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This is an important question you now need to ask yourself. Search engines are now pulling ever increasing amounts of information from websites, including contact information, event information and location data. So is your site a resource for everything you do?

The days of having a simple list of 10 web pages returned for whatever you searched for are long gone. Now you can expect to have richer results, with maps of local companies and service providers, review information for online stores and lists of events being packed in around the traditional results. This means less prominence for that elusive #1 ranking, but a more even playing field for those who can’t possibly compete with SEO behemoths such as Wikipedia and the big multi-nationals.

So, consider rich snippets. Consider Google Local listings, Google Base product feeds and just about everything else which makes it onto the SERPs offered by Google. You may end up reducing your spend on SEO as a whole.

You will see that your site will become a central resource for your company – not just a page on the web.

One of the cool things that has been added to Google Webmaster Tools is the feature which allow you to see the website as Googlebot sees it. There are plugins which also you to do this in Firefox, namely, user agent switcher. This alters the user agent string when making a request to a website so that it will return the page as though it were being spidered by Googlebot.
The addition tof this Google Webmastertools adds this functionality. It is located in  the labs section. Simply type a URL and press fetch. You can only fetch pages on sites which you have added to your webmaster tools account however.

When the request is processed, it will show the page code as Google sees it allowing you to identify if there are any problems. It is particularly good for identifying spam links that have been injected into your site which may only be visible to Googlebot.

You may have noticed that Google is added more features to keep it ahead in market share of search. To use the new search feature, select latest from the search menu options and results will appear as they occur. The results are taken from a variety of sources including Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca, but you find mostly they tend to come from Twitter. For example to find out the latest news on the snow in the UK search, snow UK for this and news will be relayed as it happens. It could be useful in certain situations but I think that it will be used for spam when it is realised that it will display in realtime for certain events.

I was looking on Google trends and I was thinking I wonder how Bing is doing? Would Google show me the information for its largest competitor? As it turns out it did and the results are much as you would expect. Almost nothing before the launch of the search engine then a large spike, settling down somewhat and now starting to increase slowly. (I would post a picture but the image upload facility is not working.)

http://www.google.com/trends?q=bing

On the image you can also see there also a small blip at the end of the year before Bing was even conceived. Thinking what could that be. The Christmasy answer was revealed when I thought of a White Christmas. It was Bing Crosby.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=bing+crosby&ctab=-1&geo=all&date=all

Microsoft’s search engine Bing! may find itself in court over the name it chose for the search engine. Apparently, there is another company called Bing! (with the exclamation mark). It is an internet design company based in Missouri and according their lawyers, they have been using the name for more nearly ten years.
They also allege that Microsoft’s use of the name will create confusion in the marketplace.
In my opinion, I cannot see how any confusion can arise.
Microsoft are not averse to stomping over people that use even variations of their name in websites (Especially if they are critical of their products.) However this case is slightly different. Microsoft is a global company that everyone has heard of and a large proportion even have the misfortune to use their products every day.
I would not find myself typing a query into the search engine when I meant to order a website or conversely, ask for a website to be built in a search engine only to have a list of search results returned. In any event, the difficulty can be resolved by being more precise with the language.
If the Bing! in question is ambiguous then clarify it by saying Bing! the search engine or Bing! the web design company. The default position will be Bing! the search engine since most people did not know there was a web design company called Bing! until now. If there is still any doubt, then say Google.

One of the predictions from SEO consultants, SEOMoz is that SEO will become harder as search engines try to keep you on their site by answering your queries before you even click on a search result. This can be seen in automatic answers that appear for you search. The most rudimentary of which would be a query like, how many meters in a mile. Just type meters in a mile and you will be returned the result.

1 mile = 1 609.344 metres

If you need to know the weather it will show the answer as you type in the suggestion box. At least it will in the US Google, it does not do this in the UK yet.
It is not just Google that is doing this, Bing is also in on the act. If you type a flight number into Bing, it will give you results of its current status, where it started from and its destination.
All these feature are seen as ways of answering the query without having to go to a website. The search engines are becoming information engines. What effect will this have on driving traffic to a site?

To keep pace with Bing, Google have announced they are rolling out personal search in their results. What does this mean for the average user?

Personal search has been around for more than a year. The idea is that the search engine will learn about your likes and dislikes through your search history and return results that it believes you are more likely to interest you. This skews yours results according to your previous searches.

The more searches that you perform the more data there is to work from and so in theory the results should become more tailored to your needs. However, does that mean that they will be better?

Although there is no way to switch personal search off, it can be disabled by adding the parameter &pws=0 to the end of the search query URL.