Heard of Bing? It’s a new search engine by Microsoft that’s been getting a ton of attention since its recent launch, likely thanks to a huge marketing budget.

Author Seth Godin is skeptical. He pointed out that Bing is trying to be the next Google, and the problem is that the next Google is Google. “Google is not seen as broken by many people, and a hundred million dollars trying to persuade us that it is, is money poorly spent,” writes Godin in a recent blog post. “In times of change, the rule is this: Don’t try to be the ‘next’. Instead, try to be the other, the changer, the new.”

Satirical newspaper The Onion even commented on Bing — they did an American Voices feature about it, where three (fake) people were asked what they thought about Bing. “Search engines are for lazy computer users who don’t have the fortitude to type random URLs until they find what they’re looking for,” was one answer. Another was, “Bing? Interesting. I’ll have to Google that when I get home.” Great stuff.

It’s a huge risk to challenge Google, a search engine so big and powerful and a part of our everyday lives that we’ve adopted it as a synonym for “search.” I need to find a dry cleaner near my house. I’ll just Google it. So why try to compete with Google? Well, why not? Competition is a good thing. Plus, Google didn’t achieve overnight success.

Rob Pegoraro of The Washington Post wrote about the good and bad aspects of Bing in an article titled “With Bing, Microsoft Finds Some Good Web Search Ideas“:

Bing suffers from some handicaps, starting with one whose initials happen to spell out: “But It’s Not Google.” Yet it works fairly well as a general-purpose search engine, outperforms competitors in a couple of areas and makes a major contribution to mobile Web searching. There’s something to see here, and it’s not just the hype that $100 million or so of marketing can buy.

Pegoraro also reported that when searching for generic terms, Bing can seem “confused.” But when searching for a well-known topic, “Bing can present more relevant details than Google,” he says, using the example of a search for “Washington Nationals” that turned up the team schedule for the week, links to ballpark info and tickets, and the team’s record and standings. Google results, on the other hand, “offered little more than the score of the Nats’ last game.”

Today reports came out that after just a week, Bing has become the number-two most used search, beating out Yahoo. Google holds a 71% market share, and Bing now holds a 16% share. BNET warns that this could be due to the hype and marketing around the site launch, so we could see the traffic go down pretty soon if users go back to the search engine they were previously using. If traffic holds, though, that means Google potentially has a serious competitor.

Some experts say that whatever new, cool feature Bing implements, Google will come right back with something better. If that’s true, we could possibly have two search engines that are constantly one-upping each other and improving. Even if Bing winds up failing at “beating” Google, it’s a win for everyone if we’ll be getting better results for what we’re looking for.

Regardless, it’ll be interesting to watch what happens in the next few weeks.

Tags: bing, Google, microsoft, search engines, Search Marketing, SEO, yahoo

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 3:07 pm and is filed under bing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.