The appearance of a new search engine on the scene is always cause for excitement in the SEO community. Some companies buzz with the sense of a new challenge in the offing. Others fret over the possible new parameters their strategies will have to take into account. Usually, the excitement is over in a matter of weeks, and everything settles back to the way it was, Google victorious.

The introduction of Microsoft’s ‘new’ search engine, Bing, has been somewhat different. The key term here is ‘new’. The engine is a revamp of LiveSearch, which has been picking up the scraps left behind by Google and Yahoo! for a few years now, and it seems the connection with the bridesmaid of search engines is not going to do the new engine much good at all.

The new engine has benefited from more than the usual amount of buzz on the net. A lot of the hype about Bing comes from the extensive marketing campaign Microsoft embarked on at the start of the year. The technology company, not half-hearted about promoting the new search engine, is estimated to have spent around $100 million in advertising. It’s worked, at least in terms of buzz about Bing. What remains to be seen is whether the search engine can deliver on what it promises.

Early results were not encouraging. ComScore reported that Bing increased in average daily searcher share by just 1.7% over the former MSN LiveSearch. This pushed MSN’s search share to 15.5%. It’s a nice little boost, but not what Microsoft was aiming for, and the search engine is still where it has been, lingering in third place behind Google and Yahoo!. As at mid-June, 2009, Bing was ranked as the 17th most popular website out of a study of 450,000. If this is traffic at the height of an expensive promotional campaign, one wonders what will happen when the advertising dollars run out.

There is nothing startling about how Bing operates, although there are a couple of positives. The shopping comparison tool may have an edge over Google’s, which often produces frustratingly mediocre results. Appearance-wise, Bing features a fresh interactive picture every day that contains entertaining trivia and suggested links.

Bing is hampered by its association with MSN, which has made several less-than-successful forays into the search engine market. Although much of the buzz about the new search engine has referred only to its solo brand name, Microsoft’s insistence on claiming that brand means there is no chance for the new product to fly on its own.

The initial reactions to Bing from search engine optimisation companies were the usual mix of fear that old techniques wouldn’t work, and dubiousness of whether change would be necessary. As with every change on the net, the new search engine has to be taken into consideration in your SEO campaign. A smart business should give some attention to all search engines, while targeting most of its activity towards the lion in the group, Google. Contact us at SEO Consult for information about designing your SEO campaign.

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