Bing!
With the dominance of Google, and the availability of MSN, Yahoo and others, online search may be one of those services that you don’t know you want better until you get it.
Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft, may actually qualify.
It became publicly available this week, and is the subject of a new ad campaign. And while at first blush, it looks a lot like the search engines we’re used to, it offers one element that we have identified as a best practice: Search results by category.
If you’ve been part of a Greystone planning engagement lately, you know we show search results from Dartmouth Hitchcock as a best practice. Instead of showing 1,500 pages on, say, breast cancer, 10 to a page, and ranked 1 to 1,500, DHMC groups results by content type. So there’s a collection of links for things like services, specialists, classes and events, etc.
The point is, when the user typed in “breast cancer” you didn’t really know what he/she was looking for. By grouping the results, we believe it displays what the entity has to offer in a manner that appears full service, not just complex. It also offers options that the searcher might have never contemplated (maybe the user was looking for symptoms of breast cancer, but hadn’t even thought of looking for a support group or a clinical trial).
Well, Bing displays many search results that same way. If you search for specific nouns or acronyms, you get the usual search results. But try a search for “breast cancer” on Bing, and you get results grouped by articles, symptoms, treatment, stages, surgery and prevention. That’s a lot more useful than Google’s listing of literally 39 million pages on “breast cancer,” listed in order, 1 – 39 million.
So what do you need to do to make sure you rank well on Bing? It appears the basics still apply, and if your site or page is well constructed and written for general search engine optimization, you should be okay on Bing. The handful of searches I tried generated similar results on Google as on Bing. They were just organized a lot better on Bing.
We’ll be watching Bing to see if that changes, and so should you!