There's a New Dog in Town!

Who's better at Search Eric or Bing?

We've got a new boy on the Zelst team this month in the shape of our new top dog, Eric.

In fairness, Eric has mainly been brought in for reception and security duties however our new boy has already taken to Search like a duck to water, although he's also heavily into chewing, causing mischief and weeing in inappropriate places.

There's also another new dog in the search world this month (though I'm not sure how happy Microsoft will be referring to their new product as a dog) when Bing was launched on the unsuspecting world on the 3rd of June.

Bing is the latest attempt by Microsoft to get into search and compete with Google. Microsoft is spending $100m (even using Google Adsense as part of its campaign) to promote a rebrand of Microsoft's search product, after Live search, Windows Live Search, MSN search and all the other incarnations.

But Bing is more than just a rebrand, apparently!

The most striking difference in the photo image on the home page, which rotates each day and is certainly more striking than the competition, though it would be nice if Bing told you where the location of the image was in a more helpful fashion. The image is meant to contain a special hidden hotspot that leads you to more information about the subject, however I haven't found it yet. Have you?

There's also some snazzy new features in the results page, such as a little preview of the page in the results and the video search which lets you watch videos without leaving the search engine. But what about the results, surely the acid test?  There are undoubted differences with Google and Yahoo's algorithm and some quite considerable ranking differences as a result. Google's Matt Cutts has twittered at some length about Bing's deficiencies and Google's CEO Eric Schmidt has been less than complimentary about his new competitor. Bing is very much in Beta and there are sure to be some significant changes to be made before it is fully rolled out.

Other current features include:-

• Bing displays fewer results if it's sure it's understood your requirement. A search for 'Facebook', for example, brings up only one result linking to the site, with a number of other 'related searches.
• Dividing some searches into categories, e.g. if you search for a popular celeb like  'Paris Hilton', you'll get results in the categories news, images, video, biography and the "Rank (tm)"!
• In spite of the attractive background image (there we go again you can tell I like it!), Bing's homepage loads really quickly in your browser because the search box and logo load first. You have the option to turn off the background image if you really want to, but why would you?.
• Bing offers special search engines for travel, health and shopping, as well as instant answers to travel searches.
• An infinite image search apparently!
• There are, however, some popular Google features that are missing e.g., Bing doesn't seem to recognize misspellings and returns no results in those instances unlike Google's helpful prompts!

Will Bing succeed? That very much depends on whether it will be used. The question, imho, is whether sufficient numbers of people will switch from Google, which then rather depends on why you would want to.

Has Bing done enough to warrant people switching? Well, apart from the attractive image, I'm not convinced and they've got a lot of catching up to do.

Zelst Analytics saw a significant increase in traffic from Bing compared to its MSN/Live! predecessors though whether this can/is being maintained is a different story. Bing seems to have surged with the novelty factory, overtaking Yahoo as the number two search engine, however this appears to be short-lived and Yahoo's CEO doesn't appear worried.

A stronger rival to AdWords would certainly be welcome but, again, this depends on market share and how Microsoft improve their PPC offer, which currently does lag behind Google's by a country mile.

I wonder how Eric would respond to the name 'Bing'.

Will Bing affect you? People are using it and it is returning results. Microsoft Adcentre/Bing PPC offers a cheaper, though arguably poorer quality, alternative to AdWords and we recommend it on campaigns over a certain size. You need to be found in Bing and we are naturally optimising for Bing and following it for you. Call us to see how Bing could help you.

Interested in learning more, take a look at this video, here.