Using Bing to its Full Potential

Bing has established itself as a major rival to Google fairly recently, with the addition of powerful features that you may or may not know about.

As you may well know, Google has a few hidden features of its own, such as its search commands.
Let us now explore some advanced features of Bing.

Convert Search to RSS

One feature of Bing that I’m not aware that Google has is the ability to view the search listings in an RSS format. This is handy when you would like to bookmark certain search terms that might update regularly, for example news on a certain event or topic.

To get the results as an RSS feed, simply set a live bookmark in Firebox using the RSS icon in the address bar, or click on the RSS icon in Internet Explorer and choose “Subscribe to this feed”. Alternatively you can add “&format=rss” to the URL for third party RSS programs.

Boolean searches

Another powerful feature of Bing includes the use of Boolean searches. Operators such as AND, OR and NOT can be used in advanced searches to further increase the accuracy of your search results.

For example, try searching for “football NOT Premier League” which will exclude results, fixtures and information on the Premier League, leaving the Coca Cola Championship as the top result.

Find pages which contain certain files

This handy parameter allows you to search for file types which are contained within the web pages that are being listed.

For example, searching for “Google Lectures contain:pdf” will only show web pages with PDF files inside them. This technique can also be used for music/video files and also spreadsheets and presentations.

How to submit your webpage to Bing

For those of you whose sites are still not listed in Bing’s index, visit the link below to submit your website:

http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

Chris Hutchison
SEO Programmer