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Search Engine News and Updates

First, we start with news from Google, since they are by far the leader in search. Tomorrow, changes are expected to be rolled out that affect the way Google treats “no-follow” tags. The no-follow tag has traditionally been considered an instruction to search engines to not follow a particular link in a website. The webmaster, for a myriad of reasons, may have considered that link not worth following or didn’t want its search results influences by the presence of that particular link.

Now Google will officially take no-follow instructions as a “suggestion” according to Google executive John Mueller. But, it has been our experience that they have been doing this for some time as evidenced by this article shared on our Facebook page last month.

BING

The Microsoft search engine has seen an uptick in recent months. And some people think it is a direct result of Google masking their ads to look more like natural results. The Google user feels more confused or tasked with finding the true result and has to scroll down 5 or 6 lines to find an organic one. People are leaving Google for Bing.

In Europe, 30% of searches are already made with Bing. In the USA that number is less than 10%. But industry insiders expect that number to grow as Google changes for the worse.

DuckDuckGo

The privacy based search engine has seen their usage steadily increase. This is because it is the only major search engine that claims to collect any of your information. From their site: ““Our privacy policy is simple: we don’t collect or share any of your personal information.”

But users we interviewed said the search results can be clunky and the quality of the results aren’t as good as Google. Being a small company, they haven’t the resources to develop the AI like Google. But, I can see this search engine being in much more demand as their results improve.

• Brad