1) You need to factor Bing into your plans. Whatever you think about the long-term future of the Bing, in the short-term at least we know that Microsoft is going to be throwing some big marketing dollars at it so for that reason alone its worth making sure that you're presence on the service is optimised.
Confusingly for search marketers Bing ranks some sites very differently from Google, meaning that sites that dominate the Google SERPs (search engine results pages) might be near invisible on Bing. You need to optimise your pages for Bing now to make the most of the inevitable traffic spike that will follow the launch and subsequent offline marketing campaign.
2) This is going to drive innovation. We've already seen Google step up its innovation, in the form of its recently announced Twitter partnership, and we're hopefully going to see something of a feature war between the two engines as they fight for market share. Bing has its own Twitter partnership in place and its recently announced Wolfram Alpha deal will see it serve up some really advanced results to specific searches.
This particular deal does, however, flag up the risk of feature bloat - it's likely that Wolfram Alfa results are going to take a while to load up and we know that immediacy is a significant consumer demand. Unless Bing looks at some sort of major infrastructure update, like Google's caffeine, then it could lose out on a key area of service delivery.
3) Offline marketing isn't everything. Players in the search space have been trying above-the-line marketing for years now, and there's no proof that it's an effective way to drive market share. Ask.com has been advertising on the Underground, Yahoo! has been buying billboards - and neither of them can really claim market dominance!
Its possible that a significant investment in marketing by Bing could push Google to market its brand in areas where it's less than comfortable, but it's always stayed away from brand advertising in the past and it would take a lot for it to change this approach.
4) Its all about the product. Whatever Bing does in the long-term it's going to be product, not marketing, that defines the outcome of the search wars. Google's dominance was built on product excellence and the nature of search is such that utility always wins over brand.
Unless Bing can consistently deliver better, more relevant and more valuable results than Google against both generic and niche terms then it hasn't got a chance of making an impact on Google's user numbers.
5) Its probably not Google that should be worried. Whilst the world's focus is going to be on how Bing impacts on Google, the real shift of users is more likely to be from other tier two and three engines towards Bing, rather than from Google.
Ask.com and Yahoo! both look vulnerable to a well marketed product that delivers decent results. Clearly stealing these player's market share isn't going to let Bing become the market leader, but it's a start for them and should probably be a key part of their marketing ambitions.
The launch of Bing is a major development for search marketers, but we've seen many, many players try and fail to take on Google at their own game. Microsoft has been trying to gain a decent foothold in the search market for years, with relatively little success, so its questionable how much difference they can make now. That said, this is probably the most serious competition that Google's yet had to face, so we're in for an interesting time at the very least.
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