Microsoft’s Bing Goes “Live”…Now What?

2 June, 2009 (10:37) | Search | By: Kieran

If you visit Bing.com today you will no longer see the a “coming soon” message - yes Bing, the new Google Killer from Microsoft is live and ready to be used.

So now what?

Well if you play around with Bing long enough you will start to realize that aside from the results being similar to what you saw from Live.com (I am assuming the new algorithm is slowly being phased in) the new Bing is actually a good search engine. Along with relevant web, image and video results; Bing brings cool (and useful) new search features that aim to enhance the searching experience for users.

Better search engine, cool new useful features and a $100 million ad campaign…so what does this mean for the Search Engine Wars? Easy. Microsoft will gain a percentage of users, Yahoo will lose market share and Google will still dominate. Looking at the data from Compete.com below, it is obvious that Microsoft isn’t going to catch Google anytime soon, but if everything goes according to plan they should see the gap close.

The best case scenario for Bing and Microsoft entails a successful massive media campaign that draws a good amount of people to Bing to try it out for themselves. Of those people who visit and actually perform a search, a percentage of them become so impressed by the results / UX that they either no longer go to Google as their first choice or use Bing as their secondary search engine.

Want another prediction? Bing will become the e-commerce / shopping search engine of choice for millions of people . This is where Bing has the opportunity to be a leader…