The news has started to filter down that Bing has leapfrogged Yahoo into the slot as the second biggest search engine, taking only two weeks from its launch to do so.

This is hardly surprising and anyone drawing hasty conclusions about this meaning a rapid demise for Google or Yahoo should be disqualified for jumping the gun ridiculously early.

Of course the launch of Bing has seen it snatch share away from its rivals – it’s something new to have a look at. Like the new pet that hogs all the attention for a few weeks. However, it better have some better tricks if it is going to hold the attention and make substantial inroads on the Google empire.

From what I’ve seen, this is not going to happen. At present, Bing looks simply like a rebranded MSN Search. And it has been rebranded with a positioning that is too close to Google for my liking. For example, it has a new image as its background each day, which is in the same vein as Google altering its logo every day. Even the name is a shoddy attempt to steal Google’s monopoly on search engine parlance; ‘Bing’ being a blatant attempt at adding a new adjective to rival ‘googling’. ‘Binging’ or ‘I binged that’, just won’t catch on I fear (or hope).

What it could really build on is any new solid features it brings, with real benefit to the user. I just don’t see these yet – there isn’t really anything that is going to stop you subconsciously typing Google into your address bar if you want to search the net. ‘Quick view’, where you can see a snippet of the page before you click through, is really just inventing a problem that doesn’t exist, and overestimates the effort of clicking ‘back’ in your browser. Same with ‘infinite image scrolling’ – that overestimates the issue of clicking on to a new page and gets rid of the ability to re-find an image by remembering what page it was on.

I’ve heard there are more benefits on the US version. I really do hope so for Bing’s sake.

Posted In:

Bing, Google, Search Engine Optimisation