A recent press release from Experian HitWise (one of the best global information services companies) disclosed some interesting facts related to Bing and YouTube. The press release revealed the results from UK Search Engine and Social Analysis report made by HitWise and it seems Bing is gaining more and more popularity within the UK.

Although over 90% of all searches from UK pertain to Google, Bing increased its market share with 0.28%, thus becoming the fastest growing search engine between February and March 2011; but on the other hand, Google lost about 0.66% from its market share. Speaking about yearly figures, Yahoo!, Google and Ask lost up to 0.61% of their market share while Bing has gain a whopping 1.43%, showing that it is starting to become more popular among the UK users.

However, when it comes to social networking, there are no surprises here: Facebook has over 56% of all visits to social networking websites (although its market share declined in the last month with 1.22%) while YouTube increased its visits with over 18.32% in one month. Yet again, speaking about monthly figures, Facebook has grown with 4.16% and it does not show any signs of stopping its growth.

Conclusion of this study is that each and every brand should look more into optimising for Bing while Google is not the single player on this market (although its market share is huge). With Facebook’s huge growth, not having a presence on that social networking website can mean nothing more than lost customers. Waiting for some more advertising options though…

It seems they have indeed started a war, or at least a “war of words”. First, Google accused Bing of copying its search results – they say Microsoft search engine is spying on what people search for on Google, then they use that information to improve Bing’s search results. That is the explanation of Bing’s relevancy improvement, according to Google accusations.

Google’s Amit Singhal said “I’ve spent my career in pursuit of a good search engine, I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book.”

It was just a matter of time for Bing to reply to these accusations and Harry Shum, Bing’s Corporate VP said about Google that it is a “spy-novelesque stunt” and furthermore, Bing uses over 1,000 different signals in their ranking algorithm and what Google did is just a “creative tactic by a competitor”.

It was again the time for Amit Singhal to step into the spotlights and in response to Harry’s statement he said that “Bing’s search results are just a cheap imitation of Google’s. However, he added that Google wants to stop Bing from using customer search data from their search engine in order to influence Bing’s “recycled” search results. Strong words from Google!

“We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google.” he added.

These words come yet again from Mehdi, published on Bing blog:

“We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop. We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting.”

We all know that competition is always a good thing, we always look forward for new search engines to come into this battle for supremacy and we will definitely follow-up with future posts related to this “war of words” between Google and Bing.

As we wrote a few days ago, Bing and Facebook have partnered for what some are saying to be a new search results era: the integration of social networking from Facebook to organic search results from Bing. It was just a matter of time for Google to strike back and display their search results details from a social sharing “environment”.

Basically, Google seems to test the waters by adding a “Shared by number+” next to number of related articles, in their news section. This move from Google will show how popular a story is on Twitter or other social sites and it seems to perfectly respond to users’ demands, in simple words: if a story is so popular it really is worth clicking and reading it.

For now, the results come only from Twitter but it can become very helpful while trying to see which Twitter users are quoting or making comments on a particular link in their tweets. When clicking on the “shared by” link the user is taken to a window displaying real-time sharing activity from Google Updates.

This experiment showcases a great feature that every Google News’ user might use and we look forward to seeing how this will evolve in time. Latest signs from social networking and search engines world reveal that sharing becomes a very important part of the search engines results, the web designers from WebCreationUK are keeping an eye on this particular subject as it might be a new step forward for the online environment.