The Bing Review – The Numbers Stack Up But What Next?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Bing has now been around for a small while, probably long enough to start losing the ‘newbie’ tag and the associated traffic. Is it going to be a force to be reckoned with in the future? Has it made any impact to date? The Cuil Blog has an interesting analysis of Bing comparing it to Google and Yahoo! across several different test scenarios that impact search engine optimization and usability as well.

How did Bing stack up? It appears it is more competitive than both its predecessor and Yahoo! and could give Google an interesting run for its money – but will it? Let’s look at the major differences identified by Cuil – Bing seems to give more weight to:

Keywords in URLs;

Capitalized terms; and

Large sites.

In the area that really counts, producing relevant results, Bing overlapped Google 29% of the time whilst at other times was either very good or very bad with very little in between. It would be interesting to see which search terms were being used in relation to travel, retail and finance – reportedly Bing’s strengths.

This report is an interesting read but what affect will it have on the future of search? We can run any number of tests but ultimately they cannot predict the future – they can only tell us about the now. Future events such as:

The blending of Yahoo! and Bing;

The influence of social search; and

Google’s response to any threats.

What has always been clear is that search is an evolving beast and that search engine optimization is never complete – there is always a new twist around the corner that needs to be dealt with, always a new rumor that increases heartbeats. I wonder how many website owners will now race around capitalizing all their keywords – of course, it won’t look natural – but haven’t you heard, that’s what Bing prefers!