Yahoo! and Bing: What Does It Mean For You?
We thought we’d wait a few days for the dust to settle and the wailing to die down after the announcement of the Microsoft/Yahoo! deal. After all, there has been plenty of both (dust and wailing). One blogger went so far as to suggest “Yahoo committed seppuku today” (the equivalent of hara-kiri). Others took a more measured view, pointing out pros and cons, along with the risks for both parties.
Quick disclaimer: My son works for Microsoft. He’s a product tester for MOSS, so he doesn’t directly have any skin in this particular game.
The issue for us, however, isn’t picking winners and losers, it’s trying to determine how this affects our search engine strategies. The Pandia Search Engine News article puts it best, I think, when it suggests this might make our jobs easier. Instead of three major search players, there will now just be two.
But the challenge has always been the same: Well structured Web sites, with content that makes intelligent use of priority and strategic keywords and phrases will get the search traffic. That was true when there were a dozen search engines to worry about (remember those days?), and it’s no less true today. Basic blocking and tackling, folks. It works for all the search engines.
Many argue that habits are hard to change, thus Google will always dominate. While I wouldn’t bet all the Internet you can eat that Google will fall from the perch anytime soon, there remains a lot to like about Bing that we’ve outlined before (grouping results by content type), plus the ability to drill down from a search results page without leaving that page. And there’s recent research that shows PPC ads are performing better on Bing.
And don’t ever count out the marketing power of Microsoft.
Thanks for this post, Neal. We’ve definitely seen an increase in search traffic from Bing in our Benchmarking database. It is still a distant 3rd in the rankings, with Google of course being the overwhelming market leader, but it will be interesting to see if this trend continues over time.
Microsoft Bing would be the closet competitor of Google. but i still use Google because it shows more relevant results on the serp.
As advertisers we like adcenter for the great conversion rates of Bing’s traffic.. With Yahoo though we are forced to buy clicks from junk partners that send nothing but fake clicks.. It’s a daily job to monitor all the new bad-domains to block.. And you have to PAY for all that..
With the current merge of Yahoo and Bing let’s hope the new “team” will do it RIGHT by giving the advertisers the choice to pay only for real yahoo/bing searches.. just like Adwords and adcenter allow (for now?).
Just my 2 cents
Cheers!
i think that Bing is not as good as Google. Google would still index new websites faster than Bing. Microsoft would still need a lot of catching to do with GoogleBot.
I use both Bing and Google search engine and i dont see much difference in their search results. I use google for searching hard to find academic topics and Bing for general search.