The lowdown on Microsoft's Bing from those that know

by Andrew McCormick, revolutionmagazine.com 29-May-09, 12:10

LONDON - Only two UK search experts outside Microsoft have received a sneak preview of Bing, Microsoft's new search engine. Revolution spoke to them both.

Alex Hoye, chief executive, Latitude Group

"There are a few pretty good things about Bing, mostly from a usability perspective. Firstly it offers more information at the hands of users without being too cluttered. Secondly, Bing adds different iterations of keyword phrases to make searching easier. I like that a lot as the way we search is becoming relatively specific. If you're looking for an iPhone for example it makes it easy to find iPhone apps and iPhone games.

Bing also lets you see some content before you actually click-through. It's like Ask.com but a little less annoying. I hate pop-up features usually but this looks pretty useful. One of the good things is that they have a team of 60 engineers building it for Britain and it looks a lot fresher than Live Search (Bing's predecessor).

The main negative has to be the really big market share challenge. But what's nice is that Microsoft is not just releasing Google features a year after Google did. The challenge is no longer trying to teach people how to search. It's to be better than Google. It has to be better and we won't be sure until we put it through its paces. Traffic will go up at least in the short-term and this could be the lever to help it overtake Yahoo!."

Andy Mihalop, head of search, i-level

"When I saw it it was very much from a consumer perspective and was really impressive. It's different from the typical search journey you get on Google as the search engine refines the search as you go. This will make people find results quicker as Google Suggest is not as intuitive. From that perspective it's a step forward.

From an advertiser perspective though, the big issue is still traffic. What we want is to get people there to make one search and if you get people to try it and have a good experience then they could switch. But it's a massive job.

Most innovations in search come from Google but I'm not disappointed in Bing. It's raised the game a little and Google will be monitoring it with interest.

One way it may effect agencies and brands is that we may have to build our search campaigns differently. It could be that there is more competition and higher prices for generic key words because the engine does the work from the initial keyword. This means that we may need to think about approaching it in a different way.

At this stage brands should be monitoring the situation and we plan to update our clients to give our point of view on it."