Microsoft Launches Bing- A New Search Engine.. Oops Decision Engine

Microsoft has announced the launch of Bing , a decision engine to help people in making everyday decisions. Bing is launched in Europe and will be launched all over the world in various stages by 3rd June. According to Microsoft, Bing is not just another search engine, but a decision engine that will help people in making decisions. Bing has been designed to let people quickly find the relevant information required to complete daily tasks like shopping, travel, health care etc.

Bing boasts of its strength as not just  spitting results based on popularity but based on information mining and categorizing the results into various categories, thus helping users navigate to relevant information quickly and easily. Bing has been customized based on search criteria for eg if a user is planning a travel, he just need to provide the travel details like dates and destination and Bing will bring all the current deals for those dates, user reviews and even advanced functionalities like price viewer graph which shows the spikes in the price trends. Users going for shopping will see the search results from various stores,can see user reviews and do a price comparison of the products. Best part is that Bing even gives you cash back for shopping through the the links Bing is providing.

Bing is introduced with a rich homepage and will have a new homepage image everyday with information hot spots on every part of the page , It seems that Bing may customize the page based on user preferences and location. Suppose a user is based in NewYork, Bing may show nearby restaurants, shopping centers on the homepage itself making the search easier and more relevant. Bing homepage is serving many categories like shopping, travel, news, maps, video,images  helping user pinpoint the exact search results they are looking for.

Cutting the time user’s put to pinpoint results:

According to a research users get less than 25% success rate while trying to pinpoint exact results and most of the searches are based on day to day tasks like shopping, restaurants etc. Hence Bing is designed to decrease the time and effort which user put to gets the relevant results. Bing has been designed to provide best and instant answer to user queries in a more organized manner with the help of information grouping and sorting based on relevance.

Are Search Engines Jumping into other’s domain, eyeing their pie:

It seems that  search engines  are jumping into other domains and are trying to keep users to the search page itself providing all the relevant information. Google updated its search engine to show all necessary flight details etc on the search page itself  thus user need not go to the airways site,hence Airway companies may have less users vising their site and they have to pay more for advertising to Google and other engines to attract more customers. Now Bing is also decreasing the need of users to go to shopping sites,travel deal site hence decreasing the need to shopping and travel deal sites.

At present Microsoft has around 10% of the search market share ,which is led by Google at 64% and Yahoo at 16%. Microsoft tried  hard to increase its share in search market for last few years but havent go any success till date but it seems that Bing may help Microsoft boost its numbers and get a better search market share.

Recently there have been many updates in the search domain , Established players like Google are trying to improve how people use and see search as. There are many new players in search domain like Wolfram which are trying to establish them as decision systems. It seems that the search market is getting hotter and better everyday and solutions are coming up to provide a better and richer user experience.