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1st Click Works
What is Bing? Does It Taste Like Cherries?
Try Microsoft's New Search Engine, Bing
Bing is Microsoft’s newly branded search engine. But more is new than the name alone.
With Bing, just launched June 3, Microsoft is attempting to improve its search engine as a marketing and advertising tool. As they describe it, Bing is a “decision engine” integrated with a regular search engine.
Bing is designed to deliver relevant results and organize them in a way that allows a searcher to “make important decisions faster,” according to the company’s press release. It seems clear that the approach is designed to enhance the profitability of advertising on the site—both for Microsoft and for its advertisers.
In creating Bing, the developers say that they “started over.” There is no way to know whether this means that, in addition to organizational changes, the search engine also underwent major algorithmic changes that would alter search results. But, the search engine maintains the "geolocation technology" that has allowed it (as well as Google and Yahoo) to provide search results based upon the location of your own computer's Internet protocol address.
The home page for Bing is beautiful, featuring gorgeous nature photos with “hot spots” of information.
In addition to a general search field, the page includes links to images, videos, shopping, news, maps, and travel.
Bing shopping offers “cash back” when you make a purchase through one of the retailers featured on the site. Details on this offer can be found here.
If you are searching for airfare bargains, though, you should definitely try Bing. Microsoft bought travel site Farecast.com some time ago, and have incorporated it into the Bing search engine. Click on the Travel link and you will have the opportunity to compare prices from more than 100 airline and agency sites on the flight you need. Beyond viewing prices from the airlines themselves, you can also compare those rates with those offered on Priceline., Expedia, Hotwire, BookingBuddy, and American Airlines. Unfortunately, to fly Southwest, you will still need to visit that airlines’ site.
The Farecast technology also has been incorporated into the site. This operates as a predictor of whether rates are rising or falling. Microsoft reports that an independent audit of the technology found that it was nearly 75% accurate in predicting fare changes.
Microsoft reports that so far this year, more than 4 websites go online every second of every day. That creates a lot of information for the search engines to index and organize. Bing is still in its infancy, but if it can meet the goals that Microsoft has set for it, it may be able to increase its usage beyond the 9% market share that the Microsoft search engine has now.
It is difficult to break search habits, but Bing is incorporated into one of the best news and information pages on the web in MSN.com. So, this is definitely something worth watching.
Posted by Janet Macdaniel on 5th June, 2009 | Comments | Trackbacks
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