I have been playing with Microsoft’s new search engine, ‘Bing.com‘ and you know what, I like what I see. Its fast, uncluttered and the results are none too shabby either. The left hand pane of the results shows ‘Related Searches’, which I always feel that the typical searcher will turn to more if they can’t find what they are looking for on the 1st or even 2nd page.
OK, its not ground breaking as both Yahoo! and Google have offered this for some time but it’s the positioning which is impressive : top left of the page under a nice eye catching orange header, Bada Bing, I feel Microsoft have created the first Teflon Don Search Engine by creating a spiffy, smart and unfearless appearance to display its results within.
I also played around with bing.com/webmaster tools last night, and while it does try to be its own model you get the feeling that its just Google webmaster tools laced up in a strait jacket. However, back to the Bada Bing Search Engine. Will it be a serious contender to Google? Probably not. Will it help gain more searchers to its engine? Yep, it’s got me for starters, that’s 1 more at least than Live had last week.
Microsoft’s marketing arm is at full pelt at this moment in time, reminding us all it’s a ‘descision engine’ and not a ‘search engine’, their even rumours that their about to throw $80m to $100m to hook people on that term. You say ‘Tomato Sauce’, I’ll say, ‘Red Sauce’ please.
I’m not 100% sold on the little descriptive box that appears to the right of a vertical result, its a tad annoying but interesting at the same time, much like a 6 year old hyped on fizzy juice. To end, I’m liking this new fresh look from MS, I only hope the public like it too.
Update : Thanks to Joe Hall of Search Engine Journal fame, who brought to everyone’s attention the manners of Bing in changing its SERP title tags to adequate the search query to help increase click through rates. Seemingly, it is taking the most specific anchor text to a domain as a semantic relational query. My initial analogy of Bing in a friendly mobster manner is holding true. This is one search engine who ain’t happy with its current territory grounds and will play hard to increase its reach. Bing is no mild mannered crooner, it’s a serious approach by Microsoft to eventually take a decent share of the search engine market and yes, I still like it, even more so now.
That would explain the odd-title tags I was finding in Bing.
My concern with bing is that it just looks like Google with a typically-microsoft background image.
When it comes to competing with Google Ben, I think you need to ask, ‘why try and re-invent the wheel’, more benificial to get the relevancy right, then you have a chance in grabbing a share of the search market. Just my 2p worth