Okay I guess the buzz on Bing has died down a little. When it first came out, everyone is eating up their marketing spiel about Bing’s capability to “help you make decisions.” My initial reaction was: “What!? Somehow they have gathered enough information on me, and know how my mind works, to help me make my decisions now?” I had reasons to worry.
But a few quick searches on Bing helped put my worries at ease. Bing gives search results. Bing doesn’t help you make decisions, it’s just a search engine. I said “just” because Microsoft had search engines before (MSN and Live) and it’s not meant to belittle Bing. But to me Bing looks like a search engine with some pre-programmed searches, if you will, plus other new features.
Some people can argue that if Bing gives you search results then it’s helping you make decisions. They must have been living under a rock, because all search engines do this! What matters most to me is being able to find relevant information to make my own decisions.
According to Bing on itself (meaning I typed “what is Bing” into Bing,) this is what I got
Bing is a search engine that finds and organizes the answers you need so you can make faster, more informed decisions.
The question becomes, how does Bing find and organize the information I need to make my own decisions, that live.com or msn.com didn’t? Microsoft (MS) has been consistently third in the search engine war and is trying to improve traffic. With a reported marketing campaign upwards of $80-100 million, I think MS would be better off revamping their search (which they did,) and running $100 lottos every hour with the winners selected from Bing searchers. That would get their usage up against Google and Yahoo.
But do you know what’s real interesting? I still can’t get Bing to help me make my decision to use it regularly, or at all.
For SEOs who want to take a closer look at Bing SEO, Benj Arriola has some good views in his article “MSN, then Live, now Bing – What do SEOs need to know?” at BusinessOnLine.com.
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Tags: Bing, microsoft, search engines, search results
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