When a new website begins operating, it can have huge effects on consumers, affiliates, and competitors alike. When a major computer software company seeks to revolutionize the way we use the web by creating a search engine, it’s sure to send ripples all the way to the edges of cyberspace.
Recently, Aaron wrote about Bing Showing Twitter Results. Microsoft is full of surprises, and it seems as though we’re the on the verge of what could be huge changes in the way consumers, businesses, and marketing experts use the web. What I’m talking about is one way that Microsoft is attempting to help Bing gain a larger market share.
It has been proposed that Bing will pay news websites, the most notable possibility of which is The Wall Street Journal, for exclusive rights to their contents. In other words, Bing is in talks with companies about keeping their content away from the likes of Google and Yahoo, so that users would only be able to access such information through Bing. It’s only a reasonable conclusion that if this business model would prove a success that this idea would be duplicated time and again.
What does this mean to us? Is this the end of it all? Well… No… In fact this is where things get really interesting.
For the everyday user, this means that data may become segregated. For CNN content, go to Yahoo. For Wall Street Journal Content, go to Bing. For Fox News, go to—you get the point.
For business owners, this is particularly exciting. There has never been a better time to optimize your web presence because a diversification of search methods makes reaching high rankings feasible where it may not have seemed as such before. Even better, with proper marketing techniques, a website’s content becomes a valuable commodity for trade among search engines, whereas currently it seems that website owners are the only ones recognizing the value of their relationship with search engines.
Perhaps most exciting is the possibility that if data gets divided, future startup search engines could take advantage of the opportunity and combine the divided search data into their search results, only making search engine optimization more important, and in many ways more valuable, than ever.
Let’s keep our eyes open to see what kind of updates there will be on the subject. These kinds of changes could mean big and exciting things in terms of what you can achieve via web marketing. I know I’ll be looking for new news. I only hope that I will be using the right search engine to find it.
Best Regards,
Casey Winheim