Bing has been grabbing a few headlines lately and it has certainly stormed onto the search market this year, making a big impact. I think there could be a potential for Bing, but I don’t think it’s future lies in search. At least, not as we know it. The simple thing is, I don’t really think anyone can challenge Google’s search product now. It’s been around too long, the results are just too good and I don’t think users really feel compelled to change.  Google has a monopoly for a reason, it’s not like other search engines haven’t tried to challenge them and failed. Bing can still make a play for Google’s traffic though and I think there is a big future for the site in areas other than direct search.

Bing really started to get my attention a few months back when I spotted that they were integrating results within Facebook search :

This was a great move both for Bing and Facebook and it’s refreshing to see a new product on the market that could be a real challenge to Google’s custom search platform. I’m still not convinced of the quality of Bing’s search product itself, which explains the title of this post, but this is undoubtedly a powerful tool and is certainly the most likely reason I would now click on a Bing search result. Social is clearly of importance to Microsoft’s Bing, as their recent homepage changes incorporated access to Facebook, Twitter and Wolfram Alpha. This is certainly more prominent on the site than Google’s recent inclusion of social network updates in search results (sitting at the bottom of the page) which shows that Bing seriously understand the importance of search to the whole social user experience. If they continue to explore new ways of integrating search and social networking – the two biggest activities online – they could well have Google shaking in their boots.

Of course, the other important product for Bing comes with news that they may be launching a competitor service to Google News. Techcrunch broke the news yesterday that Microsoft had a secret meeting with top European publishers on Tuesday this week. Nice timing for Microsoft with Rupert Murdoch’s announcement that he would be ready to withdraw Google’s access to his sites within months. And, as Techcrunch notes, Microsoft are certainly going the right way about it, cosying up to publishers by pledging to invest in ACAP. The Automated Content Access Protocol was set up by major publishing organisations to revolutionise the protection of copyrighted content online, including how sites were crawled by spiders.

Google News is still a new enough product for Microsoft to take on, as it is not as engrained in people’s search experience as Google search itself. If Bing can do with news results what they’re starting to do with their own search product, streamlining it with other online activity then they could develop a superior service. As I said at the start of this post, I don’t think Bing can challenge Google when it comes to straightforward, direct searching. But the downside of Google’s monopoly (for them) is that they’ve enjoyed a comfortable position in the market without having to do to much so they might not be ready for a challenge. Bing has the upper hand here because they have to fight to steal a share of the search market. If Bing start to develop the quality products we’re starting to see the roots of, they could sneak up on Google when they’re not really looking.

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