For those of you wondering how the marketing people at Bing come up with the different images that appear on the homepage daily Todd Bishop has the answer. Our friends over at TechFlash got the story directly directly from the geniuses at Microsoft that came up with the idea.
It seems that from the very beginning one of the main goals of Bing is to try to get features to use some of the more advanced features that their search engine holds. What better way than to provide a new topic, every day, that gets users to demo these features? New users will find that as they click on the various tooltips that pop up as they mouse over the image they are taken to search results for the various subjects clicked – often using features like their video search and maps.
If this sounds familiar that because it is. Occasionally Google has been known change their logo for various holidays and special events such as earth day. Users clicking on these special logos will then be taken to search results for that particular topic.
I find that Bing’s effort in getting users to use their more advanced search features very interesting. I have heard on more than one occasion directly from the mouth of Google employees that the vast majority of their users never touch features such as video or image search. Perhaps this is the beginning of regular search users becoming more advanced searchers?
One thing is for certain: It generates Interest. If you follow recent news on twitter you will find that tweets regarding Bing’s background-du-jour coming out every hour of the day. Also, while your there, be sure to follow us by adding @bingseoguide.
So what does this mean for SEOs like us? Well, quite a bit actually. If users really do start to use more advanced search options like image search, that could potentially mean that we will need to optimize our sites more for those various mediums. Once again we will hear some people crying the death of SEO while the real industry winners will simply adapt with the changes and use them to help their sites even more visibility. It will be interesting to see as Bings’s market share increases what percentage of users take advantage of these features.
