In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft just released their latest incarnation of the search engine, Bing. This search engine replaces the old Microsoft MSN “Live Search”. With $80 million in marketing from Microsoft’s deep pockets, Microsoft hopes that their search engine may compete against Google’s monopoly on search traffic. This is an uphill battle considering that Google still holds about 68% of all search traffic while Bing only garnered 8% on the onset of the launch.
What are some of the differentiators of Bing? The most significant visual change is how Bing organizes search results into categories on the left column (called the Explore Pane). The Explore Pane organizes your search results into different categories, depending on the subject matter. A search of “Obama” provides categories of News, Issues, Facts, Biography, Childhood, Speeches, Images, Videos. The search results main page is clustered accordingly for usability.
One more of the more interesting things about Bing is the ability to recommend related search as shown in the left column “Explore Pane”.
IMO, the most interesting, yet buried and unexplored, part of Bing is the ability to create real-time search, particularly on Twitter and presumably other social media properties. At present, this is a proof of concept that is not really implemented. By Microsoft’s own admission, only a few prominent Twitter users are being indexed, including such major twitter accounts like Al Gore and Ryan Seacrest. However, Microsoft has committed about $11 billion over the next 5 years to this technology.
This has great implications for search marketing and social media. If Bing (and eventually Google and Yahoo) is able to create real-time search, social media will then become an important, viable strategy for search marketing and search engine optimization. Today, it is difficult to quantify the results of social media (just as it is difficult to quantify the results of PR). However, if Tweets frequency is used as part of the algorithm for ranking, companies will be forced to look at social media as an important part of the overall search strategy.
We will have to see how this plays out in the next few years. I’m quite certain that this will happen eventually. It may not be Twitter specifically, but there’s always value in immediate real-time user-generated data, where the data may come from Tweeter, Facebook status, or Myspace bulletins.
#search, #socialmedia