Thinking I’d be original, I first titled this post, “Changes, they are a-coming”. When I Bing’d that title, I realized that ‘original’ isn’t the correct descriptor . . . so, I went searching for inspiration to aid in finding words to convey the importance and need for change, and came up with some great quotes, a few of my favorites:
“Everything changes and nothing remains still” – Heraclitus
“They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself” – Andy Warhol
And one which makes me laugh every time I read it:
“Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal” – Albert Einstein
Which brings me to the point of this post – we’re making a few changes concerning Bing Webmaster Tools and the supporting blog and forum.
As many of you have noticed, both Rick DeJarnette and Brett Yount have moved on to new challenges. I want to take a moment to thank both Rick and Brett for the fantastic work they have done writing for, and managing the Bing webmaster blog and forum. Their work has been instrumental in keeping our community informed, and helping the larger Bing community be successful in their use of, optimization for, and implementation of solutions using Bing. Again, a big thank you to Rick & Brett!
We are making this change as part of the process to both bring these communications closer to the core Bing engineering team, and to better align with how Microsoft manages both community dialog and product support. The future will bring a broader set of topics, written by numerous people, all of which will be focused on helping you make your business’s “Bing experience” better. Likewise, you will see more, and new names providing assistance in the forums.
As we’ve covered in multiple blog posts in July and August, we’ve totally re-built the Bing webmaster tools. Our renewed investments focus on being as customer-centric as possible – covering the basics, responding to feedback, and incorporating game changing capabilities where possible. As part of this, we are also working with the Yahoo! Site Explorer team to ensure site owners and SEOs can easily transition to the Bing webmaster tools as we transition the Yahoo! search traffic to Bing. The longer-term goal is to provide great tools which allow you – the business or site owner – to efficiently project your business through Bing’s search results.
We believe all this change is good – re-emphasizing direct connection between engineer and customer, and on rapidly iterating to bring the right tools in-line at the right time. Which brings me to the answer to the title question, “What do Andy Warhol, Heraclitus and Albert Einstein have to do with the Bing Blog?” They bring not only an understanding that change is inevitable, but that it is necessary to embrace change to evolve and thrive.
If you have any question or comments, please let us know through either responses to this post, or via our Webmaster forum.
Steve Tullis, Senior Program Manager Lead, Bing Webmaster Center