Microsoft’s rebranding of their search product as “Bing” and heavy marketing spending in support of its relaunch has led to significant attention being garnered for their latest assault on Google’s near hegemony in search. Does Bing have a better interface? Is it an improvement over Microsoft’s Live search? And most importantly, does Bing provide better results than Google? These are some of the pressing questions whose answer will in large part determine if Bing is worth Microsoft’s advertising effort.

What is Bing?

Bing is Microsoft’s new online search portal, located at bing.com. Bing is just the new name Live Search, which was formerly Windows Live Search, which was originally MSN Search when it debuted in 1998. For the last couple of years, Microsoft has been operating MSN Search and Live Search as separately branded search properties. In essence, Bing is the next generation of Windows Live Search engine rebranded as Bing. Microsoft’s search engine has never done particularly well in the market against entrenched competitors like Google and Yahoo! So the software giant is recasting Bing as a “decision engine”—a service that helps people make decisions with more confidence—rather than a general search engine. According to Microsoft Live Search Director Stefan Weitz, “If you have general searches you need to make, you can use any search engine. But if you want to make a decision with more confidence, Bing can help you save time and money.”

Search Market share

As of August 2009, Google’s dominance in the search industry reflected an 83.3% market share followed by Yahoo at 7.28% and third by Bing with 3.52%.

Positive Early Trend in Daily Penetration

After its second week since launch, Microsoft’s new Bing (Bing) search engine has continued its steady growth, according to comScore. Bing is up about 3 percentage points in both average daily penetration among US searchers compared to the week prior to launch. Those numbers are also both up compared to its first week in the wild. 

PPC Advertising

The dominant share of the search market controlled by Google has led numerous PPC advertisers with small or medium sized programs to focus their efforts exclusively on Google’s Ad words. Given that the soft costs of actively managing a PPC advertising program can easily exceed 20% of the spending on clicks and that Google controls an 80% share of search.   It is much easier to manage a campaign focused on a single search engine and often more cost effective.  There are three key factors that will determine if reallocating spending from Google to Bing makes economic sense:

1. Are clicks and conversions on Bing less expensive than on Google, and if so, by  

how large a percentage?

2. What are the soft costs of adding the management of a campaign on Bing to the PPC program?

   3. What is the PPC advertising budget?

An analysis comparing Bing to Google showed that the difference in cost of conversions on Bing versus Google is 20% less. Bing is likely to be particularly efficient in less competitive categories with fewer PPC advertisers. Further, share of search and conversion rates also vary by category. Thus, for some categories, Bing may offer only minimal efficiencies, if any at all.

Eye Tracking Study

A preliminary eye tracking study conducted at User Centric indicated that sponsored links on the right attracted more attention on Bing (~42% of participants per search) than they did on Google (~25% of participants per search). The participants who fixated on these links spent approximately 2.5 seconds looking at the area during transactional searches and 2 seconds during informational searches.

Search Results

The only thing that will make people switch from Google (Google) (or even Yahoo!) to Bing is noticeably better search results. Bing wasn’t doing so badly with people preferring its results about one third of the time. Users more than 45% of that time preferred none of the top three search engines. But “the same” or “good enough” probably isn’t enough for Bing to convince too many people to switch from using Google. Switching search engines is a relatively painless process, but searching has also become an ingrained habit for web users, and the vast majority of us have been conditioned to turn to Google first. There’s just no incentive to switch to a search engine if the results are more or less of the same quality as the one you use now.

Final Comments

Microsoft has been on an advertising blitz since their new search engine’s launch, spending a reported $80 to $100 million on a campaign to push Bing.  But the early numbers (trend) indicate that Microsoft’s advertising push is at least driving a measurable number of curious searchers to Bing. The positive trends in search penetration, user reviews to the site architecture, and relevant search results should send an air of optimism for the future of Bing and Microsoft’s investment in the technology.

Thanks to Eduardo Ferreira for this sensational post. What do you think?

All the best

Manuel A. Alonso Coto