Right now, we the staff at Contextured have the good fortune to be working with a number of summer interns from University College London.  The group comprises a number of PhD students who are working on several different tasks within the company. The reason I mention this is because right now Contextured is offering opportunities to take part in the winter internship program.

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Have you been following the progress of Microsoft’s Bing search engine? If you’ve heard of it but not yet made it onto the site to check it out, I recommended that you take a look. Google has long dominated the search engine arena, but the interactive Bing could really give them a run for their money, if for no other reason than Microsoft has the clout to back it up.

When you land on the homepage for the Bing search engine, one of the first things that stands out is the attractive appearance of the page. Dig a bit deeper than outward appearances and there are some great interactive features that I think you’ll find make this more ‘intuitive’ search engine appealing.

When you do a search in Bing you’ll receive not only a list of results, but a range of information related to your search and grouped for easy viewing. If for example you search a broad term, you’ll find that you receive a number of related searches around the keyword you have entered. For example, if you search simply for dog, you’d receive grouped results for dog food, dog grooming, dog walkers and so on.

What makes these interactive features important is the potential that this offers for SEO. Targeting traditional search engine keywords and optimising for them is likely to take a new twist when you are looking at a more intuitive program such as Bing.

Alongside the initial keyword, the results that appear upon the page will include those related keyword phrases. This can mean a massive boost based upon the cross referencing ‘flow-on’ of the initial keyword with related keyword phrases. The central area of the page will be familiar to Google users, but the additional search results bar at the right provides information about a selected site/link in a small side window.

At the left of the screen, you’ll have the recent searches you’ve performed and related searches that are likely to be relevant for your particular search. With Microsoft having expressed their goal as being to create more intuitive and responsive searches, the focus of this search engine is to provide valuable information from searches to the user.

I think what makes Bing so different is the way that it is so self-contained – search engine results are filtered to make them as relevant as possible and with video and page content displayed on the page without the need to constantly follow links off page. The Bing page truly seems to embody an interactive spirit. With the cross-over effect on searched keywords, from a SEO point of view it is going to become more important that keywords are carefully researched and selected, in order to accurately target appropriate keywords as they take on an even more significant role than before.

The Contextured Bing interface is currently in closed beta-test phase, as of this blog posting. We hope to release it to all customers in August or September 2009.