Have you had a look at Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing.com? It may not be a dragon (Google) slayer but from what I can see it is a pretty solid search engine with some nice features and I genuinely hope it garners a bit more market share than its predecessor, Live.com. While Google is a great search engine, competition in the market can only be a good thing for site owners and search engine marketers.
The most obvious of Bing’s features appear to the left and right of the search results. Once you have done your search you can look through the main results or choose to explore some of the additional information offered.
On the left, you’ll see related searches and other information, depending on what queries you entered. For example if you search for an actor or author, you might see links to biographical information, interviews and their movies/books. If you search for a place, the left side of the page will display links to weather, maps, airports, etc. A search for a sports team shows scheduling and ticket information.
When you mouse over the main results you’ll see a little orange dot appear on the right side of each listing. Mouse over it to see more detail on the information contained on that page. Nifty - gives you a little more to go on before you decide if that’s the page you want to visit.
There is a lot more to Bing than that, so I’d encourage you to check it out and let us know what you think.
Will Bing be able to pull some market share away from Google? While I would like to see that happen, I’m not optimistic. Google has become so dominant that many people don’t even think of searching anywhere else. Trying to break that habit may be too much to hope for, even for Microsoft.
