Will you Bing?

On May 30, Microsoft launched Bing - its latest effort to catch up to Google in the search engine wars.

Previously, Microsoft’s search product was Live Search and the company had been all but written off as a search competitor. Its only obvious hope: acquiring Yahoo. But that was then and this is now. Bing is here and is definitely worth a look.

Microsoft is branding Bing as a “decision engine” as opposed to a search engine and is investing $100m in an ad campaign to introduce consumers to its new product.

Initial reactions to Bing from the media and blogosphere were positive. Some cooler stuff to take note of:

• Bing automatically provides filters and links based on the nature of search results. If you search for a movie title, for instance, it knows to provide links to Images, Soundtrack, Cast, etc.
• When a video is listed in the search results, Bing displays a thumbnail that, when rolled over, actually plays a preview of the video itself. Interestingly, Microsoft is using Flash instead of Silverlight to do this.
• A history of recent searches (which can be cleared or turned off altogether) is kept handy on the left-hand navigation bar.
• By rolling over the area just to the right of each search result, Bing displays a more detailed synopsis of the content on the page, including, where available, contact information and links.
• Bing offers RSS feeds for any search. Just add the URL of your search to an RSS reader and viola!
• Thanks to Microsoft’s ownership of Farecast, Bing Travel is already a pretty comprehensive travel search engine.

While none of these features are going to be called revolutionary (and some of them were actually present with Microsoft’s old Live Search), it’s hard to argue that Microsoft hasn’t done a good job of “putting it all together”.

Early indications are that this has been enough to spark interest. Last week, comScore reported that Microsoft’s share of search results pages increased 2% to 11.1% market share. And Microsoft has done enough with Bing to get the CEOs of Yahoo and Google to comment on it.

Obviously it’s way too early to tell if Bing is going to help Microsoft compete with Google (and Yahoo) but while we wait to see how Bing does over the long haul, you might want to find out how well your website is Binging. Just in case.