By Michael Behrens, VP eMarketing
Maybe, not yet. However, if I were Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz I would not be as dismissive as her latest comments indicate…
“I don’t know if Bing means a whole lot to Yahoo. I think people will go to Bing because they are curious. I think they will get some uplift, but people will keep their same habits.”
I was at Microsoft for two days last week, test driving BING and a whole host of new upgrades to the Sponsored Search (launched a couple weeks back) and some pending additions that will monetize Bing. I have to say I am pretty impressed. I guess I should have been convinced something was different when I heard about the $100,000,000 ad campaign allocated to launch Bing, but I was not. I mean, it’s Microsoft. We know they have the pockets and the desire to be a player in search but to date, they never really seemed to understand search. One thing that Microsoft gets: search is far from optimal and evolution to search needs to occur. Okay, that’s two things. 42% of all searches are refined, but 99% of users say they are happy with the search engines… HUH? So, why all the search refinement? Obviously there is room for improvement. The refinement mainly stems from a lack of the search engines understanding the intent of a searcher. Uncovering intent is the Holy Grail for a search engine and the motivation behind BING.
Decision Engine
Bing is positioned not as a search engine but as a decision engine. A decision engine is designed to minimize the inefficiencies a search engine has when trying to satisfy a user’s intent (not Microsoft’s definition, just one I made up). According to BING a decision engine is made up of three core components, Search, Intelligent Organization, and Decision Tools (this is a Microsoft definition).
Satisfying Intent
Microsoft’s desire is not only to provide “links” to destinations that may assist users in having their intent satisfied but to actually satisfy the intent, or at least a portion of it right there on BING. There seems to be 4 categories that BING believes a decision engine is more optimal than a search engine: Travel, Shopping, Local, and Health. These 4 categories make up about 32% of search. Try a search for “Seattle to Los Angeles” or a search for “Canon Cameras” and you will be able to experience the difference that includes price comparisons, reviews, tables of content, images, and segmented organic listings by popular classes, and even a predictive modeling engine that recommends if you should buy your plane ticket now or wait for a better deal.
Evolving Search
BING is only one of a few innovations to launch recently focusing on evolving search. Google recently upgraded their search experience with recency filters, review search, and video search. Also we recently saw the launch of Wolfram Alpha. The launch of Wolfram Alpha caused quite a little buzz at our agency. One of engineers was so happy to see the evolution away from links to answers, sending a plethora of internal emails full of optimism that destination based search engines were on their way to extinction. For example if you type in “Who is the President of the USA?” in Google, you get links to whitehouse.gov, a Wikipedia listing, but nowhere on the page do you see the name Barack Obama. In Wolfram Alpha, the first two words you see are “Barack Obama”. No links. Just an answer.
So does BING solve the challenges of decoding intent? No, but it is a creative and most importantly different way of addressing the issue, moving it from a “me too search engine” to an “alternative solution”, a Decision Engine.
BTW, here is the screen shot for “Who is the president of the usa?” on BING…
