With a marketing budget between $80 to $100 million, Microsoft is going to try very hard get Bing a large share of the search engine market. And apparently they are making headway:
The qSearch analysis revealed that Microsoft Sites’ average daily penetration among US searchers reached 16.7% during the work week of June 8-12, up three percentage points from 13.8% during the May 25-29 work week prior to Bing’s introduction, MarketingCharts observes.
Sergey Brin, according to insider sources at Google, is working with his team to learn more about the search algorithm being used in Bing decision engine. While this is leading many to infer that Bing is shaking things up at Google, and even that Bing has them a little scared, Microsoft revamps their search engine and repackages it quite often. This is nothing new. While there are enhanced opportunities for search engine marketers, Google has a large established user base – in short, it is a mammoth in the search world. While the hype is likely leading many to “try it out”, eventually the momentum will slow and users will return to what they know best.
Microsoft is packing their team, however, with former key members of the Yahoo and Google teams, hiring VP of Operations at Yahoo Kevin Timmons, Yongdong Wang, former Yahoo VP of International Search and Knut Risvik, who was a Google Engineering Director and previously worked at Yahoo as a Chief Architect after Yahoo acquired Overture.
These are the top features of Bing:
Auto-Suggest – Offers intelligent alternatives for search queries
Instant Answers – Serves up information within search results, eliminating the need to click on anything
Best Match – Provides useful links and information for definitive sites
Related Searches – Points to deeper information available with one click
Deep Links – Enables easy, direct access to relevant content within a site
Quick View – Summarizes a Web site at a glance, before clicking through to the site
Smart Video Preview – Previews a 30-second clip of videos simply by scrolling onto them
Infinite Scroll – Provides easily browsed image results without clicking to a new page
Quick Tabs – Tailors search results with one click
While Microsoft insists that search engine optimization strategies need not be affected by the new algorithm, there are some interesting new features to Bing that one must consider when search engine optimizing for Bing.
Categories and long tail
When one searches the results in Bing, following the results for that specific search string, there will be additional categories that offer greater opportunity to appear on the first page. For example, when searching “food”, you will first be greeted with results for “food” followed by categories within food: food types, recipes, catering, tips for food.
Best match – sitelinks and internal search
When Microsoft is assured that your site is the best match for the user’s search, then it will attribute your site as best match. With three levels of “trust” Microsoft will offer sitelinks, search the site or a search form based on specific site criteria, such as UPS Track a Package.
Page preview with deep links
When the searcher passes the mouse over the page preview link, they are given a small preview of what appears on the page, and in some cases deep links within the site. Some webmasters feel that this will limit the amount of searchers who will visit the site itself, in which case there are options for disallowing this.
Popularity: 6% [?]
The recent “crisis” over the Google PR loss of many websites and blogs has caused many SEOs and bloggers alike to question the real value and accuracy of PR (though many in the SEO and SEM industries and otherwise have been thinking this for a long time). Some major sites have had their PR “fixed” (because elitism always enhances the user experience, and this is the point, right?) but many smaller sites are left wondering: WTF?