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?
General Search
That is a tough call. It certainly does succeed in some areas. It has a very pleasant design, with a nice layout of search results. The 3 column design often seems less cluttered than Google. This may partially be due to the fact that most Bing searches have less advertising than Google, so Bing’s right hand column is often blank, where Google’s is crowded with ads.  In my opinion, it has Google beat on visual appeal.
The left column, with its related searches and categories (depending on what you search for), is attractive and useful. I prefer it to the way Google simply adds its related searches to the bottom of the results. I also found the related searches to frequently be very relevant. Clearly their semantic search technology is working well.  They are making a very nice attempt at giving searchers results that relate to the intent in their search, and not necessarily just the keywords they searched on. I think this is an admirable goal, and it is well executed.
But they key to search is still relevancy. And Google still has the edge here. I did dozens of searches, and most of Bing’s results were good, but they occasionally gave less relevant or less trustworthy results than Google did, or failed to understand my query as well as Google did. For example, on the search “flight boston to la”, Google knew “la” meant “Los Angeles”. Bing gave me results for La Guardia, la+caruna (Spain), and most notably, it’s #1 result was for flightclubla.com – an online store that sells trendy shoes and baseball hats. Oops.
Shopping
Bing does have some nice features when shopping. For example, take a search on “canon sd1000″. Above the results is a nice layout featuring an image of the product, links to user reviews, expert reviews, ratings, and a way to shop for it. That is pretty useful information, and it is presented nicely. On the other hand, the first link in the search results is for canonsd1000salereview.com, which is clearly a spammy result. Google gives you the official Canon site first, Bing gives it to you second. Then Bing goes on to divide the results on the page into categories like “Canon SD1000 Review” and “Canon SD1000 Accessories”, which also can be very useful.
With travel, there is a similar presentation for cheap tickets that takes you directly to Bing Travel – which I am assuming is a great way for Microsoft to earn money from this traffic. I played with it for a while, and cannot say yet whether this is any improvement over simply using Orbitz or other similar services. But it certainly appears to be putting the money in Microsoft’s pocket.
In conclusion, Bing is a big improvement over MSN Live. It is attractive, and it’s related searches, image and video results are well done. It can deliver shopping related information nicely. How much market share it will gain as a result remains to be seen. I estimate that it should experience some growth with the new changes and the promotional blitz that is bound to follow. It now just needs to improve the relevancy and trustworthiness of its results to be a real threat to Google.
Comments on this entry are closed.