Bing Gets Smarter While Jellyfish Begin Their Takeover

The last month hasn’t been too incredibly crazy.  There have been a few notable updates and some new features that are interesting.  There is also a new player in the search arena, Jelly.  Unlike other search start-ups that are like ants going up against the tanks of Google and Bing, Jelly has the backing of none other than Twitter…you know, the 3rd largest social media network in the world.  So, there may be something there.

I’ll tell you all about it in this month’s SEO update video:

Video Transcript:

Happy New Year!

I’m Kurt Steinbrueck with OurChurch.com with this month’s SEO update. We’re going to jump right in, and we’ll start with Bing this month.

Bing
Bing really has two things that they updated that are worth talking about.

Bing Get’s Smarter:
First thing is Bing updated Satori. Satori is kind of a collection of information, kind of like Google’s Knowledge Graph, where the search engines are trying to gather together all this information so they can provide direct answers to questions, additional information related to searches, and really so they can start to understand how things really work together. They want to understand entities, they want to understand people, and they want to understand how they’re associated, so that when you ask a question, they can better understand what that question is.

So, Knowledge Graph and Satori, these are both ways that they’re teaching their computers how to be able to understand things. Then they’re also providing additional information, so when you do a search about a person, you don’t just get a list of websites maybe about the person, but you’ll actually see information on the side that have maybe their bio and their birthdates and things that they’re known for, all that kind of stuff.

Some of the things that Bing did to update Satori…

• One of them was to add TED Talks. I thought that was pretty cool. If you search about a topic and someone has done a talk on that on TED Talks, then you might see that TED Talk right there in the Satori information.
• Another thing they did was they collected audio of famous speeches, so if you’re looking up a famous person and they’ve done some famous speeches, you’ll see the speeches in the Satori information there as well.

There were a lot of other updates that they added to a lot of other information, but those were two of the things that I thought were most interesting, at least.

Bing Speech Translator App:
Another thing that Bing did, which isn’t really a search thing, but I just thought it’s pretty cool, is they released a new speech translator app, and it’s kind of based on the same thing that they’ve had available on their Windows 8 phone, but now it’s available on any Windows device. The way it works is basically you speak into the app, and it will play back to you what you said, but in whatever language you want it to translate in. Supposedly, it even does it pretty well in the right accent and all that kind of stuff.

So if you wanted to be able to communicate with someone who doesn’t speak your language, you would be able to speak it in, and the computer would then speak it out in the language that that person would understand. Especially helpful if you’re traveling around to places where other languages are spoken, but also if you just want to hear something. Maybe you’re trying to learn a language, so it would help you to be able to hear it back in the language you’re trying to learn. But just a neat little thing you might want to check out.

That’s about it for Bing.

Google
Google usually takes a break, if you will, at least about their algorithms, during the holidays. They don’t want to slam people with this big change right before Christmas and New Year’s and all that. And they did so this year; they didn’t really do any major updates. But they didn’t take the whole time off.

Slashing Blog Networks:
Instead, what they did was they found a couple of blog networks and wiped them out.  If you’re not familiar with blog networks, or private blog networks, link networks, basically what they are is usually a network of thousands of blogs that you can pay to have access to, and what people do is they’ll post these blog posts. Usually they’re pretty low quality content, but they’ll have a link going back to the person’s site.

So, basically it’s a way to have all of a sudden all these links, that are on all these different websites, different blogs, with relevant content, linking back to your site. It’s supposed to look natural, but it’s not natural. You’re paying to do it; you’re putting the posts out there. There’s nothing natural about what’s going on. Google really doesn’t like that.

Every now and then, Google will go along, they’ll find one – which is really not hard for them to figure these things out – but they’ll find one and they’ll just rampage, and they’ll wipe out all the people that are involved with it. Some of the people were penalized; some of them were kicked out of the search engines. Maybe if you didn’t have too much going on with it, you just lost those links. But they’re going to do something about it.

So, if you’ve even thought about doing a virtual blog network like that – don’t. It’s not worth it. It’s going to bite you in the end, and it’s going to be really painful when it does. So stay away from those and you’ll see from time to time, Google’s going to be wiping those out.

Google Hotel View:
Another thing that Google did related to their local search is, if you remember several months ago, they released the Carousel on their local, and actually on some of their general search results, which is basically this banner that’s up at the top that has pictures of the locations, things that are being displayed. It was only for a couple of categories, like hotels and restaurants and a few others, but they had this Carousel that was up there.

Now they’re trying to take this a step further with something they’re calling Hotel View. Obviously, this is just for hotels right now, but they want to be able to have pictures of the insides of the hotels, their lobbies, whatever features they offer, the rooms, all these types of things, so that when you’re trying to decide where you want to stay, you can actually see what the hotel looks like and what the rooms look like and have a really good idea of the experience that you’re going to have. So that’s kind of a neat thing, and if you’re in the hotel area or you work in hotels, it’s something you might want to look into, because it could be very helpful for people.

Jelly

Lastly, moving away from Google, Twitter has gotten into the game a little bit more, into the search game, with something they’re calling Jelly*. Jelly is not a traditional search engine; it’s not like a Bing or a Google, but rather, it’s really like a social question and answer type of thing, where you’re supposed to be able to put your questions in, and then it sends it out to your friends that you’re connected to through Jelly, and then they can pass it on to friends that they know.

The whole idea is that if you have a question, you probably know someone, or know someone who knows someone, that would know the answer to that. So you’d be able to get that information back quickly, as it just kind of moves on to the person who would already know the answer to it, instead of you sitting there trying to hunt down the answer.

Now, the only problem with this is it sounds a whole lot like a lot of other things that have been tried – Quora and Yahoo! Answers and Facebook Questions, and probably a dozen other social question type of sites, and none of them have really succeeded. They’ve kind of come up for a little while, and then they fade away. So I don’t know what Jelly is going to be that’s so different that’s going to cause it to succeed, if it does, but we’ll keep an eye on it and see how it goes.

But that’s about it for the month. Remember…

We live in this internet age, and so it’s important for you to stay strong in the search engines so that you can achieve your mission and goals online.

God bless.

* Correction: Jelly was created by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and is backed by Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams, venture capital investor Reid Hoffman, as well as U2 frontman Bono and former Vice President of the United States Al Gore.  Jelly isn’t a release of Twitter.

Tell Us What You Think:

• Do you think you’ll try Jelly?
• Would you find Bing’s Translation app helpful?