The competition between Google and Bing is becoming ever hotter, with the latter rolling out a new aspect to its US search engine from mid-September. Adaptive Search, which takes information from a user’s previous searches to inform future searches, was announced on the Bing blog and at the US search industry conference SMX East on September 14.
Bing Search team member Aidan Cook stated on Bing’s blog that the search feature aimed to clear up the ambiguity that can occur during broad searches. Information from previous searches is used to present a selection of results topically matched to the user’s interests. These results would, for example, present a search on ‘Liverpool’ by travel buffs with information on Liverpool as a city, and direct football fans to pages on Liverpool FC.
The change follows two other levels of personalised search investigated by Bing this year. The company tested and introduced local search improvements in February. Bing also began experimenting previous search data at around the same time, using click history to present more suitable results and pushing up previously clicked-on websites. Adaptive Search will initially be available for Bing’s US search engine only.
The advances in personalised search have presented complications for site owners using search engine optimisation. Those in SEO careers have been advising site owners to pursue local search for some time now. As both Google and Bing introduce further methods of automatically personalising searches, the SEO industry may have to come up with new techniques for attracting attention.