It’s A Whole New World For Search

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Bing Network for IZEA. All opinions are 100% mine. I’ve been on the Internet long enough to remember when finding a website meant either browsing a directory on Yahoo or putting a search term into Lycos. Those were the days. Not great days… not for Web searching anyway. Neither of those services worked very well. The directories were badly chosen; it took ages to find the right branch. And Lycos was… well, it was okay when there were only a few thousand pages on the Web but once those pages had started to grow, it soon showed its limits. Things have changed a lot since then… and they’re changing even faster now that half of all searches take place on mobile devices. That’s a big change. We used to surf the Web from a desktop in the corner of a room or in an office. Now that the Internet is always with us and we search while sitting in a car, dining in a restaurant, or relaxing on the sofa. We do it on laptops, on phones, on tablets but also on games consoles and television sets. We want to search everywhere and we want the results whatever we’re doing, without having to first bring up a search engine then enter a search term. We want our answers faster than that! Search companies are already moving. First, they’re making sure that their search options have a broader reach across websites, Search engines now have syndication partnerships with some of the Web’s biggest content producers such as AOL and The Wall Street Journal. The old way of searching is still important and smart companies aren’t abandoning it. They’re just making sure that they don’t rely on us coming to their home page to do it. Instead of hoping that we’ll come to them, they’re trying to come to us wherever we are on the Web. It’s nice to be wanted! But at the same time they’re also making their search tools always whatever device we happen to be using at the time. That’s huge. Bing, for example, has already expanded beyond the PC. Of course, Microsoft’s search engine is the one used in Windows 10, and it also powers search in Office so that we can get to work on the file we need instead of wasting hours digging around for it. But it’s also used in Amazon’s devices. It translates for Twitter, it’s used on the iPhone’s Spotlight Search, and when you ask Siri a question, Apple’s assistant just shrugs and tells Bing to bring the answer. In short, we can already see that search engines are turning up in more places on the Web than ever before and its answers are found in places we’d least expect. Search used to be something we did deliberately; we’d open a tab and type in the address of a search engine. Now it’s never more than a thumb tap away and sometimes not even that. We don’t always see the search engine itself but we’re always benefitting from the results the engines deliver. It’s easy to take search for granted but a lot of work is going into adapting it for a new Internet era. And that means there’s a lot of opportunity for people who can adapt with it. Learn more about Bing Network  Humanization of Search

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