Bing is now live as the primary search engine from Microsoft. If you go to MSN or Live both of these sites now rediredct to Bing.
Google Analytics is now showing Bing as a search engine in its stats, so when you look at your traffic sources you will be able to see Bing in the results. When Bing was first launched the only place to see Bing as a traffic source to your site was under referring sites, so this is a good update for webmasters to monitor traffic on the site. This will help you monitor your search engine visits more accurately.
Interestingly I just did a search for “Bing” in Google and Google’s suggestion tool is recommending that I search for Bingo and not Bing so I’m only getting 3 search results for Bing. Looking at the choice of name – the development name of the new search engines was Kumo but we think that they’ve gone with Bing to create a verb – like Google – “I Googled them”, “I Binged them”, however as Bing is so closely related to the word Bingo this might take a bit of time to for the search results to not suggest “bingo” when people search for Bing.
Microsoft have been running Bing TV adverts in the US to raise awareness of their new search engine and to try and tempt people away from Google.
Some of the results in Bing are slightly different from what we are used to seeing. For example, if you search for “facebook” in Bing you only get one result, the Facebook homepage and the option to see other results containing this word. In Google and the you will get over 1 billion results, although the top result is the Facebook Homepage. When people search on a well know brand name such as Facebook they tend to be searching for that Brand and will “teleport” to the brand name site and not look at the other search results. The cleaner results you get in Bing make it more clear where the site you are looking for is – however if you want something else to do with Facebook this could be annoying.
Figures in the US are indicating that Bing has overtaken Yahoo! in the search market with more people using Bing over Yahoo! However it is unlikely that the Bing will challenge Google in the current market so there will be no changes to the SEO work you do on your site.
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