Bing has recently put into effect a new patent involving temporal search, which will return time-relevant search results to users.  Depending on when a query is searched, different results will be delivered.

If, for instance, a searcher queries ‘Valentine’s Day’ around February 14, they will receive results for the holiday; however, if at another time of year a movie named ‘Valentine’s Day’ is released, the user at that time will be delivered results for the movie.

Here’s the abstract of the patent:

“Techniques and systems are disclosed for returning temporally-aware results from an Internet-based search query. To determine if a query is temporally-based one or more query features are collected and input into a trained classifier, yielding a temporal classification for the query. Further, if a query is classified as temporal, the query results are shifted by determining an alternate set of results for the query, and returning one or more alternate results to one or more users. Based on user interactions with the one or more alternate results, the classifier can be updated, for example, by changing the query to a non-temporal query if the user interactions identify it as such.”

This new Bing feature represents greater user awareness on the part of Bing, which can now take into account click-through rates for specific keyword phrases.  If a site receives less click-throughs at a particular time of year, it may be moved down the list of priorities.

What does this mean for search engine marketing?  It may mean that internet marketing experts should be aware of temporal searches and create content relevant to specific times of the year.  No matter what the strategy, Search Engine marketers will have to approach internet marketing with a greater awareness of time-sensitive queries.