Ever since Google began dominating the search engine market, many up-and-coming search engines have come and gone.  But as far as we can remember, none have stormed the market with as much vigor as Microsoft’s Bing has in this past year.  In fact, Bing’s driving force seems largely to compete with Google to be the world’s largest and most popular search engine—a bold move to say the least.

Right from the get-go, Microsoft made clear intentions it wanted to make a huge push in the search engine market when it decided to rebrand its current Live Search.  On June 1, 2009, Microsoft launched Bing, and announced that they would spend between $80 million and $100 million on a marketing campaign for its latest search engine.  So far it seems to have been a fairly successful strategy, as Bing grew its US search engine market share to 13%, putting it in 3rd place just slightly behind Yahoo!.  With the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal already finalized and in transition, Bing will soon power Yahoo! Search making it, at last, a viable competitor with Google.  That would give Bing a 26% market share compared to Google’s 65%, though with Bing’s current pace of growth, a market share of 33% is very possible in the near future.  Bing’s growing market share is especially important to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) professionals, as a competitive market may mean lower prices for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising, leading to a greater number of businesses adding SEM to their advertising model.

Bing’s long-term success, however, is dependent on much more than just large quantities of advertising spending.  Advertising will lead to an increase in awareness and curiosity, but in the end, people are only going to care about the accuracy of the search results and the Website’s presentation.  Therefore, Bing must differentiate itself from its competitors, most notably Google, if it’s going to survive.

A major part of Bing’s differentiation in the marketplace is that the search engine calls itself a “decision engine,” instead of simply a search engine.  Bing is marketing itself as an engine that doesn’t just show you all the results, but one that helps navigate you in the right direction.  They do this in a few ways.  Most visibly, they use subheadings to better organize your search and make it easier for you to find what you’re looking for.  For example, a search for “Italy” will give you subheadings in the categories of images, maps, tourism, food, culture, history, attractions, and economic facts.  Google, on the other hand, will give all of its most relevant results in no organized order, thus allowing you to browse the results on your own until you find what you need.  However, this does become somewhat irrelevant if you just search with more specific key terms.

In addition to the subheadings, Bing differentiates itself as a decision engine by allowing you to get “more info” about your results by simply putting your cursor on an arrow that’s placed to the right of each result.  This will give you a chunk of text and some popular links on the page to help you quickly decide if this is the result you’re looking for without having to physically click the page.

Let’s move on to the presentation, which is a considerably important aspect of a search engine for many users.  While Google has made a living from an “as simple as it gets,” no-frills homepage, Bing went out and created a homepage to be as pleasing to the eye as possible.  Every day they put up a brand new image as the search engine’s background, and they are consistently captivating, high-quality and quite appealing to peruse.  The pictures are usually vivid, beautiful, and inspiring photographs taken all over the world (and outside our world), usually of an incredibly unique place.  The background image will sometimes include photographs of people, animals, and sports, too.  I must admit that if there’s one thing that keeps me coming back to Bing, it’s their breathtaking homepage images.

The downside to this design, for some people, is that the images serve merely as a distraction to what they came to the search engine to do in the first place— search.  On Google you do your search, find what you’re looking for, and then move on with what you have to do.  On Bing you might find yourself distracted, clicking away at the cool images, and forget why you’re really there  originally.  And while Bing is great at helping you “decide,” Google’s search results were deemed significantly more relevant in a recent study.

Even though determining whether Bing can compete with Google in the future will depend on multiple factors, how Bing brands itself in the marketplace can make a huge difference.  Google has one of the strongest brands in the world by becoming a part of our everyday lives and having a great product.  Bing will have to do the same, and it’s not going to be easy.  But I say give it a chance, see if you like it, and then determine for yourself which search engine you prefer.  So next time you decide to “google” something, consider “binging” it instead.