Google might have changed the face of the Internet searching with its unique, and closely protected, search method that has been demonstrated to producemore relevant results than the leading search engines of the early years (despite attempts by webmasters using search engine optimization to try and manipulate the results!), however there is a new contender attempting tobring to the Internet search yet another makeover, and it appearsto be seeing results where so many others have tripped up. Bing.com, Microsoft’s latest attempt was launched late in May 2009, and has starting then demonstrated improvements in popularity regularly in a commercial landscape where popular opinion believed that Google could not, and would not, be touched possibly in our times. Just a few months after Microsoft’s arrival with Bing, Google’s market presence reduced by 0.1 percent, at the same time that Bing rose to 9.3 percent of market share. Most other search engines have remained constant in their market share, but when the challenging search engine Yahoo has only 19.3 percent of the market share, it is surprising that a fresh entrant such as Bing can climb to nearly 10 percent so quickly, and seems that it won’t just stop there.
What’s so great about Bing? Is it just the $100million Internet Marketing and Search engine marketing campaign that has it biting away at the search engine market share? Or is there something tangibly worthwhile in the way the search happens that places it over the rest, positioning it as a genuine competitor to Google? Probably both. For example, Bing offers a visual search function which lets a user to describe what they’re looking for and then narrow down their search based on image results, thus a person who can remember what an object looked like finds it hard to remember what it’s called, can quickly find what they’re looking for. Saw Caught a new model vehicle on the road but don’t know what brand or type it was? Bing’s visual search will help you find that car by presenting you with a parade of photos from which to identify the closest and eventually find arrive at the exact model you were looking for. This may seem a simple concept to begin with, but Bing believes that they are changing the way people will think of Internet searches in the future. By making it more graphical, they expect to transform the way users search the web. It’s no surprise then that they like to call Bing a ‘decision engine,’ rather than a ‘search engine.’