Microsoft’s new search engine “BING” certainly looks interesting.
BING is a lightweight semantic search service integrating the technology Microsoft got when they acquired PowerSet with their current LIVE search platform. It seems to be trying to address the key frustration people have with traditional web search tools – namely the lack of structure in the results that are returned. Outside of common topics, it can sometimes take a fair amount of digging through pages of headlines for people today to find what they are looking for.
Microsoft sees this disaffection with the search status-quo as the approach they can use to go after Google. Their intention is pretty clear from this video introducing BING:
Technically, getting BING to work as promised will be a huge challenge for Microsoft. People search for all kinds of things. After you get beyond the more scripted result sets seen in these demonstration searches, how well will BING really perform? Can Microsoft’s approach really scale up to cover a meaningful percentage of the web and cover a broad enough set of subject domains to attract a large following. While I really like BING at an aspirational level, I can’t ignore the many “product visions” from Microsoft that far over-sold what ultimately got delivered in their final products.
Remember the promise of “Longhorn” aka Vista?:
But even assuming BING can live up to it’s billing on a technical level, it will probably have another issue to deal with: the limits of what Microsoft (or any search vendor) can do with the content they crawl. Unlike the more tradition approach to web search, BING seems to mine various sites for more detailed information, pulling it together into more thematic views. The richness of these views could potentially obviate the need for people to click back to the source sites to still get the information they want – something that would certainly be frowned upon by those content creators counting on receiving click-thru traffic. The high level of content extraction required here is a new area in web search that has yet to establish any accepted “terms of engagement” between all of the involved parties.
With all of this said, Microsoft may finally be on the road to having a viable answer to Google’s dominance. BING seems to be a big step up from their current LIVE search, and is probably better aligned with how people would like to experience web search than Google presently is. They will need to aggressively market it, which is something Microsoft appears more than capable of doing. And at only about 8% market share in web search today, moving the needle a meaningful amount probably wont be that difficult for them to accomplish. The key to getting advertisers to follow will be building up and sustaining some momentum around whatever market share gains they make. That’s what will make BING successful in the long term.
But all of this assumes that BING delivers on the promise – that the results BING returns are highly relevant to the searches being done and easy for a user to navigate.
And at this point, that’s still a really big assumption…