SEO Agency: The New Search Engine from Microsoft Bing

There is a lot of buzz in the SEO services industry about the new search engine from Microsoft called Bing. Can Bing really make a dent on Google's huge share of the search engine market? This is not the first time Microsoft has launched a search engine they have tried 3 times in the past with unsuccessful attempts at winning increased market share of the search engine market.

As an SEO agency it is essential that you keep up with the latest search engine enhancements. Although it is likely the majority of traffic comes from Google the other search engines can bring incremental traffic to your site. For a search engine optimiser to ignore the other search engines is a big mistake as who knows Bing might achieve what it has set out to do and significantly increase it's share of the market, although in reality this is unlikely!

History of Microsoft Search Engines

The timeline shows the previous offerings Microsoft have launched. None of the previous attempts of creating a competent search engine have made any impact on Google's popularity. Microsoft's share of the UK market has in fact continued to decline. Over the past 3 years their share of search has fallen from 8.55% to 3.51% according to Hitwise.

Google continues to dominate the search engines share of traffic owning 86.94% of the UK search market according to the latest Hitwise figures. The continued growth of Google's share of this market is not only eating into Microsoft's share Yahoo Search now only has a 2.8% share of the market.

How does Bing differ to Google?

Apparently Bing does much more than search for relevant links. It retrieves and processes data, and renders it smartly. Bing has introduced a lot of new features in an attempt to lure you into using it instead of Google.

Related Search

The first noticeable difference of Bing from Live Search is the related search panel down the left hand side. Which you can see in the image is denoted by the red box. This list of related searches is not dissimilar to the new functionality being offered by Google. It is indeed an enhancement to the search results but nothing that Google has not already produced.

There is no doubt the Bing algorithm works differently to Google. We know this because if you type the same search query into both engines you get slightly different results. Take a look at the results for London restaurant for both Bing and Google.

According to Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi they "have taken the algorithmic programming up an order of magnitude". Microsoft is pitching Bing as a decision engine; each search result page is customised according to the type of search performed (health, travel, shopping, news, sports).

The algorithms determine not only the order of results on the page, but the layout of the page itself, and what sections appear. These sections can include comparison pricing, reviews, images and a list of related searches in the left-hand pane including images, videos, and local results. Bing is what is known as a semantic search engine bringing meaning to search queries rather than displaying a bunch of results based on the keywords you use.

By using Powerset technology Bing also has a cool previews and snippets of text function that appears when you hover over a natural search result. This is indicated by the red box below.

Bing will continue to roll out more features as time goes on. But from what I have seen so far I think Microsoft will be successful in gaining some market share with the new Bing search engine, whether this be from Google, Yahoo or AOL I do not know.