Bing recently announced the addition of information snippets that will appear on its SERPs after Microsoft and Brittanica reached an agreement. The data, much like that on Google’s new SERPs powered by its Knowledge Graph, will appear on the results page when a relevant encyclopedia entry would be part of the results.
Unlike information from Google’s Knowledge Graph, the Brittanica entries are in the usual search results rather than in their own sidebar (and the encyclopedia answers are not necessarily the top results for given queries). Within the entry, users will also see links to different web encyclopedias where they can find more information. However, the relevant search answer provided on the SERP itself will only come from Brittanica. Beyond Britannica, Bing links to Wikipedia, Freebase and other free web information sources.
According to Bing, providing fast information to its users is critical given the evolving nature of the web. For marketers, the SEO implications are minimal since results rankings and visibility won’t change too much, where Google’s Knowledge Graph takes up more SERP real estate. Another major difference between Knowledge Graph and Bing’s Brittanica Online Encyclopedia Answers is that there are no links to related searches on the Bing feature. Google includes related topics within its Knowledge Graph and links direct to SERPs for those queries.
The potential effects of Bing’s addition remains to be see, but Brafton recently reported that Google Fellow Amit Singhal told The Wall Street Journal that users are conducting more search queries on the website by clicking on these related links as a result of Knowledge Graph. Moreover, Wikipedia, the main source of information Google users to aggregate its information, is reportedly happy with the feature since more people are reading its content.
