Bing: A Welcome Addition to the Search World

I decided to give Bing 100% of my searches for one week to see if they’d con­vert me, and I’m happy to say that three days in I’m very impressed. Much has been writ­ten about the spe­cific fea­tures but I’m not only impressed with those (more on that below), I’m impressed with their entire approach.

I like the catchy name, I like that they’re call­ing them­selves a “deci­sion engine” and I like the way the ad cam­paign tied in the recent finan­cial melt­down, but most impor­tantly I like the way they’ve tar­geted “head” queries. It’s true they do not do as well on “tail” terms if you’re look­ing for a very spe­cific response (their data­base is clearly not as large as Google’s), but I like how they cat­e­go­rize results for queries like “San Fran­cisco” by show­ing top results then Weather-related results…

…then Hotels, Restau­rants and Maps below that.

To truly com­pete with Google and gain 30–50% mar­ket share, they’re going to have do a lot more. I’d like to see them do the fol­low­ing and really change the Search game:

• Buy Twit­ter: real-time search is here to stay and would be a wel­come addi­tion to Bing’s search results

• Inte­grate Dis­play ads into their search results

• Intro­duce CPM pric­ing to the Search world for brand cam­paigns: many search mar­keters sim­ply want impres­sions on high vol­ume queries or to sup­port large brand cam­paigns, why not give them what they want?

• Main­tain their high qual­ity con­tent net­work but get into the long-tail con­tent net­work Google is cur­rently dominating

• Fight more aggres­sively on dis­tri­b­u­tion rela­tion­ships — they may never wrest AOL from Google given the Tim Arm­strong rela­tion­ship, but if they’re will­ing to spend $100MM on an ad cam­paign they should be will­ing to pay pub­lish­ers higher rates than Google

• Com­pete more aggres­sively for mobile search volume

• Inte­grate Bing all through­out the Microsoft prod­uct suite: I’d like to see a search box on every Win­dows desk­top, a search box in the top right cor­ner of Excel, Word, Pow­er­point, Out­look and so on, a search box in the Win­dows Media Player and on and on. Peo­ple want to search the Web from what­ever appli­ca­tion they’re in so let’s get the Bing peo­ple to walk across the Microsoft cam­pus to the Win­dows build­ing and inte­grate Search into every­thing Microsoft does

• And finally, they should buy Yahoo! Search: this last move would cer­tainly make the game more inter­est­ing and pro­vide a viable threat to Google

Let’s hope Bing is more than just a flash in the pan and con­tin­ues to make inter­est­ing, aggres­sive moves in the next year. The Search mar­ket needs diver­sity and so far Bing is show­ing they came to play.

For more on how Omni­ture has quickly responded to the Bing launch, see this great post from Ben Gaines.