Bing. You Are Now Free to Move about The Internet
As one of the few people in the internet world who still watches a lot of TV, last night I saw my first commercial for Bing. Today, as an experiment I decided to ask a few different people what they thought of Bing. A former Microsoft employee that I know likes it. He was proud of his former company and found the interface and layout helpful. A Googler that I know has actually switched to Bing to see whether his preference for search depends on the actual relevancy of the results or the habit of using one browser for so long. When a query gave results that he didn’t like or couldn’t find fast enough, he then goes to Google to see if it provides a better experience. (It turns out that the number of times both scenarios have happened are much lower than he would have anticipated, two in a week’s worth of use.) A Barista at Starbucks wondered if it was like Chrome, and a young lawyer who uses Google to search and Hotmail for email had no idea. In other words, outside of our industry and the very well informed, the launch of Bing didn’t really happen.
The initial talk of Bing centered around the obvious – will Microsoft’s long-awaited real-entry into the search market make a dent in Google’s market share? After the initial traffic surge of window shoppers, current numbers point to a tiny uptick. That tiny uptick could mean a hundred million dollar increase, but to a company like Microsoft, such revenue is a rounding error on their overall numbers. Reading how the CEO’s of Microsoft and Google feel about Bing’s impact and chances for success makes for a story in and off itself. The never one to hold back Henry Blodgett covers Microsoft’s chances for success here and his staff member finds some great material from Google CEO Schmidt‘s point of view. Their public posturing aside, instead of looking at the more immediately quantifiable angle of traffic, what we should be looking at is what Bing means to search, regardless of where we search. Bing could be monumental, not for what it does for Microsoft, but what it could mean for Google if they choose to follow suit. The entry of Bing has less to do with Microsoft vs Google, and everything to do with the role of the search engine.
For those who haven’t seen Bing, it has an innocuous enough, perhaps even pretty, home page, which for now has built in hotspots to trigger queries. The left hand nav bar mirrors the functionality seen on the top portion of Google. The latter has links to Web, Images, Video, Maps, News, Shopping, and Gmail, whereas Bing does not have a link for mail but Travel instead. No webmail link at all, instead you have to move your eye to an unnatural place away from the current focus to see a confusion of their other brands – MSN and Windows Live.
The differences between Bing and another engine appear subtly if you begin with standard queries. The biggest differences come when queries are entered that come close to matching one of the specialized areas, i.e., "Images, Video, Maps, News, Shopping, and Travel" but mainly shopping and travel. Unlike Google which has evolved incrementally and cannot afford major interface changes, Bing had the luxury of designing their interface from scratch with years of search learning already in place and to suit their long-term goals. Here are the results for "samsung led tvs" after entering it from the Bing homepage.
You will notice they look pretty similar, i.e., there are differences, many of which are helpful, but nothing too fundamentally different that it might cause a stuck in their way searcher to flee quickly. There is also nothing to make an advertiser wary. Where things start to get interesting, though, is when a person clicks on the left nav bar for shopping or the center result for "shop for.." Here the search experiences differs dramatically, and Microsoft gets it right. They appeal to a sense of savings. Google’s shopping product page if you navigate towards it has plenty of merchants who offer Google Checkout, but the page doesn’t scream ‘save!’ like Microsoft’s does.
Bing’s cashback signs are much more enticing than a page with shopping carts on it. Plus, while a merchant doesn’t lose that much by not offering Google Checkout, what merchant won’t want to participate and look like the one not saving money. Select a model, and you see a page showing final prices after cashback.
Selecting the expand sign next to a merchant explains more.
Click on store, and you go here.
Where the power of cashback becomes even more obvious is when looking at the sponsored ads from the comparison page.
The ad includes the logo for cashback, which puts even more pressure on the AdCenter advertisers to participate, not to mention many more clicks for those who do. A click on the ad takes you to a similar landing page for a participating merchant.
The above are a lot of screenshots, but it’s worth seeing the experience for those who might not have already. More importantly, shopping is just a warm-up for the bigger disruption – travel. That’s where any in the aggregation business should worry. Navigate to the travel section of Bing, and you notice a start page rather un-search like – more like that of an online travel agent site (orbitz, expedia, etc.) The functionality is the same too. Enter a flight query and what you get back is the same type of experience had you performed a search query and clicked on an ad from of the major online travel sites.
As is the case with shopping, they are (through previous acquisitions) their own aggregator. Cleverly, though, they also monetize the site well from the sites they are displacing. Check out the logos on the top right, the sponsored results. Because Bing has captured the exact query, when they send the user off to the advertiser’s site, the user sees the same results as though they had performed the query there. It’s quite beautiful because Microsoft gets a higher yield CPC, more clicks per unique user, and they can sell it as value add because the user experience is more seamless. It’s the great travel circle jerk which has become ever more popular as travel sites try to monetize since they keep cutting their own booking fees.
After using Bing just for a bit, it looks less and less like a search engine and more like a different version of Microsoft Office. Instead of Word, PowerPoint, etc., we have Travel, Shopping. Bing is not a search engine but the earliest true formations of an internet operating system. Such a notion has been discussed by technology pundits since 2004, and rumblings of that being Google’s goal since almost then. Bing just makes the idea more of a reality in that we can visualize what such a thing might mean. And from the looks of it, what we see are the traditional aggregators getting disintermediated. What happens when that gets applied outward to other areas? More importantly, what happens when Google starts to do this. Despite their innovation talk, they really know how to make existing concepts better.
