Bing Vs. Google

Everyone has heard of Google.  The word itself is synonymous with searching the web.  If you don’t know something, what do you do?  You Google it.  It’s become part of the internet vernacular.  You rarely hear folks say they are going to Yahoo that when they get home, or come across a solution by Binging it.

Like it or not, Google has become a part of our lives, but it certainly hasn’t done so without deserving it.  It is the leading search engine, and has earned it by being reliable.  When you search for something on Google, you find what you want.  It’s not easy to manipulate the system, and that’s why people trust Google so much.

Enter Bing.  Bing unveiled itself this past summer as Microsoft’s replacement for Live Search.  Microsoft, as you know, is not dependant on the business of Search Engines, or even ads, which are Google’s prime industries.  While Bing isn’t the end-all Google-killer, it’s earned itself more than 10% of the Search Market in the first few months.  Many SEO analysts have found Microsoft’s new search engine to be accurate, although often results are different than Google’s.  While the masses aren’t exactly leaping from Google to Bing, there’s a very good reason to keep an eye on the new contender:

• Bing is Microsoft.  Microsoft knows how to slip in their services any chance they get.  You’ll find Bing on the default homepage of IE, the search engine of choice for IE8, MSDN and all other Microsoft sites, along with plenty of media coverage, marketing strategies, and television commercials.  Microsoft even had a campaign where they offered money to use Bing.

• The New Yahoo.  Yahoo and Microsoft have recently settled on a deal which will eventually use Bing to power Yahoo’s popular search engine.

• The Decisions Engine.  Bing’s focus is less on standard SEO, but has coined the acronym DEO.  The search engine’s goal is less about finding the specific site you want, and more about finding the most relevant sources to questions.  Whether or not users use Bing with this in mind is a whole other story, though optimization for Bing is much different than it is for other search engines because of this.

• More frequent crawling, more up to the moment results.  Bing boasts the ability to crawl and index sites faster, so supposedly, when changes happen, Bing’s there to check your site and index your new content.  Google has plans to implement similar capabilities in the next few months.

Bing is still fairly new, fresh, and though not as popular as Google, still very relevant.  That alone has attracted curious users to try it.  The biggest differences involve the front end facelift, which added more real estate for ads, related searches, and other relevant information, attracting users.  Some users visit www.bing.com every day just to see the photo of the day.