Every now and then something comes along to shake up the world of search and search marketing. Microsoft has just launched a new service that they hope will be one of those big things to shake up searching, and they call it Bing.
Bing is not a normal search engine– instead, it bills itself as a ‘decision engine’. What this means is that instead of searching for a general keyword or key phrase and getting info from any number of angles as they might relate to that keyword or phrase, a user might type in a keyword that they have a query about in order to find out the answer (not just general information surrounding the term). This means everything from ‘Fitness’ returning results for calorie calculations and workout routines because it intuits the user wants fitness advice to ‘LAX to LaGuardia’ returning online booking options and itineraries for flights from LA to NYC.
How exactly SEO and Organic Search Placement factor into the results presented by this new ‘decision engine’ will be fascinating to develop understanding with, and it can be assured that the search community at large (not just us here at Search Placement!) will be diligently reverse-engineering the results of thousands of searches to gain such familiarity– and how it can be put to use for our clients.
What will also be interesting to observe will be the marketshare Bing stakes out for itself as a niche ‘decision engine’ in the world of Google’s hegemony and the type of searching users have gotten used to. As it stands, Bing is outpacing Yahoo! in terms of search volume; however, some of that flow can be attributed to the ‘new and shiny’ effect that loses its lustre in relatively short order. Will Bing hang on in the #2 spot? Microsoft surely hopes so, and we’ll see for ourselves over the next few months.
