There’s a good chance that by now you’ve heard of bing, Microsoft’s new search engine. The optimistic will say that it’s a distillation of many existing search engines, honing what works, culling what doesn’t, adding what was missing, and subtracting what was extraneous. The cynical will admonish the Redmond juggernaut for yet again forcing its way into a market of which is just can’t bear not having a significant share. While the negative have precedent to cite (such as Exhibit A and Exhibit B), the positive arguably have some evidence in their favour. bing does have a number of features that could make it a useful little engine, after all.
Opinions aside, many will wonder whether it will make a big enough splash to warrant attention from web professionals, particularly SEO professionals. Well it wouldn’t be like Microsoft to just throw a new technology out into the wild to die. They’ve clearly put a ton of marketing into it already. I’ve already seen ads on sites like msnbc (unsurprising) and facebook (more surprising). It will most certainly see a push from the company’s more ubiquitous software offerings, perhaps with the next IE as well as Windows 7. It may catch on pretty quickly, grabbing a significant market share in short order. If it doesn’t, expect Microsoft to keep pushing it until it does.
So in short, it would be wise to keep bing in mind while optimizing from this point on. Then again, that question may have been a non-question; it’s a search engine, so optimize for it.
Now, what kind of special needs does bing have? Two elements in particular jump right out of the SERP: the Quick Tabs and the Document Preview.
bing SERP - Quick Tabs
The panel to the left of the search results is a little reminiscent of a categories menu in an e-commerce website. It gives you popular variations of a given search. clicking on any of the tabs will quickly requery bing with the additional keyword appended to your search.
This makes those all-important long tail keywords even more critical to search engine success. Imagine if a user were to click through those tabs and spot the same site at or near the top of each result. It’s an incredibly powerful means for exposure. Chances are, the Quick Tabs will also provide a little direction when doing keyword research.
The other feature of bing that really got me curious about working with it is the Document Preview. Point your mouse over the right edge of a result, and a tooltip-style window will pop up giving you more information about the page, beyond the META description. the Document Preview displays extra page content, including a list of key links found within the document.
bing SERP - Document Preview
This one appears to be a bit of a moving target. It doesn’t look to simply be the first x number of words found in the body of a page, nor does it directly relate to anything within the META tags. But if it can be controlled, it’d be a golden opportunity to feed a user that much more information in order to draw them from that perceived safe zone of the search engine, down into the website proper. Then again, perhaps Microsoft’s algorithm for gleaning Document Preview content is intentionally oblique; as we all know, if it can be manipulated, it can and will be abused. Even so, though, it stands to reason that the best strategy will be to be even more vigilant about putting the best content possible at the forefront of the page. Having a good number of internal links handy seems to be wise as well, in order to take advantage of that “Also on this page” subsection.
Additionally, Microsoft has seen fit to provide webmasters with the capability to disable the Document Preview tab for any or all of ther pages in their sites. In my humble opinion, though, doing this for any site that is also being actively optimzed would be lunacy.
There are certainly more attributes to bing than these that make it an apt competitor in the search engine world. It also marks what appears to be a far more concerted effort than MSN or live.com in assessing user behaviours and addressing their needs. The one realm it certainly has room to grow, however, is in webmaster/developer support, as their resources are easily dwarfed by those put out by the likes of Google and Yahoo!. Bing will most certainly evolve in this department, however, and as a result, more SEO tricks and opportunities are sure to trickle out.