Overall, I’m a fan of Bing.com
Posted by on June 7th, 2009 View Comments
Posted in Search News |
First it was MSN. Then it was Live. Now, it's Bing.com. Microsoft pulls a nice piece of work out of the hat with Bing.com. Actually, for the last few years Microsoft has been behind the scenes working on some pretty great web applications. I remember when I saw Microsoft Live Maps Beta – the street and satellite view image quality was amazing. Still is.
It's funny, Microsoft has built some impressive web technology, but they've suffered from a lack of market penetration, organization, and web leadership. Don't get me wrong, it's not like they've got a bunch of noobs running around, but unfortunately, they've been unable to secure market dominance in really any category on the web. MSN.com has done well – being the default home page for Internet Explorer for over 10-years certainly hasn't hurt anything.
In review of Bing.com though, I can see that some things have changed with the software giant's web team. If they can manage to gain some brand awareness they might have a shot with Bing. The only bad news for Bing is Live Search.
Having analyzed Microsoft's search engine for the last 6+ years (since they pulled away from Looksmart and Inktomi), I fear they made the decision to downplay the importance of page trust. In the top search categories you'll find decent search results, but outside of the manually reviewed sites at the top you'll find yourself in a sea of "out of place" search data. In deeper categories the malice gets worse – even brand new websites commonly show their ugly faces.
IF, Microsoft can manage to improve Live Search, Bing.com will become what MSN always dreamed to be. The code, usability, and content syndication partners are light years beyond MSN.com. The presentation elements of Bing are impressive and simple. If I've been overly critical, it's only because I expect more from Microsoft – they have the tools and the resources. Bing could represent a decent revenue driver for Microsoft – but, they're going to need to compete against the big shopping comparison engines, the major travel inventory aggregators, and the other search engines. Microsoft needs to acquire one of the big 3 travel sites, and one of the shopping comparison engines. Only problem is that their competition has already made moves on the best players. AOL and Yahoo! are hungry, and showing no signs of defeatism – I hope my friends at Microsoft make the right decisions. I'm still a big fan of Microsoft. Good luck with Bing.com – it looks great.
