Bing SEO News
Bing Mimics Google’s Interface to Retain Users
Microsoft’s Bing has been spotted mimicking Google’s homepage UI when users search for “Google” on Bing.com. This design includes Google-style doodles and a rounded search bar, with the Bing logo subtly hidden to reduce switching. The move targets users trying to transition to Google or Chrome, leveraging Bing’s default status on Edge.
Compare the screenshot at the top, where searching for Google, to the second one searching for BGR:
SEO Recommendations by Jason
This is exciting, as we see Bing continue to compete for a key position in search engine usage dominance. With recent volatility in Google’s search engine due to erratic algorithm updates, Bing stands tall as a great opportunity for users to enjoy another algorithm.
These UX search engine changes by Bing reinforce its commitment to compete with Google and play a role in advancing and evolving the search engine user experience.
I recommend all sites become acquainted with Bing webmaster tools and analyze their inbound traffic from Bing search engines as a % of Google searches.
General Search Marketing News
Microsoft to Invest $80 Billion in AI-Enabled Data Centers for Fiscal 2025
Microsoft plans a record $80 billion investment in AI-capable data centers in fiscal 2025, with over half allocated to U.S. infrastructure. The initiative underpins Microsoft’s partnerships with OpenAI and others, fueling the AI race spurred by generative technologies like ChatGPT. With Azure and AI services driving significant growth, the company aims to solidify its leadership against global competitors, particularly China, through strategic investments and advocacy for U.S. AI innovation.
Sam Altman Discusses AGI, AI Workers, and Superintelligence
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared insights on the future of AI in a recent blog post, discussing the company’s path toward AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and beyond. He expressed confidence in building AGI and predicted that AI agents could significantly transform workplaces by 2025. Altman also hinted at superintelligence, AI surpassing human capabilities, as a future goal. While exciting, concerns about safety and alignment persist, especially given OpenAI's challenges with AI safety engineering. The industry now awaits updates on GPT-5 and other developments critical to realizing AGI.
Sam Altman wrote in his recent blog post:
We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.
We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity."
Critical Vulnerability in UpdraftPlus Plugin Affects 3+ Million WordPress Sites
A high-severity vulnerability (rated 8.8/10) in the popular UpdraftPlus: WP Backup & Migration Plugin has exposed over 3 million WordPress sites to potential attacks. The flaw, present in versions up to 1.24.11, allows unauthenticated attackers to exploit PHP Object Injection via deserialization of untrusted input. While no known POP chain exists in the plugin itself, attackers could leverage additional plugins or themes to execute malicious actions. Users are urged to update to version 1.24.12 immediately to secure their sites.
Wordfence explains the vulnerability:
“The UpdraftPlus: WP Backup & Migration Plugin plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to PHP Object Injection in all versions up to, and including, 1.24.11 via deserialization of untrusted input in the ‘recursive_unserialized_replace’ function. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to inject a PHP Object.
No known POP chain is present in the vulnerable software. If a POP chain is present via an additional plugin or theme installed on the target system, it could allow the attacker to delete arbitrary files, retrieve sensitive data, or execute code. An administrator must perform a search and replace action to trigger the exploit.”
From the official Updraft Plus WordPress plugin changelog:
“TWEAK: Complete the review and removal of calls to the unserialize() PHP function allowing class instantiation begun in 1.24.7. (The final removal involved a theoretical security defect, if your development site allowed an attacker to post content to it which you migrated to another site, and which contained customised code that could perform destructive actions which the attacker knew about, prior to you then cloning the site. The result of this removal is that some search-replaces, highly unlikely to be encountered in practice, will be skipped).”
SEO Recommendations by Jason
As always, it is crucial to monitor your website security vulnerabilities from plugins and third-party scripts. It is essential to avoid security issues that could affect your website users and your relationship with search engines, which could consequently lead to a loss in rankings, organic visibility, and potentially domain authority.
