Bing provides a new search experience by providing a decision engine.  It provides direct access to the information being searched.  Moreover, it organizes search results in a way that relevant contents can be more quickly and easily located.

To lead to more informed decisions, Bing harness that information through exclusive tools specific to the task.

When you visit Bing’s website, you would be presented with a nice scenery photo – wait – the search box is at the top.  Although Bing is currently in Beta mode, it does its job – provides search results relevant to your search.

Let’s switch to image search – here are some differences.  Inside image search you can choose what kind of images you are looking for – small, medium, large or wallpapers, different layouts and colors, different styles, and photos that only shows the face of human or head & shoulders.

Here is another new toy: the xRank. xRank keeps track of notable people and puts them in order.  Web searches in Bing for movie stars, musicians, famous people etc were counted and compiled with Bing’s ranking formula.  The result is a cultural popularity of different people.

Bing do not have any advertising spots yet, at the time of writing.  It would be interesting to see the benefit of advertising on this new search engine.

Try Bing today.

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To be honest, I don’t quite like it.  I think it is kind of ugly.  I prefer the previous one, with a clean and simple character ‘g’.

I wonder why Google would have manpower to change these tiny things?  After all, Google has been known for serious search engine business.  All the tech people envy working in Google, though.  Not just because it is well known.  It is in face the best place to work in.  Think about amusement.  Think about work environment.  Think about meals.

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“We wanted to offer users a chance to search an older index as a way of looking back at web history, and the January 2001 Google index is the earliest we could generate,” said a spokesman from Google.

The Google logo back then was like a toy shop. Anyway, it is quite fun to play around with it.

At that time, Best Web Ezy was not online. And of course, a lot of significant brands as well.

And there is no Adwords ads on the search result pages!

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“With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames.”

In key phrase research, you are concerning quite a number of factors.  These 3 things – category you are in, seasonal trend, and target audience, would be presented to you in Google Insights and it has certainly made SEO a lot easier.

If you have a new product and are looking at entering the market, you should surely start your research through Google Insights.

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The traditional way (for me) is to Google for something I want. And it is very likely that a Wiki entry is listed within the top 5 results.

Apparently the new Cuil search engine displays a lot of Wiki results as well.

However, do you know that there is a search engine dedicated to search only the Wikipedia?

Powerset is designed just for this purpose.

Powerset enables you to:
1. Discover Factz
For most people, places and things, Powerset shows a summary of Factz from across Wikipedia.

2. Unlock Meaning
Powerset finds articles related to the meaning of your query. And sometimes even direct answers.

3. Scan Summaries
Powerset summarizes pages for easy browsing, with tools that follow you as you read and explore.

It is of course easy to use – type in a search query, click ‘enter’, and there you go.

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Founded by an ex-Google employee, Cuil claims to provide a better searching environment for internet users. In fact Cuil has indexed 121,617,892,992 pages at the time of writing – about 3 times more than Google.

But more pages indexed doesn’t really mean better. It is more important that when people are searching, they would be able to find what they want.

As opposed to Google, Cuil uses an all-black design on the homepage. After typing the search query, if you are lucky enough not to have the “server overload” error, then you would be presented a search result page, white in background, having a layout like a news / magazine website. Each entry would have a thumbnail beside it.

I searched for “best web ezy” and I have half of the results leading to this blog, another half leading to BlogCatalogue. The thumbnails are not screenshots – some seems like they are randomly generated!

It also has a search result (indeed, #2 result) which leads to a page that I took down about 1/2 year ago.

And I cannot find information on how to submit websites to this search engine. I searched for “submit to cuil” and I got presented results which are absolutely irrelevant.

I guess it might still take some time for Cuil to make things right. I am looking forward to a better Cuil.

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The great search engine is named Google, being a play on the word googol which refers to the 1 followed by one hundred zeroes.  It reflects the company’s mission to organize the unlimited amount of information on the internet.

Many people know this already – Google was started as a research project at Stanford University.  It was created by PhD students Larry Page & Sergey Brin at 24 & 23 years old respectively.

Google’s indexed webpages is the most in the world.  It often only take Google <1/2 a second to commence a search in its collection of information.

Search requests are all over the world including Antarctica.

Apart from English, users can search in 35 different languages.

** Specially for Star Trekk fans – Google Klingon! **

“Googlers” refers to the nearly 3,000 staff in Google (is that all?) and “Googleplex” refers to the Google headquarter.

For the handheld devices fans, Google translates HTML webpages into WAP / i-mode phone formats.  “Predictive text input” is also available!

Google Groups have got more than 845 million Usenet messages – the world’s largest collection of messages.  That’s equivalent of more than a terabyte of human conversation.

“PageRank”, although associated with the ranking of a webpage, is actually named after Larry Page, not the function.

Who works in Google?  Former neurosurgeon, rocket scientist, chef for George Clinton……

The above are from Google Press Room.  Surely there are more of it:

The “I’m feeling lucky” button was nearly never used.  But it was a comfort button.

The homepage got pretty much nothing on it because the original founder just want a simple interface and he didn’t know HTML.

The “©2008 Google” was added just to show the users that the page has finished loading.  In the early stage of user tests, people were sitting in front of the screen and waited for a long time.  They were asked why they have to wait and they said they thought it is still loading l0l

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Have you ever dreamed of using DOS to search?  Now you have the chance – the (Unofficial) Google Shell provides you the opportunity to search the internet like, when you are using DOS.

Open the page and perform a search by typing “web [search query]” to perform a search.  To learn more functions, type “h” or “help”.

If you are feeling lucky, type “l [search query]” or “lucky [search query]“, which works just as the same as the “I’m feeling lucky” button.

Currently the shell only displays 4 results to ease server load.

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IZEA has recommended their new service – they named it IZEA rank / RealRank.  I strong encourage you to sign up as:

1. It is free
2. It seems like it is more reliable than Alexa and Google PR

I can see that there will be more and more people trusting this ranking service instead of the others (Although you may have heard about the change of Alexa ranking).

From their FAQ:

RealRank is the first site ranking service that focuses exclusively on measuring the traffic and influence of individual blogs throughout the blogosphere. The service is designed to help advertisers analyze the relative reach of blogs and make informed online advertising purchasing decisions in the long run. RealRank aims to replace historically unreliable influence indicators such as Google PageRank, Alexa and Comscore by providing more accurate statistical data collected directly from the source.

Click on the badge to sign up.  It is that simple!

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Therefore, it is good to have directories that serve a specific industry. Zycon, a directory specifically for the industrial distributors / manufacturers, has made our lives easier. Their slogan is ‘stop searching, start finding’ – which does exactly what it is supposed to do.

Zycon connects engineers and technical buyers with the related products and services. Industrial products includes chillers, gas springs, metal stamping, pumps, transformers, cases, seals, speed / gear reducers, valves, check valves, control valves, ball valves.. just go have a look.  You won’t be disappointed.

(Brought to you by Zycon)

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