Bing.com – A Decision Engine

By now, Microsoft clearly understands that world doesn’t need another search engine and it understands how Google makes money on its search engine. It is a multibillion-dollar market, and Microsoft wants to have a slice of the cake. So Microsoft is positioning Bing as a decision engine, renaming Virtual Earth to Bing Maps and making “Farecast technology” part of Bing Travel. Microsoft is also making the mobile edition available for cell phones and other mobile devices at m.bing.com.

Bing - A Decision Engine

With the aim of leading users to more confident decisions, Microsoft identified three design goals to guide the development of Bing:
1. Deliver great results
2. Deliver a more organized experience
3. Simplify tasks and provide insight

Bing also innovates on core search areas such as:

• Entity extraction and expansion
• Query intent recognition
• Document summarization technology
• New user-experience model that adapts to query types to provide relevant and intuitive decision-making tools.
• Deep Links – allows more insight into what resources a particular site has to offer
• Quick Preview – a hover-over window that expands over a search result caption to provide a better sense of the site’s relevancy
• One-click access to information through Instant Answers
• Preview videos in the search without having to visit YouTube directly

In nutshell, this is an attempt is to make Bing well suited for task-centric searches. Many users are impressed by the progress, while Matt Cutts of Google may not be impressed yet. Only time will tell.

Some of the key differentiators from Google are:

• Searches for videos – returns clips that can be watched by simply moving your mouse over the results.
• Cash back – when you buy products from certain merchants that have a Bing symbol displayed next to their links.
• Related searches – Shown in the upper left hand side of the results page
• Travel related searches – searches like “Seattle to NY” return a ticket price at the top of the results.

There is a huge focus on Travel, as Microsoft research shows that 45 percent of people use a search engine to select a flight or hotel. According to a recent survey by Bing Travel, 52 percent of potential travelers search three or more sites before booking their airfare. Forty-two percent of travelers spend between one and four weeks weighing their travel options and 17 percent spend more than a month.

Bing Travel’s key features include the following:

• Price Predictor – Bing Travel predicts whether the price of a flight is going up or down.
• Rate Indicator – Bing analyzes historical rate data from thousands of hotels to determine whether the current price is a good deal, or not a deal at all.
• Travel Deals – Bing Travel shows the best airfare and hotel deals it has and will even show why particular flights are considered deals.
• Comparison Flight & Hotel Search – Bing Travel allows refining results quickly: nonstop flights only, specific airlines, hotels within a mile of an address, and many more.
• Fare Alerts – Most airfare price drops last less than 48 hours, so people need to be ready to jump when a fare falls. Fare Alerts will notify people if the fares for their trips drop, allowing them to catch lower fares.
• Original travel editorial content – Bing Travel combines editorial content from MSN Travel and Farecast to create an in-house team of experts who write daily articles, features, slide shows and blog posts

Microsoft is finally rising to the search engine challenge. Steve Ballmer publically announced his goal of making Bing second most popular search engine in next 5 years. Data issued by Stat Counter on Thursday June 4th 2009, showed that the goal had already been achieved:

• Google: 71.47 percent
• Bing: 16.28 percent
• Yahoo: 10.22 percent

Bing - Stat Counter Global Stats

On a global basis, the company said it saw a similar trend:

• Google: 87.62 percent
• Bing: 5.62 percent
• Yahoo: 5.13 percent

Just for fun, try to search the following on www.Bing.com

• Microsoft
• Google
• Yahoo
• Any other company

All of this is good, now show me the money . Before Google’s debut, all the websites owners were trying to bring people to their web site and keep them on the site. Longer the user stayed on the site, more money site owner made by showing more advertisements. AOL, Yahoo, MSN were all in the same boat. Then came Google. Google makes money when you leave their site. The sooner you click on one of the sponsored links, the faster Google makes money.

Now that you understand the incentive, let’s talk about the behaviors that this incentive drives. Now it has become more important for Google to show you the most relevant advertisements rather than the most relevant search results. This makes the quality of search results a second priority.

To focus on the first priority, Google democratized the advertiser market and brought mom and pop owners to the same level as large corporations by allowing everyone to bid for search words on a level playing field. With these 10’s of millions of advertisers and 100’s of millions of search words up for auction, Google spends most of its efforts and energy on relevance of advertisement rather than search quality.

Yahoo and Microsoft have been evolving on the Search relevance with a hope to catch up with Google, but the main battle is yet to be fought in terms of acquiring the paying advertisers, as these advertisers bring the money to the table.

It once seemed inevitable that Google would forever rule the world of search, but Microsoft and Yahoo are not yet vanquished. Will Microsoft’s knight in shining armor – Bing – prove mightier? Or is the world forever fated to use Google?

 

What are your thoughts on Bing? How do you like the search engine’s results compared to Google’s? Share your thoughts here…