Microsoft’s new Bing search engine is quite an impressive tool for Web users and online marketers. I read an article in USA Today, entitled Bing it on: Microsoft overhauls search, again, which gives some excellent info about this new search engine.
Bing includes search suggestions on results pages to help people narrow their searches and find exactly what they’re looking for. This is what I talked about in my eHarbor Blog entry, “Paid search about to get complicated.” Web users want to find information, products and services faster, so they’re using an increasing number of keywords in their searches.
Including suggested search terms on a results page is nothing new. Google includes them on many of their results pages, as well.
I noticed there are no paid listings on Bing results pages. Maybe that is because the service is just getting started and has not yet had time to develop pricing and other metrics to charge for pay-per-click ads. This could present a challenge to ecommerce, but there is probably a solution, whether it is more investment in search engine optimization, social media or other marketing strategies.
Microsoft calls Bing a “decision engine” instead of a search engine. That has a nice ring to it. They call it that because it is supposed to help people make decisions, instead of just provide a whole slew of disorganized information.
I like the fact that Bing gives price comparisons and reviews of products, 30-second clips of videos on results pages, and its image results page is huge! You just scroll down to see all the images, instead of clicking on lots of pages in Google and waiting for them to show up.
What does Bing mean for ecommerce? It will probably reward companies that work hard on online marketing on SEO with high search ranking and quick access for consumers to their websites. We’ll need to continue to refine the search terms we target. It’ll be interesting to see everything that happens.
The photo of the Bing search engine is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Kimberly Saia.
Tags: article, Bing, CNN, Ecommerce, eHarbor, google, marketing, Microsoft, msn, new, online, Paid Search, positive, PPC, search engine, SEO, Social Media
Bing decision engine good for online marketing…
Microsoft’s new Bing search engine is quite an impressive tool for Web users and online marketers. Bing includes search suggestions on results pages to help people narrow their searches and find exactly what they’re looking for. Web users want to find …
[...] my earlier eHarbor Blog entry, entitled “Bing decision engine good for online marketing,” I said Bing can be good for ecommerce. It will probably force Internet marketers to get more [...]