Top Search Stories of 2009 (Part 1)

June 2009: Microsoft Launches New Bing Search Engine

Microsoft launched its new Bing search engine in June 2009 on the heels of a PR and advertising campaign featuring high-profile TV spots. Microsoft attempted to differentiate Bing from industry giant Google by calling it a "decision engine" rather than a search engine, returning results that were more detailed and precise than Google and therefore providing information to help people make real-world decisions.

According to the official press release, Microsoft focused on three design goals when creating Bing: "deliver great results; deliver a more organized experience; and simplify tasks and provide insight, leading to faster, more confident decisions." Bing offers several features that are unique from Google or Yahoo! search engines, including Related Searches and Quick Tabs, a table of contents for different categories of search results.

While Google remained the dominant search engine, Bing was able to grow its market share throughout 2009, ending the year with more than 1.3 million searches a month.

October 2009: Search Engines Add Real-Time Search Functionality
The increasing popularity of social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook forced search engines to have to address the challenge of real-time searches in 2009. In fact, in the span of one day in October, two of the major search engines announced plans to integrate real-time content from social media sites into their search results.

Bing was the first search engine to announce the integration of Twitter content into its search engine. Google followed up with a similar announcement later that day, adding the rollout of a new Google Labs experiment called Social Search. Through this feature, people conducting Web searches on Google can see results for queries specifically from people in their social network.

December 2009: Google Updates Personalized Search Function

In December 2009, Google released a new version of Personalized Search designed to deliver individual, customized results based on a person's search history. Personalized Search uses information from past searches to deliver results targeted to be the best fit for each individual user. According to a post on the Official Google Blog, one example would be that if a person visits a particular food site frequently, it would be ranked higher in the future when that person does a Google search for recipes.

Previously, Personalized Search had only been available to people who were signed in and had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. The newest version of Personalized Search extended that feature to all users (even if they were not logged into Google) through their anonymous cookies from the past 180 days.

The announcement caused speculation within the industry about what impact this will have on search engine rankings and the process of optimization. While it is possible that there may be some volatility in search engine rankings in 2010 as the effects of Personalized Search are seen, Chris Boggs of Search Engine Watch feels that basic SEO best practices will still be necessary to ensure a proper search engine ranking.