Bing’s joke could have backfired but at least showed willing.
The digital marketing world has a general view that the teams behind the search engines are constantly working behind the scenes to create new updates for search marketing companies to then have to comprehend into their SEO strategies.
We have previously reported how the online world was full of foolery on April fool’s day this year with Google and many social media sites devising various different pranks however it seems that one search engine devised a prank at the expense of Google.
Bing released two gags on April 1st. On the Bing blog Michael Kroll, the Principal UX Manager at Bing put up a post stating that research had shown the homepage of Bing to be too engaging for users. The (changeable) Bing homepage is renowned for displaying beautiful and memorable images each day with the aim of showing users a picture of the world that they have never seen before.
The post stated that users were coming to the site to perform a simple search however they were finding themselves getting lost looking at the images. This has led to the search engine redesigning their homepage by going back to basics, or as they described it “back to the dawn of the internet.”
Once you switched to the new Bing Basic even those who aren’t particularly familiar with the online world of search would recognise Bing’s joke and that the revised page looks just like Google’s current homepage! The only difference being that the “I’m feeling lucky” button was replaced by “I’m feeling confused.”
This was an April fool’s joke aimed directly at Google’s rather plain homepage. Bing didn’t take the day of pranks as light heartedly as other search engines and social media outlets but instead chose to create a gag at Google’s expense. This just shows that there is competition even within the world of search!
The second gag pulled by the vibrant search engine is announcing the use of new SEO tags. The new tagging was said to let webmasters tell Bing where their pages should rank; the new tagging code was even to go as far as allowing webmasters to tell Bing which competitor they want to rank one higher than!
If only appearing highly in the SERPS (search engine results pages) was as easy as that! Unfortunately this was only yet another April fools prank that appeared online and so it isn’t as simple as telling search engines where you want to rank.
