Bing?

Microsoft search reincarnated, reinvented, revamped...that's what Bing is.

For the small business owners who visit our site, Bing is worth checking out.

Forget everything you know about search engines.

The odds are that when you think about search engines you think of Google, which dominates the search engine world.

With Bing, Microsoft has introduced something that is very different from Google. It looks different from Google. It doesn't behave like Google. It does a lot of things that Google doesn't do.

We'll probably still do a lot of searching with Google, but we are going to spend a lot of time on Bing too.

Based on what we've heard and read, Bing offers a faster way for consumers to make more informed choices.

With traditional search, the tendency is to search, then search again, then search again and again. We spend a lot of time searching and not enough time finding.

The Microsoft Bing search engine offers a richer more organized search experience. It shifts the experience from search over to find in a very positive way.

For starters, it uses something called faceted navigation. That's geek language for categorization.

So, rather than just get a bunch of search results, if I search for something, I also get access to categorized search results.

So, maybe I search for Toyota Prius and I am presented with tabs for Dealers, Repair Information, Reviews, and New Models. When I click on those tabs, I see only search results that are specific for a tab. This is a big evolution in search technology, powered in large part we guess by Microsoft's acquisition of a company called Fast Search and Transfer.

Beyond giving very relevant search results and organizing them intelligently, Microsoft Bing search has a lot of other nice features, including things like instant answers, deep links within the sites that come up in results so you can get a better feel for the site, and, our favorite, the ability to hover over a result and get a graphical preview of the site.

Everything about Bing search seems to be geared toward helping users to accomplish things faster and more easily. Microsoft has invested heavily in adding special features for health-related searches, travel-related search, and shopping-related searches, among other things. It's clear that their goal is to excel in helping consumers in some key categories, and, to our mind, they've done well with that goal.

SMBs and Microsoft Bing

Key takeaways for small business owners regarding Microsoft Bing search are as follows:

• Try Bing Out. Play with it, get to know it. We think you will like it. It will stimulate your creativity and it can make you much more productive.
• Give Bing Advertising a Try. If you've had success with pay-per-click advertising, you'll want to set up a Bing account ASAP and get started with Bing advertising. Their search traffic is sure to grow with this offering, and it's best to get started with them sooner, rather than later.
• See How You Rank in Bing. Pretend you are a customer who is using Bing to look for your products or services. How do you rank in the Bing Microsoft search engine? If you are not high in the Bing rankings, you may want to engage a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant.

Search Engine Competition? Bravo!

Congrats to Microsoft for moving the search category toward an improved and more relevant search experience. We've all collectively given search market share too easily to Google, allowing them to slow down on innovation. Google is great, but let's not let them rest on their laurels.

It's nice to see some great competition in the search engine space. There's enough room in search for many talented players...when there's competition, everybody wins.