Bing Search Engine in Action

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is out. At first glance, it looks better visually than Microsoft’s previous attempt, live.com. The organization of results with easy access to search history, related searches and businesses is well done. I also like the infinite results in Images Search (which live.com also had) and the super-clear (even if slow) Bird’s Eye view in the Maps section. Search seems to be working okay for most items. I faced one issue when it brought up “Derry, NH” as the first result when I searched for my present hometown “Londonderry, NH”.

This is a good attempt by Microsoft, but I am not sure how much market share it can pull from Google at this late juncture in the search game. I know the money is all in the ads part, but Google has created a massive ecosystem with many products that complement its search engine. To name a few, Google Custom Search, Google Webmasters, Google Analytics, FeedBurner, etc. are products that have brought in web developers all over the world into embracing Google search.

Microsoft, to some extent, faces a chicken-and-egg problem. For web developers to take its search engine seriously, it has to show more people using it and clicking through to websites. At that point, developers will start to work about their pages ranking high on Bing and they will clamor for tools. This self-reinforcing cycle will build up the momentum. But at this point, Microsoft search has few users and people are not very bothered with search results on live.com.

Several months ago, when my company was spending money on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft ads, we found that there was little click-through on Microsoft ads. In addition, both as an absolute value and as a proportion of visitors, Microsoft search was way below Google and Yahoo! I noticed the same pattern on my blogs for organic search. Both my blogs have only 0.5% traffic from live.com, while Google has between 80% to 95% of the traffic on any given day.

In general, if you are a web developer, keep monitoring the traffic coming from Bing and until you start seeing an appreciable quantity, you can safely ignore with respect to your development activities.