Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

The fun story of the day, Bing is apparently copying Google's results - Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results.

I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise to Google, when you're the best at what you do, people will try and copy you, it's called competitive benchmarking!

From an SEO point of view, this may help companies achieve consistent rankings in both search engines, and therefore increased traffic. it will also solve some optimising headaches.

And as a searcher, it's not really going to change my habits, I'll still keep using Google.

Are you likely to change habits because of this?

Bing...and the Yahoo is gone

Well not totally gone actually, just 25% gone to be precise. Yahoo announced this week that 25% of its natural results are now coming from Bing, the first step of a planned transition (read more here).
Call me cynical, but is this going to make a difference on the way most SEOs work? somehow I don't think so as Google's dominance of the market means it will still remain the benchmark when optimising your site. And personally I've never been too impressed with Bing's results...but still, it is a big change in the industry so let's keep an eye on things over the next few weeks/months.

How do you feel about this transition? is this going to affect your work?

Bing...and the Google is gone!

Where have I heard a similar phrase before...ah yes, Barry Scott!
In the light of the Microsoft/Yahoo agreement this week, I thought I'd take some time to talk about Bing, Microsoft's "decision engine", and the implications of the agreement for SEO.

From what I can see, it looks like Bing is now going to power Yahoo's search results, and to be honest, I'm far from convinced this is a good thing for the seo industry.
I've been working in SEO and online marketing for a number of years now, and MSN/Live/Bing has always been the most unpredictable search engine. I dont know if it's because of the companies I worked for, but I've always struggled to achieve decent rankings in MSN's SERPs for my core keywords even though the same keywords were delivering great results in Google and Yahoo.
Now that I've had a bit of time to look at Bing. it still looks to me like the results are based on the old Live algorithm and do not give me what I expect to find, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one to feel that way. So excuse me Mr Microsoft, but I need more than a slick looking interface to convince me (yes, Bing does look very nice and clean, shall we just call it Bling then??).
On the plus side, Bing offers some webmaster and keyword tools (thanks Rochelle for the post suggestion!) and until I test them further I'll reserve judgement. One can only hope they'll be as good as Google Webmaster tools....but very unlikely. Maybe they'll help SEOs understand how the algorithm works, but I'm still worried that the transition from Yahoo to Bing is going to hurt a lot of websites in terms of organic traffic.
It'll also be interesting to look at paid results as a lot of advertisers (including me) have already heard the rumours that click through rates in Bing are higher than in Google (less ads displayed)

If I were Google, I wouldn't be really worried about this new alliance yet, and as an online marketer, I'll still focus most of my efforts on Google while keeping an eye on what's going on on the other side, but until I can see some tangible results for my sites in Bing results, I'll remain unconvinced.