The convenience of a single interface for both Yahoo and Bing is likely bring in more advertisers.  Despite AdCenter’s reputation for delivering a higher ROI than Google, many have found it brings in too little volume to be worth the effort.   But once there is a joint interface, that will no longer be the case.  Those advertising on Yahoo will most likely be automatically transferred over to the new platform, so it will become very easy (and possibly necessary) for them to advertise on Bing.  So Bing not only gets all the current Yahoo advertisers, they should get and influx of new advertisers who may not  be current Yahoo advertisers, but are willing to try the new interface because they cannot ignore the close to 30% market share that Yahoo & Bing will have combined.  So my guess is that many advertisers who have enjoyed a high ROI on Microsoft will start to see more ads competing with them for their keywords, and CPC will go up and ROI down.

The impact on Yahoo should be similar, with an increase in CPC, but to less an of extent than on Bing.  Yahoo already has a lot more advertisers than Bing, so the impact of a few more advertisers should, in general, have less of an effect on prices.   How the results from Bing look on the page could have an impact, but it is difficult to predict what that will be, so we will have to wait and see.

Aside from my concern about a rise in CPC, I look forward to the new joint advertiser platform, even though it is probably close to two years away and still has to pass anti-trust scrutiny.  I am impressed with what Microsoft has done with Bing, and if they take the best of adCenter and Yahoo and add in a few new improvements and tools, it could prove to be a productive and efficient way to reach the 30% of search that anyone who is just using Google is missing.

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.

This has led many people, including myself, to wonder whether this could be a serious competitor to Google, or change the way search is done.  No doubt, there are some searches that will be better served by Wolfram.  That alone leads me to believe that Google could lose some search volume to Wolfram.  The question is how much, and what kind of searches.  I imagine the loss will be small, at least for now.  First, Wolfram is NOT a search engine.   Try doing a search on Wolfram for “top law schools” or “guacamole recipe” – it does not know what to do with queries like that (yet). Second, Google already has basic computational abilities built in like a calculator and measurement conversions (though few people seem to know about them).  Thirdly, I estimate that the number of searches that would be better presented by WolframAlpha is comparatively small, as they are limited mostly to scientific queries. Additionally, those types of searches do not seem likely to be the kind that attract a lot of advertisers, and thus would have a lesser impact on Adwords revenue.

But just the fact that there now exists a site that is actually much better than Google for some searches is groundbreaking.  For example,  if you search “mortgage 5% 30 years” on Wolfram, you immediately get presented with an excellent mortgage calculator.  That definitely beats searching “mortgage calculator” on Google and getting back a list of links to sites that are typically crammed with advertisements.   It is a great way to get direct answers to some questions without having to sort through a list of websites that may or may not contain what you are looking for. Though I am sure that the owners of those sites are not at all happy about the prospect of losing traffic to Wolfram.

Overall, this is an exciting development and a monumental achievement by the folks at WolframAlpha.  How it impacts the search landscape remains to be seen.  But for some, it will certainly prove to be an immensely useful tool.