Bing: It isn’t a game changer, but…

May 28, 2009
by Rob Watts

Microsoft’s search engine Bing, announced today, is certainly different; it does things in new ways and brings a fresh approach to search. Whether this will create a seismic shift of users from that search monolith Google is another story and only time will tell.

However, I want take a different stance from what others will undoubtedly say on this topic (likely that it still sucks, the algorithm is poor, yet another re-launch, it’s a spammer’s paradise etc). I want to look at what I would have done if I were Microsoft.

Relevancy and simplicity with a little added value

The essence of search, as Google has shown, is to give people what they are looking for. Quick delivery, relevant results with a diversity of options on a clean looking interface seems to be pretty popular with consumers. Others have tried and failed to grab people’s attention in the space, Searchwikia and Cuil being recent pretenders to fall flat on their faces.

Microsoft and Yahoo! have hobbled along in 2nd and 3rd places due mostly to their Hotmail and Yahoo! email user base. Both have tried to grow their offerings through various social, personal and commercial spaces (Yahoo! Answers, Messenger services, community pages, individual blog pages, Yahoo! Finance) but they’ve failed to migrate users away from Google, and the majority of search referrals (usually in excess of 80%) continue to come from Google.

So Why Google?

An exploration of the reasons why, could run into hundreds of pages of theory and hypotheses, so I won’t bore you with that. However, things like universal search, integrated news, local search, search query alternatives, blog search, news search, image search and the like haven’t exactly hurt their position, slow and steady innovations launched, often unannounced to small subsets of people with subtle alterations.

That aside, Google’s trump card of relevant search, relatively free from spam has been the key. That perception in the minds of its users has helped consolidate its base above all. People like me, back in the day recognised as nerds or geeks would tell our friends and families to go ‘Google’ things. As we were techies and seen as being at the vanguard of all things tech, these technophobes invariably trusted our advice and used Google over say, AltaVista, Yahoo or MSN.

Changing the game in real time baby

Shifting mindsets is difficult, people are resistant to change and like to stay with what they know, safe and secure in the knowledge that it does what they want. However, every now and then something comes along that, for whatever reason, captures imaginations and shifts people’s norms.

Twitter is one such example. From nowhere to mainstream in two years, take up grows daily with people tweeting on practically every topic possible, like some collective consciousness writ large. What is clear is people love the immediacy that Twitter gives, enabling mass interaction with a diverse set of people in real-time, across a multiplicity of platforms.

This liking for real-time hasn’t been lost on other social players with Facebook adapting their model to capture this liking for ‘the now’ showing instant ‘updates’ from friends. Digg too with its ‘swarm’ offering (http://labs.digg.com/swarm/) showing real time interactions from people as stories are dugg.

This hasn’t been lost in search either, with big Google Cheese himself Larry Page averring that Google has lessons to learn…

“I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about real-time.”

For those who don’t know, Twitter has this neat little search function that lets you search tweets in real-time, at both a user and keyword level. It shows real-time trends damn handy for spotting something new, newsworthy or different. It’s also useful for searching topics or themes to get soundings on what people think about a brand, news item or product, giving genuine real world insights. It has a way to go, but is a fresh and much needed take on the search gig generally.

The real time search engine

And for me, this is where Microsoft has missed a trick – with a little magic and creativity they could have done so much more with the ‘real-time’ gig. Their interface could offer people real-time insights; they could have grabbed attention through being known as the new recently launched engine with ‘real time’ features. I am reminded of the below image at the GooglePlex showing queries as they are happening, flowing like a river of thoughts as people the planet over pump questions into the Google search box.

A scrolling selection of related queries might not on the face of things be particularly useful, but that isn’t the point. The point is that through showing connected queries for a keyword, highlighting other user queries similar to yours that are happening exactly at that time across the world, and then users might just feel a better affinity and connection with the platform.

Imagine seeing little flags identifying locations of searchers as some animated box scrolled through related queries. Or integrated tweets showing what people tweeting on the topic have to say? Or how about numbers showing recent click through rates on results, with a metric that looked at how many clicked back and then blending this back in to the result set?

Why not show how many social citations a URL has had, with perhaps a stickiness rating or metric that connected all of the social activity out there? Heck even try a big social or real-time tab, that ranked websites based on a combination of relevancy and social metrics! Surely that would be better than some outdated easy to spam link metric, of anchor text and perceived algorithmic authority!

However, it’s a well known fact that if you can achieve emotional connectivity, then you are on the road to gainer greater take up and loyalty. People like to talk about new cool things. For the search-scape such a feature might just tip into this ground swell of appetite for real time information. If Twitter is anything to go by, then this most certainly exists. If Microsoft had recognised this then there might be different predictions coming out today.

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