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Has Microsoft unleashed a Google killer?

Posted on: Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Riding on a multi million dollar marketing budget, Microsoft have launched their new search engine – Bing – rumoured to be a replacement to Live Search. Currently in beta, this new challenger for the top spot is certainly pleasing on the eye. With appealing background graphics and muted tones it will probably enjoy good acceptance in the broader community, but will that be enough to dominate the search engine space?

The technology behind Bing is the Microsoft “decision” engine. In practice that means the engine interprets your search term and, along with the results, also offers a list of alternative searches that may help you find what you are looking for. For my search for “lunch in Sydney”, limiting results to sites only in Australia, Bing offered alternatives such as Christmas Lunch In Sydney, Sunday Lunch In Sydney, Cup Lunch In Sydney and Lunch In Sydney amongst others.

By categorising generic search terms, the decision engine attempts to improve the delivery of accurate results. Whether this will work in the long term is being enthusiastically debated. Will it be enough to knock Google to its knees? Probably not.

Google has earned its spot at the top with 10 years of development. Releasing increasingly complex algorithms to keep up with the rapidly evolving Internet, social media, the uptake of multimedia and leading the way in many technologies that are commonly taken for granted.

A usability study conducted in the USA by User Centric found that 42% of participants looked at the sponsored ads in Bing against only 25% with Google. This suggests that generic results will largely be ignored in Bing however the figure can probably be explained as participants being inquisitive. The study also showed that Bing had a great lead for “related searches” attracting 31% of testers against only 5% in Google, again probably curiosity. The bottom line, click through results on ads, was fairly even for both engines.

While it’s unlikely that Bing will overrun Google in the short term, Internet marketers are certainly going to be following developments closely.

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