Bing had a hectic week from expanding its visual search options to introducing new Bingbots to streamline SEO, that gave Instagram competition with their new features to remove influencers’ posts advertising harmful products. Yandex appeared to have an algorithm update this week and you can read all about it below!
News #1: Bing Expands Visual Search in Microsoft Windows
In an attempt to make the holiday season easier and more enjoyable for users, Bing announced on Tuesday that they would be expanding their visual search to more places in Microsoft Windows.
Visual search allows users to conduct searches using an image to find similar images. Previously, this feature was only accessible from bing’s image search results however, with the new update, users can access this feature from wherever they are – whether they are browsing a website or looking at saved photos.
Users must have the May 2019 Update on WIndows 10 or a later version to be allowed to use this feature…something to add to Santa’s list perhaps?
Source: Search Engine Journal
News #2: Instagram to Remove Influencer’s Branded posts Advertising ‘Harmful’ Products
Instagram is cracking down on influencers’ branded and sponsored posts in the interest of its users. In an official announcement, the company declared that it will be enforcing prohibition rules on the advertising of vapes, tobacco and weapons more strictly as well as enforcing ‘special restrictions’ around the promotion of alcohol and diet supplement..guess Jameela Jamil finally got through to them.
Instagram is making changes to better the platform for users, as we previously reported they will also be introducing age restrictions to protect younger users, install donation buttons for nonprofits on the platform and labelling ‘Fake News’ to prohibit the spread of misinformation.
Source: The Verge
News #3: Yandex Announces Major Algorithm Update
Yandex introduced a new update named Vega that features 1,500 improvements and details about how modern search engines work.
Two of these updates really stood out as they will impact search engines in an important way. The first adds expert human feedback into algorithm training, while the second allows users to double the size of their search index without impacting search result speed!
Some of the other updates include:
1. Crowd Sourcing Search Result Raters
2. Predicting Search Queries and Results
3. State of the art information retrieval
Get all the details about these new updates in Yandex’s official announcement here.
Source: Search Engine Journal
News #4: New BingBot Agents to Streamline SEO
Bing announced the launch of its new user agent for crawling web pages that will reflect the latest rendering engine used. A key aspect for SEO is if the search engine can index a web page, and the new BingBot aims to streamline this aspect of SEO since it is based on Google Chrome’s browser.
The new user agents will be based on Microsoft’s Edge browser that uses a Chrome rendering engine. It is hence recommended to install Microsoft’s newest Edge browser in order to test how well your website will render for the new BingBot, you can do so here.
Source: Search Engine Journal
