Thursday, June 25th was a big news day: details about Governor Mark Sanford’s confession on Wednesday about his liaison in Argentina continued to break, we learned of Farah Fawcett’s death, and then later TMZ broke the news of Michael Jackson’s death. By most reports, Bing did not deliver the best experience for our customers soon after TMZ posted the news on their blog. As Search Engine Journal pointed out, we had the story but it was hidden at the bottom of the main page and even deeper in our xRank result.
We know that customers are turning to search when a big story breaks: generally we get more feedback and see more engagement from consumers for bigger news stories, so we pay attention to what we can learn from these events. In the case of Michael Jackson’s death there was a dramatic rise on Thursday for queries on his name and for details about his death, as well as spikes for the source credited with breaking the story (TMZ.com), his career, and his most famous move (the Moonwalk). The following day strong interest continued and there were new spikes in query volume for names of his friends and family members and for his videos, images, and songs.
Interestingly, on Sunday, the queries for his friends and family reached almost the same volume as his name driven by interest in Lisa Marie Presley’s MySpace post about her thoughts on his death. By the way, the most searched for song – by a country mile as my dad used to day – was Thriller.
While we do want to respond to big events appropriately, our general rule is not to interfere with the normal algorithmic operation and to use what we learn to improve future releases. The only exception is for major news events where we see unusual activity and the results are clearly not being ranked in a relevant way. In these cases, we can respond more quickly to how we perform the ranking. This was the case when Michael Jackson died, and we quickly rolled out what we call a “news go big” experience to make sure we were providing appropriate coverage for this significant and sad event.
So what did we learn and what will we do? Our data tell us that when people do queries on entertainers, they are most often interested in seeing images. However in the case of breaking news such as this, we will focus on ensuring that the whole experience quickly accommodates the surge in customers’ interest. We will also think about what people will be searching for in the days following the news and be sure we have the right content and algorithms to help people find this related information. Based on customers’ feedback, it seems delivering the right experience as the story is breaking is the area where we need to improve the most, so we’re on it! We will keep making adjustments and improvements to our algorithms to get it right when big stories break. We appreciate all your feedback, as always.
Jacquelyn Krones, Senior Product Planner, Bing News
Thank you for this blog post, I was happy that you come to understand what had happened and believe me I was a little upset with how some people treated Bing as you just rolled out not to long ago and there are going to be some growing pains.
Just wished some people would of realized it. I am happy with Bing and will continue to use it for all my searches
Bing is bringing new challange to SEO World.
Nice post. Unlike other corporate blogs which are more of textbook kinds, this one makes me read it. And also shows you are constantly looking at scope for improvement. I believe you are in the right path.
I noticed on the photo depicting Bing search results for Michael Jackson at Search Engine Journal that it didn't provide users relevant information. In future when you "quickly roll out what you call a “news go big” experience", does that entail manual interference or automated approach?
Thanks for the feedback.
quality directory - we have a capability called "news go big" that allows us to show news stories, videos, and text all at once and the image on SEJ does not represent that experience - it represented our default experience. We can intervene to trigger the "go big" experience when something important happens that warrents taking over that much of the top of the page but we don't do that automatically because most of the time users want more than just the news results to appear above the fold. We don't editorially select the content in the "go big" experience, just the fact that it appears.
bing is bringing new challenges definatly!
"Picutres" - the picture "query volume trend" has a typo that appears twice...
Glad to see Bing is going to be continually improved. Just like Google is. As long as the Bing Team (That has a nice ring to it :P) keeps it up, Bing is well on its way :)
The beauty of a "go big" strategy in search is that people who are weary of the news half a day later can avoid it. Just don't search for it. Wish I could do that with television or radio.
you mean june 25th. :)
Raj and James - I need to get a little editing help!
I feel happy by reading this post and see that Bing doing great. Bing is working on the basis of customer feedbacks and taking the customers view first. It motivate mee to stay with Bing forever with its imporvement day by day!
Please improve Bing so that it can correct spellings like google.
For example, I just entered 'jquery validaate' into Bing and it does not show spelling suggestions like google.
Google displays 'Did you mean: jquery validate'
If MS could corner the spell check market first, maybe search would come next. Take some mental "picutres" of this post! Retards.
Nice to see that Bing can 'fix up' a search algorithm when necessary for a major event of some sort. I wish you guys could fix up some more search queries where the results aren't exactly what I want.
Keep up the good work Bing.
