Yes, you do not use Bing. Neither do I. But some people do, enough that webmasters and other such people have to pay it some mind. After all, how are people going to find their dose of Kardasiawhater if the Internet’s sites aren’t well tuned?
Today Bing released an update to its suite of webmaster tools, working to promote, according to the company’s notes, increased transparency, more shared data, and more total features. Or, more simply, to make interacting with Bing less difficult and more useful.
What is in the update? We have broken it down into useful bullet points to save you time:
- Expanded crawl information: Bing is now sharing more information from its crawl process, including being “no longer limited to just seeing inbound links which point only to pages returning a 400 header response code.”
- Improved email alerts: Bing will email you if it wants to change how it crawls your site. That is, if it wants to get up in your business a bit more.
- Increased URL normalization power: Bing will now allow for up to 50 “query string parameters that can be normalized” that can be normalized per website.
- Increased data provided by Bing’s Index Explorer.
- Expanded DNS verification for domains, including a “third option will now allow you to place a discrete CNAME record to your DNS to validate a domain.”
- ntegrated data from AdCenter: “when viewing Traffic data and looking at the keywords which drove traffic to your site, you’ll notice an Avg CPC column on the left now, with more details in a floating pane to the left of that.”
It’s a good list of solid incremental improvements to Bing’s toolkit. In its blog post, Microsoft cited a year’s worth of listening to come up with this specific list of upgrades. You can therefore hope that the company managed to put together a strong
complete story
Did you know that Facebook is one of the top 10 video destinations in the US, with 135m streams per month?
Let’s have a closer look at these interesting figures:
According to Nielsen, over 164 million Americans have watched audiovisual content online during the month of September. Besides, US viewers spent an average of almost 5 hours watching online video, compared to 4h30 in June.
The top 10 online video destinations
The top 10 online video destinations in September were almost the same as in June, to the exception of ESPN, which made its entry on the list, and Netflix, which exited it.
Still, it’s worth looking at the details and notice that the vast majority of viewers accessed YouTube, which attracted 126m unique users out of 164 (vs. “only” 108m YouTube users in June.) Both Facebook and Yahoo! have gained users, but Yahoo! grew even faster, taking Facebook’s third place in the ranking.
The impact of long term content
However, things are quite different when sites are ranked by time per viewer. Indeed, Netflix is now back on the list, and in the pole position. Indeed, its users spend a whopping 10 hours on the site each month, while YouTube users, in comparison, spend less than 3 hours on the site.
This is easy to explain, as Netflix focuses on long-form content (film and TV series.) Besides, it has paid subscribers, who want to get their money worth of film and TV content.
Although you may be surprised to see Chinese sites on the list, such as Tudou and Youku, the explanation may well be similar. Indeed, these video streaming platforms are also known for hosting long-form content – which users often upload without owning the rights to do so. The same goes for Megavideo, which hosts many pirated films. This
complete story
Google continues to roll out updates that focus on usability of its existing products. Today, the company announced the addition of a feature called “Suggested Times” to its Google Calendar product.
The Gmail team had this to say on its blog about the new feature:
[code]Creating an event is easy, but finding a time that works for everyone is sometimes tricky and time consuming. To make this easier and save you time, we’ve added a new ‘Suggested times’ feature to Google Calendar.
To get started, create a calendar event, add guests and click Suggested times. The resulting list will include upcoming times where all participants are available. For example if you want to create an hour long meeting with Kara, and she already has an hour long meeting at 3pm, then times like 2pm and 4pm will be suggested.[/code]
The feature is quite useful, because the worst part about setting up meetings is when people can’t make it and they respond with “No”. This causes you to have to send out a new invite, confusing everyone involved. If your entire company is using Google Apps, suggested times for meetings based on your colleagues calendar is brilliant and will save you a lot of time and headaches.
complete story