Bing Lacks Some Zing

bing

Microsoft’s newest search engine, Bing, has been creating quite a lot of buzz with their commercial blitz as they try to claim a bigger piece of the search engine user’s pie. It is being branded as “the decision engine” with a hoard of television commercials that were funny at first, but quickly became tiresome.

Bing has a fun name, but so do Google and Yahoo. What makes its home page stand out is the beautiful background pictures. This is a different approach to Google’s simple search box.

The emergence of Bing has left a lot of people in the search engine optimization world with a wait-and-see approach. From some early tests that I have run on my websites, Bing comes up with some very different search engine results than Google or Yahoo.

For my online store, my main keyword has my site ranking between #5-7 on page one depending on the day on Google, at #7 on Yahoo, but down on page two at #13 on Bing. What I don’t like about the results that Bing produces is that one of the listings on page one is a page that is parked for free and is for sale. That site’s URL consists of only the main two keywords. Anecdotally, this tells me that Bing places a lot of emphasis on keywords in the URL.

It seems that many have had their chance to play with Bing and opinions are being formed. The consensus is that Google’s domination of the market share is probably going to remain secure for some time to come.