Bing has been very visible at SES and other conferences to promote their new search engine and it’s webmaster tools functions. Is this clip from SES’s You Tube Channel, Alessandro Catorcini and Rajesh Srivastav, both of Bing, discuss Bing’s search engine usability with John Mulligan, SEO-PR at SES San Jose 2009.

They also discuss Bing’s API which is open to everyone to use at  http://www.bing.com/developers.  Just simply register for their application ID tp begin using all of Bing’s products to call its API.

They also point out that Bing has features such as the outbound and backlink functionality not found  in other search engine webmaster tools.

Here is the video:

Google announced a change to its search infrastructure and is calling the change “Google Caffeine.” Implying faster web results, the objectives of the next generation of Google were revealed in a Google Webmaster Central Blog post last month.

Three words are very prominent in the post:

1. CRAWL

2. INDEX

3. RANK

Google wants to do these three things ”as quickly as possible.”

Caffeine is coming on the heels of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine which has a knack for reporting news very quickly.   Not to be outdone, Google has created Caffeine to bring more relevant results to the search rankings faster.

Not only does Google want to be quicker on the draw, Google wants to be more efficient.   A recent New York Times article on job opportunities in statistics mentioned a Googler who had worked on a new Google algorithm model that “increased the chances that the crawler would scan frequently updated web pages and make fewer trips to more static ones.”

For search engine optimization, Caffeine certainly places more emphasis on marketers to keep their content updated and fresh.

Bing has created a new feature called Ad Preview in order to help advertisers see if their ad is appearing in Bing.  Now, instead of searching on Bing.com for an ad, the advertisers will be able to access Ad Preview directly in adCenter to manage their advertising campaigns.  Ad Preview will also help people avoid the unnecessary impressions and accidental clicks that they might come across during a search for their ad.

If advertisers find their ads showing in Ad Preview, but not in the regular search then it means that they might have set demographic or geographic targets that they themselves do fulfill.   However, Ad Preview does not offer a geographic or demographic preview right now.  Bing says this is being addressed and should be available soon.

Microsoft says that Bing continues to see  strong growth since it introduced Bing on the market and killed off Live Search completely.  According to Microsoft the number of unique users that ran queries in the decision search engine has increased by over 8% from July to August.   It is important to note that, in parallel with the launch of Bing, Microsoft has also been running an advertising campaign with an estimated cost of up to $100 million.

Here are the steps to use to use AdPreview:

1. Sign in to Microsoft adCenter.

2. Select your account.

3. Click the Campaigns tab.

4. On the Campaigns page, at the upper right, click Ad Preview Tool.

5. In the Keyword box, type a keyword that’s associated with your ad.

6. Click the Preview Ads button. Please note that you might get one of these security messages:

• If you get the message Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely, click No to proceed.
• If you get the message This page contains both secure and nonsecure items, click Yes to proceed.

7. View your ad results.