Overview

Microsoft recently relaunched their search platform under a new banner, Bing. The previous incarnation, Microsoft AdCenter, launched a few years ago and has never really challenged Google’s market share leadership. There are three key hurdles Microsoft faces in trying to gain a stronger foothold in the search market:

1. Microsoft has to compete with the familiarity of Google and overcome the habits people have established with it. With people often being creatures of habit, this isn’t easily accomplished.
2. They need to create a product that not only catches up to, but also surpasses the existing market leader with new bells and whistles that users wouldn’t otherwise have access to.
3. Microsoft’s brand is not as strong as Google’s and Google continues to carefully cultivated evangelism toward their brand.

Today’s Opinion

So far most influencers online are panning Bing, but they know that raising the search bar will only elevate everyone else’s game. Microsoft has positioned Bing as a decision making tool, alluding to the fact that this might be the long awaited foray into Web 3.0, also known as the Semantic Web. However, in its current state, Bing is not a product that is revolutionizing search. Microsoft is employing similar strategies they’ve used in the past to incentivize people to use their search platform, such as Club Bing.

There are still some black box features to Bing, but one known feature is the reverse IP look-up executed during a search query. What that enables Bing to do is identify the person’s geographic location and serve localized content and mix it within the results.

They have layered the interface with some nice roll over previewing functionality, added some dynamic global navigation against the search results and other minor bells and whistles; but again it’s basic functionality and results delivery aren’t yet gigantic leaps forward.

Microsoft is spending a lot of money to promote their newest search solution. The ad campaign looks good, but any buzz to date has been manufactured; so the real questions will be answered once the ad dollars cease beyond the launch phase and we’ll see if they maintain growth or even sustain the market share they acquire during the promotional launch period.

What Bing Means to Marketers

So far, Microsoft’s Bing still lags behind Google and Yahoo in market share. There’s no doubt they will gain more ground, which will likely come from setting Bing as the default page in their next Explorer release and embedding it’s search capabilities into Hotmail and other existing Microsoft platforms. For most marketers major changes to SEO and SEM strategies aren’t recommended at this point as it’s worth waiting for to see what adoption rates will look like.