Microsoft released it’s new search engine yesterday called Bing. There is no doubt that with the original MSN, then search.live.com, and now this, that Microsoft has had their share of identity crisis over the years.
According to last week’s article on TechCrunch, their search algorithm is supposed to be “an order of magnitude” greater than the last engine. When you do a search for “costa rica” for example, you get a similar layout to Google with sponsored links across the top and side and organic listings underneath, but there is more. There is a side column on the left (the layout changes depending on topic) with Related Searches and your Search History. Under the organic listings, it begins to further breakout more semantically related terms such as “costa rica map”, “costa rica vacations”, “costa rica weather” and more, and then finally concludes the page with Images and Video. You end up getting a lot more on the page than the typical 10 results that Google returns. Therefore, there is less paging through 3-5 pages trying to find what you want.
Comparison: Microsoft Bing vs. Google
I wanted to do a quick comparison between Bing and Google for a less “sexy” term, but one that is near and dear to our hearts:) – “free seo analysis”
Here is what the Bing search results page looks like:

Looks very similar to a Google results page with 10 results, some space for sponsored links, but includes a “related searches” section over on the left column. This could be useful not only to a user, but also to an SEO as we now know the other terms that the search engine is categorizing, so we can optimize for these terms as well.
Here is what the Google search result page looks like for the same term:

Similar layout, but totally different results, which you may expect. Only 40% of the listings are common between the two search engines, with the other 60% of the listing being completely different between the two.
While our Website Analyzer tool ranks 5th in Bing, beating out Hubspot’s Website Grader, we are nowhere to be found on Google until page 2, position 7. And then SEOmoz, a highly reputable and popular SEO site gets a high #4 position on Google, and nothing on Bing.
So it begs the question, do we “over-optimize” for Google? Bing is getting a lot of attention, and Microsoft is reportedly dumping $100M into an ad campaign to promote it – will Google lose their prestigious title as the dominant search engine, or is this simply a bunch of hype?
Time will tell, and so will my traffic numbers


