CheezeDMG Blog

Manchester City might be one of the richest football clubs in the world but they’re still in the bottom half of the league table proving money can’t always buy you success. However, it’s a good starting point and in several years time the story may be very different.

Similarly, Microsoft is one of the richest companies in the world, but in the UK is relatively unknown for its search engine. The Manchester City of search marketing you could say! But is all this about to change with the launch of its new search engine, Bing, and should we all be getting excited about it?

Well, it’s not everyday that one of the world’s richest companies launches a new search engine and surely with all the investment, brains and talent, if anyone can challenge Google’s dominance, maybe Microsoft can.

We should certainly be enthused about companies looking to push the quality and relevancy of search engines, especially as we all use them and rely on them so much for researching, learning and purchasing. But Microsoft’s new search engine isn’t going to dramatically change the landscape of the search market straight away. It won’t wipe Google off the face of the earth and it’s not going make a huge impact on Microsoft’s current UK search query share. AskJeeves.com has proved that through ingenuity and marketing you can increase query share, if only for a short while. It can be done..And Microsoft has realised it can take it to the next level as quite simply it has the cash to do so.

It’s no secret that buying Yahoo! would be the quickest way for Microsoft to gain search query share. This could still happen. In the US this would give it around 30% of the search market – a decent slice of a huge market. All of a sudden things look more favourable for Microsoft. The UK market is slightly different though, especially as doubts over the quality of Yahoo’s search traffic seem to be increasing.

So what can Microsoft and Bing achieve? It’s backed by an above the line marketing campaign throughout the UK it should definitely get enough attention for people to try it and realise that there are search engines they can use other than Google.

Consumers can expect more relevant results. Microsoft improved its algorithm greatly with ‘Live Search’ and has clearly made relevancy a focus with the way its paid search offering has developed. Bing is likely to build upon this further and with the likelihood that it is going to be indexing more and more web pages, it would be a sure step to providing the consumer with better results and a better experience. This means Microsoft could not only attract new users, but keep them too, which is ultimately the bigger challenge.

Bings new image search appears to take considerable strides and offers real promise. This is one thing that Google will definitely be looking at with interest as it’s an area Microsoft is really pushing – the scratch pad idea where you can store images and change sizes is something no other search engine can do quite as well. Let’s hope we see more of this from the new engine as it’s a great element of what Microsoft is bringing to the search market.

The results filter should also be great. A few years back there was talk of a ‘Search Macro’. This never quite took off, but the idea was very interesting and it looks like with the results filter Microsoft will include something similar in Bing, which is exciting. The idea with Search Macro was to add more context to what the user was searching for thus providing more relevant results. For example, if a user searched for ‘soup’, the macro would quantify whether they wanted information on recipes on soup or to buy soup. The ‘results filter’ appears to be an uncomplicated method for the user to add more context to their search. This would be an interesting feature for advertisers to test in the French market for example where users tend to use less keywords within their searches. It could potentially help advertisers to get cheaper clicks as the user can refine their search before clicking on ads.

However, what’s disappointing about this launch is that only the US version will have these cool new features. The UK is a highly sophisticated market, second only to the US with a high level of early adopters eager to test new services. If they’re not going to get the full fat version, they won’t be recommending it to later adopters. So any kudos gained from the launch is lost and as we all know, the Internet world is very unforgiving to services that don’t cater to individual audiences and markets.

How will this new engine affect your search strategy? Will your customers care or even notice? It might see a boost in traffic off the back of the advertising but will it breed brand advocacy? Microsoft needs to weary of ‘reinventing’ itself (as it did with Live Search – which didn’t move any mountains) with, for non-US customers, no USP. As far as the consumer knows, it’s just another search engine. AskJeeves has reintroduced their butler to breed an increased sense of brand empathy but how, crucially, will Microsoft differentiate Bing?

Will it gain market share? Not until it does something spectacular, or buys Yahoo! Do you have to adapt your search strategy? We’ll have to wait and see. For those expecting great things, we’ll have to watch the US and wait. It might change the search world, but Bing wasn’t built in a day.