Bing has introduced a new interactive feature for search results. Tiles are interactive logos or images that are displayed alongside search results (such as a Yelp logo alongside a Yelp website listing).

Upon mouse-over, these interactive tiles will display a graphic, structured element that contains some top-level information, links or commands. These Tiles only are displayed for established (name-brand) websites. Bing is currently partnering with forty-five content providers for the Tiles project in the categories of entertainment, local, travel and auto.

Bing’s Tiles seem to be an extension of Google’s Rich Snippets, which show meta data from web pages within the search result listings.

According to the most recent comScore report, comScore Explicit Core Search Share Report * January 2011 vs. December 2010, Bing saw a 13.1% spike in search volume–2.2 billion web/network searches. Bing was the only search engine to report an increase in market share for that period. Bing’s increase came at the expense of Google’s market share. Google’s market share is above 11.1 billion searches.

Google launches a new on-page SPAM fighting algorithm as part of it’s 2011 New Years resolution to be more aggressive in fighting this growing epidemic.

SPAM is bad for the Google business. It makes search less useful for searchers–as the content results are diluted with unwanted items or worse. Additionally, distribution methods for SPAM are becoming techniques used for more nefarious content and websites, like  those that hold malicious code.

This new Google algorithm is already live–as confirmed by Matt Cutts on his Google/SEO blog.  This algorithm will particularly focus on websites that copy the content of other websites. The penalties of this new technique could also affect websites with authentic forms of duplicate content, so webmasters and designers may need to rethink approaches to design, SEO and information architecture that involve duplicate content. Some eCommerce websites and blogs may be examples of such a legitimate scenario.

The net affect of this new technique may involve only 2% of search queries with some measure of change. The ultimate goal of this approach was to remove or devalue websites that have scrapped or copied content.

Spam fighting is certainly a necessity for the growth of successful online markets. Google is proposing a new approach to fighting spam, which gives control to users. Essentially this approach would allow users to remove or blacklist domains within the Google search results. Google has already tried to do something similar with SearchWiki, but the approach was limited to the page level. This supposed new approach would be domain-wide.

One of our concerns is that this DIY blacklisting approach would be abused by competitors or even spammers themselves to squash strong competitors in search rankings.  Besides automated script/robot abuse of this new function, we see a potential problem with factory-style “SEO-spam” that try to downgrade competitor websites using multiple accounts, users and IP addresses but with a single protocol. We are not so much concerned with the idea of a de-centralized authority for spam defense, but we are concerned that spam defense itself may become the object of abuse by those who the approach was intended to fight against.

Source: Google Blog, 1/21/2011, Google search and search engine spam

According to a report by Rasmussen Reports, 77% of American adults oppose Federal Communications Commission – government regulation of search engine results. Notably, frequently users oppose regulation most fervently.  The data for the report was the result of a telephone survey in January 2011.

The question that users were asked was whether “a need for government regulation of the way that search engines select the recommendations they provide” was needed.

Additionally, the poll found that users are 1. happy with search engines and the 2. speed of search engines. On the negative side, users stated that search engines have too much irrelevant information. Despite this sentiment, searchers still felt that they could find what they need.