Microsoft’s attractive new search engine Bing was officially released to the public Monday. In an email sent out to Microsoft AdCenter advertisers, Microsoft described Bing as a “decision engine that offers consumers a way to make informed choices fast”. I found this an interesting choice of words that reveals Microsoft’s desire to position Bing as more of a “shopping engine”, enabling them to go after some of the most lucrative areas of search. Instead of trying to compete with Google in all areas of search, and risk falling short in comparison, they have differentiated themselves as a “decision engine” and need only be better at shopping related searches to potentially win some of this very productive traffic.
If you look at the Tour Bing section, you cannot help but notice the emphasis on “Travel” and “Shopping”. These are big money segments of search, with many advertising dollars spent, and a great deal of money to be made here. If Bing can give the “consumer” a better experience than Google on searches like these, they may be able to increase their share of this lucrative traffic, and then possibly get more people to use Bing as their standard search engine. So the question is, does Bing do a significantly better job than Google on these fronts, and how does it do in general?
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