The name of Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, which was unveiled officially at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle this week, is an absolute gift for journalists, headline writers and bloggers alike, writes Mead. Microsoft's PR includes the explanation that Bing is ‘the sound of found' but the peoples choice so far is undoubtedly Seth Godin's take on Bing as an acronym for ‘But It's Not Google'!
So is it a challenger? Well, tradition dictates that one of the first few lines in any review of a new search engine includes the words ‘Google Killer?' but killing Google, if it ever happens, will be a process, a journey and not a knock out blow. Microsoft has much bigger (or should that be smaller?) things to think about first, such as becoming the number two player in the search market ahead of Yahoo!. So let's lower the bar and skip to a look at the product itself.
First look
Microsoft has billed Bing as a ‘decision engine' which aims to help users in four key online objectives; making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition and finding a local business. I like the focus on these four areas as it taps into the way that the search industry is developing around deeper, vertical products.
Functionality and features
The results page is clean and simple though slightly dated in my eyes. It's got some nice filtering and sub search options displayed in a box on the left and an Ask.com style preview area on the right hand side which enables users to take a look at the page content before clicking through.
One of its key features is the way search results are categorised. For example a search for Sony Vaio brings back results grouped as ‘support', ‘parts', ‘downloads', 'images'. Unfortunately the categories don't always include what's most useful. What about ‘product reviews' or ‘user reviews' for example, which I would argue are much more important than ‘parts' or ‘images' in a purchase decision.
Video search is another plus point on Bing which returns results from a wider range of sources than ‘just' YouTube. Users can hover over the video thumbnail and watch a short clip of the video before clicking through which is a nice feature that Google doesn't offer.
Bing also seems to have integrated Microsofts long list of acquisitions such as Jellyfish, Farecast and Multimap more effectively than previous offerings.
Quality of results
The quality of the search results is good but not game changing. I found that many searches lacked the richness and variety of Google, with searches for popular brand/product combinations totally dominated by the brand site which in some cases was the source of 60 per cent of the first page results. Commercial sites which do very well organically on Google such as price comparison engines seem to feature much less prominently on Bing. This is interesting bearing in mind Google's moves to tighten up any ‘secondary listing' sites (i.e. sites such as price comparison which display another set of results rather than the final destination site). In Bing's case this feature of organic listings could result in a higher percentage of users clicking on the sponsored search results as reviews and price comparison are very popular with consumers.
The verdict
Bing is a decent enough product but I can't help feeling that with a bit more thought, alongside the resources and the undoubtedly very smart people at Microsoft, it could have been so much better. With a reported $100 million advertising campaign it will certainly get a big spike in traffic but Ask.com has tried this before without success. The real test will be how many of those users end up being ‘tyre kickers' who quickly fall back to Google. From an advertising and search marketing perspective I expect that this will put Microsoft back onto many major search plans where they have fallen off in the past due to the opportunity cost of managing a third engine with such low traffic and market share.
I like the brand name, despite all the gags around it. It's short, it's sweet and as Steve Balmer said it ‘verbs up' nicely, something which certainly can't be said of MSN Search or Live Search!
The battle is very much on between Yahoo! and Microsoft for the number two position in search. Now just imagine if those two got together....
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