Search Lately Issue 148

ISSUE 148 – 15th August 2014

Speedier search on Bing and Baidu to come Both Bing and Baidu are investing in hardware to make their search engines faster. The hardware is called field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and should work to deliver improvements in performance by up to 95% across both speed and accuracy. Bing are planning on deploying this technology, which they are called ‘Catapult’ in 2015. Baidu have also been testing FPGAs and have found them to be more efficient. The hardware functions by offloading processes from the existing server CPU hence increasing performance but also allowing a reduction in the number of servers. For search engines, this is key as data centres are growing with the increasing complexity of data. Both Baidu and Bing presented their research at a conference this week. Ultimately, the impact should be faster and more accurate search results for users from these search engines.

Shared By Jasdeep Mondae The full Microsoft research paper: http://bit.ly/1oRfow9

Follow the link for more details: http://bit.ly/1Acaiy3

Drum Report: Nearly a third of Retailers claim SEO agencies are too expensive 32% of UK retailers claim SEO agencies are ‘expensive’ and are not able to deliver clear results according to a OneHydra report published last week. It is claimed that less than 20% of clients’ SEO requirements on average were met in last 12 months alone, with a quarter running SEO inhouse now. Oscar Romero, head of search strategy and product at Starcom MediaVest, explains in the article how it is becoming increasingly difficult for clients and agencies alike to measure performance with the same level of granularity as before. “Since Google began restricting visibility of keyword data in 2011 under the (not provided) label, businesses have been denied fundamental information about how their sites were performing in organic search. As Google further increases online security measures, the proportion of keyword data being labelled as (not provided) is reaching close to 100 per cent. With this lack of visibility on keyword-level performance, businesses are faced with the significant challenge of how to assess ROI and justify future investment in SEO.” - Oscar Romero, head of search strategy and product, SMG