Microsoft Bing: Innovation, Challenges and What Now?

June 12, 2009
by Alex Hoye

I was lucky enough to be amongst a handful of people in the preview of Microsoft’s new search product, Bing, last Wednesday. The worst part is that they kept the name a secret, and in the ensuing betting, I lost £20 in a pool for the potential name amongst a field of Kumo, Kiev, and Bing by choosing “none of the above” – ever the optimist I suppose…

Now that my NDA has expired and Microsoft’s $100m marketing campaign is underway, I can publish my thoughts on the good, the bad and the implications from what I saw.

Innovation

Search engine evolution in the UK for the past few years has been reminiscent of the late Schumacher –Ferrari era of F1 – race after race, never a moment of suspense as to who would win. Successive launches of user and marketing features that Microsoft and Yahoo released were simply playing catch up with things Google had long ago already released.

In good news, there are some features in Bing that actually innovate beyond GOOG, especially in user experience. MSFT will have to keep pouring it on to make it a real match, but there are some nice new features, In particular:

• The new interface is user friendly

• More one-click solutions to reduce the current 4:1 ratio of unsuccessful to successful searches (e.g., seeing some content before you click, video selection, etc.)

• My favourite innovation is the ‘galleries’ offering (ok, I don’t love the term); This is essentially a subset of related terms in the upper left that offer guided exploration of related keyword terms which have been selected through a combination of search results analysis and human editorial selection. This is similar to the Microsoft Office Assistant, however, it doesn’t get in the way. This not only helps people get where they intended to go, but in the case they had not thought of something, helps them explore in ways that they might not have thought of but without generating too much clutter.

In the US version, Microsoft is able to take advantage of interplay with MSFT assets. This is partially included in the UK version as well, with more coming over the next few months – the most notable will be an integration with recently-purchased Ciao.com (which has totally subsumed MSN Shopping). Over time it will be interesting to see their integration with other assets like in the US of Farecast, Cashback and Multimap… and eventually Outlook?

It is also a bold move to invest significant sums into the marketing. This will generate curiosity and undoubtedly trials – but they will only stick if the results beat a threshold of positive experience.

The Challenges

One might say that on a level playing field Bing would win out over Google in side-by-side trials for user experience. However, as we all know, the playing field is not level and even grandmothers around the world have their search set to Google – MSFT faces a real battle to change customer behaviour.

As much as I am a fan of the new interface, to retain traffic, MSFT’s dedication to continue to upgrade its algorithm will also need to come through. Relevance in search depends upon search samples. In Britain, given Google’s dominant share, this will need to be shored up – Microsoft has invested in the Search Technology Centre based here in Soho, which they hope will fill in many of those gaps, but market share is the best long-term solution.

If I were in their shoes, to drive utilisation, I would focus less on TV ads and more on ‘distribution’ i.e., working with the likes of the major browsers to grab the search default and potentially with mobile operators. Oh, and take on Yahoo! UK search

What Now?

I think that even Google would consider it healthy to have some viable competition – here in the UK, Microsoft with its ability to invest is the best potential offering for this.

And there is a lot to play for. The UK search industry was worth £2.75bn in 2008 up from 2.22billion in 2007 (eConsultancy), of this PPC accounted for £1.9bn and SEO £850m (IAB).

In the immediate term:

• There will likely be an increase in searches and clicks benefiting both SEO and PPC campaigns so it’s important to be allocating enough budget to current PPC campaigns on Adcenter

• This may be temporary and there will likely be a drop in conversion rates on the new search engine since lots of queries will be driven by curiosity rather than true purchasing intent – but marketers and agencies will need to keep an eye on opportunities to capture increased traffic

• More questions from less knowledgeable senior management types to their online marketing team along the lines of “why do we not rank Number 1 for term XXX on Bing”, when they previously never showed an interest in MSN search

• The interesting trend for us to try a identify is whether Bing will [temporarily or in the longer term] attract search from Yahoo, Google or both – if Bing generates traction, having a multi-search engine approach will be more important for those who currently opt to focus purely on Google – although at Latitude, we work across them all

• From an organic search perspective in the UK, since many of the changes to the fundamental product are delayed versus the US, the impact will be limited; However, over time, determining whether the galleries approach to keyword phrases will have any impact will be worth watching

• The immediate objective for agencies has got to be on educating their clients as to what is going on and why it is happening. It is then a case of keeping abreast of additional changes when released, assessing how they may impact the Microsoft SERPs and feeding this information back into campaigns and back to clients.

• With MSFT’s declared Built for Britain approach, advertisers will need to keep abreast of changes and feed any information back into their strategy

• MSFT will also update AdCenter this autumn, including closer integration between display and search. Advertisers will need to review what is included and how it is integrated. If they can get a better quality of display inventory than Google has, this will help. Or if they can better monitor the conversion attribution and cross over between the two elements, this would be an advantage. If it is limited to adding another channel into the mix that is no different to Google’s, they are just catching up, which is also good, but not a game changer.

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