Microsoft's Bing Search Engine Takes Over?

With commercials for their new search engine on just about every channel on television, Microsoft has re-invented itself with a new search engine touting to be a "decision engine". It debuted on June 3rd and has already taken the search engine industry by storm. Most experts now agree that it has surpassed Yahoo as the second leading search engine and that it won't be long before it takes over Google as the most preferred search engine out in the marketplace today.

Microsoft is using techniques with this search engine that are not necessarily unique or new, but it is yet to be seen if people will ultimately like them long term. First and foremost is the 20 results per page instead of the common 10 result page that people are accustomed to in most search engines. Microsoft is also betting pretty heavily that people will also be clicking on the links that lead you to various groups on the related topics that you have ultimately selected as your search term. The concept of grouping results also is not new. Long known as clustering, you can see it in use at other search engines like Hakia, Clusty, and others. Microsoft claims that they are putting their own unique spin on it hoping to draw your attention to the non-organic search results and more so on the sponsored links. Personally, their pages look too busy and whether it will work or not is yet to be seen. Some experts are betting that the various sub-headings are distracting and will ultimately be overlooked. Keep in mind that Google also has it's own form of clustering in their "related search suggestions".

Advertising with Bing will be discussed further in our next issue of WebTrenz. There are many options when it comes to this new search engine and we believe that in the long run that Bing is here to stay and will rival many other search engines in terms of the best use for your Internet advertising dollar. We have been running tests with respect to how effective their marketing program is. Hopefully we will have more informative information for you relatively soon.

Microsoft has released white papers on SEO advice for Bing called "Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters". This is the second document in as many weeks, as they first put out what they called the " IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit" The PDF document in the "New Features" document does more to describe the user interface changes that launched with Bing, but does go into SEO a little. Overall, the look and feel of Bing is substantially different than most search engines because the organic results are much different in terms of how they show on the page. Microsoft says that over 300 factors go into determining the category results for Bing. In other words, you may search for "Stanley Cup Playoffs". The first five results will yield those results. Then six through eight may show "Stanley Cup Playoff Pictures" because that is what is commonly searched for and then nine through twelve may result in Stanley Cup Statistics" or similar results popular to that particular search.

Microsoft says that this new way of organizing results provides new long tail opportunities for site owners. They suggest determining what entities you most want your site to rank for and then optimizing for the long tail queries within those entities. For instance, if your site is about cars, you'll want to optimize for the car brands (Ford, Chevrolet, etc.) but also car-related categories such as dealers, used, and for sale. That will give you additional opportunities to rank on the first page of results and the ability to stay on top a little more consistently.
There are literally hundreds of other factors that go into this new way of looking at search results. We have been studying this search engine since early April of this year when we were sent links to the early versions of the search engine in Beta, which at that time was called Kumo. If you are interested in discussing optimization of your site for this search engine or the advertising opportunities that have resulted because of the new technology, let us know. We have worked with several site owners since Bing opened up in June.


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