Bing, who is actually reaping the benefits?
Microsoft Corp. registered a 0.4% increase in their search market share in June at the slight expense of Yahoo! not Google, said comScore.
The bigger picture of the worldwide search market now looks like this (figures updated on July 9th):
- Google 90.85%
- Yahoo: 4.26%
- Bing: 3.04%
32% of Bing visitors come from the US, taking BING’s search market share in the US to 8.45% (StatCounter, June 2009), an additional 0.4%, whilst Google remains stable at 65%. However in the UK Bing only represents 2.56% of the search market.
What’s in it for users?
Microsoft presented Bing not as a search engine, but as a decision search engine, offering more contextual, relevant results to help decision making.
First of all, next to search results, on hover, users can display a text snippet containing additional information on the website in question. I found this quite handy and user friendly.
Once you have typed in a search term, the results page displays ‘related searches’ to help you broaden your search. For example searching for dslr cameras, Bing suggested: dslr camera reviews, Sony dslr cameras, Pentax dslr cameras, top 10 dslr cameras..
Video search results – Bing presents some nifty functionality in this area. Following the same philosophy as the text snippet available for each website suggested, hovering on a video result will start playing a video preview.
Shopping Aid tools – Any search will display ’shopping results’ (provided you’ve clicked on Shopping at the top), eg. sponsored links from retailers, offers, other related searches, along with consumer reviews. Google doesn’t do as much in this area.
Overall, some nice features, but nothing groundbreaking though. That said, it is worth mentioning the tests carried out by BlindSearch (http://blindsearch.fejus.com/). These showed that all 3 search engines SERP proved close enough to each other in terms of quality. And more importantly, neither Google nor Yahoo, nor Bing particularly stood out from the crowd from a user perspective.
What’s in it for advertisers?
Like on Google, sponsored links are displayed on top and on the right hand side, but also at the bottom, which Google doesn’t do. Bing thus makes more use of the page space to display sponsored results – but some critics say SERPs on Bing tend to look like advertising billboards.
The advanced search functionalities that Bing offers in travelling and shopping may well attract advertisers in these verticals.
Microsoft search engines have been known so far for delivering good ROI on Pay-Per-Click campaigns, but advertisers also always complained about low traffic.
However, Microsoft has now taken out Microsoft Content Network out of beta, in the hope to catch up with what Google AdSense currently offers to content publishers. This should positively increase advertisers’ reach.
And Efficient Frontier, allegedly placing $750 million in text ads on search engines per year, recently said that in the 2 weeks since Bing switched from Live, clicks went up 13%. One is tempted to ask though whether conversion rates were at least maintained.
So, who does really benefit from Bing?
Users? Not really.
A study comparing Google and Bing from a user preference perspective (in the US), published by Catalyst Group in June, revealed 3 things:
1. The design and layout of Bing got the thumbs up over Google’s.
2. SERP relevancy was perceived as similar in both cases.
3. 1 and 2 are not enough reasons to shake people’s habit. Most respondents reckoned they would not switch from Google to Bing.
So by the look of it, Bing’s small market share increase (over Live) may have well resulted from the extensive (and expensive) marketing campaign run by Microsoft in the US, and the interest generated.
Advertisers? This remains to be seen.
Bing seems to be more consumer focused in the way it displays search results, but is it what people want?
Microsoft? Maybe.
The promises of ‘unlimited’ advertising revenues lying in the search market are at stake for Microsoft. A few days ago, CEO Steve Ballmer announced that the Redmond firm would be looking to invest up to 10% of Microsoft’s operating income in search for the next 5 years.
However the success of this venture still entirely remains in users’ hands. Neither a ‘me too’ product, nor a massive advertising budget have seemed capable of so far overturning the dominance of Google. Microsoft has been trying to gain market share by offering an enhanced user experience, but studies show that it is not working so well. So will real innovation be the only way out for Microsoft’s search engine? Probably.
