Top celebrities today? Top politicians or top bloggers? Everybody is interested in this kind of information. You can access it by using Bing xRank. Here’s how to:

Bing xRank ranks most notable people

According to the developers, “xRank keeps track of notable people and puts them in order for you. We count Bing web searches for movie stars, musicians, and other famous people. Then, we compile our findings into an insightful ranking formula that tells you who the world is searching for most. The result is a cultural snapshot of who’s hot and who’s not!”

By using xRank, you can easily do one of the following:

• Search.
  Enter a name and Bing will tell you who they are and how they rate.
• Learn.
  You can browse a bio or get the latest news headlines about the person you’re interested in.
• Explore.
  For each celebrity, you are ine click away from the latest videos, images, movies, albums, and more.
• Relate.
  This is one of my favorite features of xRank. This is one big electronic gossip machine. Thumbnail photos at the bottom of xRank show you the associates, friends, enemies, and romances, of the person you’re interested in.
• Scan.
  You are a big fan of some singer or movie star? Look over the rankings and trending over time. Movement at the top of the list means more than it does near the bottom.
• Track.
  View a person’s popularity over the past six months on the xRank History chart. Under the xRank History chart, find the top-moving searches. These are real searches from users on the day the person peaked in popularity on xRank.

Celebrities, politicians and…

According to Microsoft, worth tracking are:

• celebrities
• politicians
• musicians
• bloggers

You can see that these are the categories which make the first page of tabloids, except maybe bloggers.

I’m not into any of the celebrity business and also not interested in politics or top bloggers. But I like the concept and think this is a valuable SEO resource for people interested in more visitors and clicks. Write about what’s hot and you may receive thousands of visits a day.

What do you think? Is xRank useful or not?

Popularity: 2% [?]

       

The good news is that Microsoft sites had 3.3 billion searches in July 2009 which is 41% more than in July 2008. The bad news is that exactly 41% was the average market growth. So Microsoft only managed to defend its market share. Care to see how much Google grew?

Well, here are the raw data according to ComScore:

Worldwide Search Market Overview July 2009 vs. July 2008 Total Worldwide – Age 15+, Home/Work Locations Source: comScore qSearch
	Searches (MM)
	July 2008	July 2009	Percent Change
Total Internet	80,554	113,685	41%
Google Sites	48,666	76,684	58%
Yahoo! Sites	8,689	8,898	2%
Baidu.com Inc.	7,413	7,976	8%
Microsoft Sites	2,349	3,317	41%
eBay	1,223	1,723	41%
NHN Corporation	1,243	1,526	23%
Ask Network	929	1,291	39%
Yandex	663	1,290	94%
AOL LLC	1,148	1,023	-11%
Facebook.com	743	879	18%

Google sites are doing great, with an impressive growth of 58% over last July. Even combined, Yahoo and Microsoft are far away from Google. Yandex, the Russian search engine, is the absolute performer, almost doubling the number of searches.

Popularity: 1% [?]

       

Bing had an US  market share of 10.7% in August, according to Nielsen Megaview Search. That positions Bing as the fastest growing search engine in the US top 10. here are the detailed data:

Top 10 Search Providers for August 2009, Ranked by Searches (U.S.)
+------------------------------+-------------+----------+------------+
| Provider                     |  Searches   | M-O-M %  |  Share of  |
|                              |    (000)    |  Growth  |  Searches  |
+------------------------------+-------------+----------+------------+
| Total                        | 10,812,734  |   2.9%   |   100.0%   |
| Google Search                |  6,986,580  |   2.6%   |   64.6%    |
| Yahoo! Search                |  1,726,060  |  -4.2%   |   16.0%    |
| MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search |  1,156,415  |  22.1%   |   10.7%    |
| AOL Search                   |   333,231   |   1.8%   |    3.1%    |
| Ask.com Search               |   186,270   |   2.9%   |    1.7%    |
| My Web Search                |   128,432   |   0.5%   |    1.2%    |
| Comcast Search               |   50,328    |  -21.6%  |    0.5%    |
| Yellow Pages Search          |   37,923    |   2.7%   |    0.4%    |
| NexTag Search                |   31,830    |   0.4%   |    0.3%    |
| Local.com Search             |   16,314    |   2.9%   |    0.2%    |
+------------------------------+-------------+----------+------------+
Source: Nielsen MegaView Search

Google still leads the pack from a comfortable 65% (this is almost a monopoly on search), Yahoo is down 4% above the previous month. It would be useful to compare the Bing market share (taken by the number of searches) with Bing market share taken by the number of searchers. That would allow to draw some interesting conclusions.

Popularity: 1% [?]