t require you to restart the browser. And a hat-tip to Google OS for pointing out this document.

Think of the site operator as a quick diagnosis of the general health of your site in Google’s index. Site operator results can show you:

a rough estimate of how many pages have been indexed
one indication of if your site has been hacked
if you have duplicate titles or snippets

Here is an example query using the site operator:

Your Sitemap report provides more granular statistics about the URLs you submitted, such as the number of indexed URLs vs. the number submitted for crawling, and Sitemap-specific warnings or errors that may have occurred when Google tried to access your URLs.

Feel free to check out our Help Center for more on the site: operator and Sitemaps. If you have further questions or issues, please post to our Webmaster Help Forum, where experienced webmasters and Googlers are happy to help.

read: Google Webmaster Blog

Clear disclosure of sponsorship is critical, and that includes disclosure for search engines. If link in a paid post would affect search engines, that link should not pass PageRank (e.g. by using the nofollow attribute). Google — and other search engines — do take action which can include demoting sites that sell links that pass PageRank, for example.”

We do take the subject of paid posts seriously and take action on them. In fact, we recently finished going through hundreds of “empty review” reports — thank you for that feedback! That means that now is a great time to send us reports of link buyers or sellers that violate our guidelines. We use that information to improve our algorithms, but we also look through that feedback manually to find and follow leads.

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