Bing.com - Microsoft's new Search Engine

Microsoft’s new search at Bing.com is apparently going to help people make better decisions when they search online. Because of this Microsoft has deemed Bing to be a ‘Decision Engine’ as it’s being touted as helping customers go beyond search in dealing with information overload.

So what is Bing? Well first and foremost Bing is a search engine. It’s difficult to tell if it’s any different than its predecessor or any of its competitors, as on the surface it behaves very similarly. After performing some testing, to understand the implications on sites I work on and how they would rank, I did notice there was a small variation in the results compared to Google, but nothing I could call significant. I noticed there were far fewer listed sites than Google but then again this isn’t any different to it’s predecessor.

OK, so what is different about Bing? According to Microsoft, Bing is focused on four key areas; making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition and finding a local business. These claims are all very well and good but my initial testing couldn’t prove any of them. I can’t say I understand exactly how the focus on these key areas would take effect, but I could not find anything to demonstrate these claims through the search engine results pages (SERPs) being returned.

Obviously Bing is still in it’s infancy and making any sort of judgement about it now could prove premature, although I welcome competition in the search engine market. The lack of genuine competition creates inherent problems which restricts how we are able to use the web. Time will tell if Bing.com becomes just another search engine or whether it can live up to its hype and offer users something genuinely different – which if it could might allow it to take some of Google’s market share.