June 9, 2009 By Lisa Barone
Last week, Microsoft unleashed its brand new search engine onto the market. It’s called Bing and, contrary to what the name suggests, you do have to take it seriously. Even if you’re not planning to give up your Google search habit, you’ll still want to familiarize yourself with Bing to understand how you can help your site rank in their local search index. To learn a bit more about the engine, you can read about the keynote Q&A Microsoft president Dr. Qi Lu gave at last week’s Search Marketing Advanced show in Seattle.
However, what I really wanted to see was how Bing handles local search.
Microsoft’s not known for the creating the hippest search products, so I was curious to see how Bing was handling local search right out of the gate. A search for [Albany, NY Mexican] brings up all the usual suspects that my palette remembers living in Upstate, NY. You’ll notice that the search engine results page (SERP) looks pretty rudimentary compared to Google and Yahoo! (not much more exciting than a Yellow Pages search), however, I really like the refinement options Bing offers on the left-hand side. They take an approach similar to Ask.com where they allow you to sort your search by Rating, Price, Cuisine, Atmosphere, Reservations, Payment and Parking options.
Once you refine your search, Bing allows you to click through to individual business listings. These individual pages give local searchers handy business “scorecards”, 1-click driving directions (a pretty awesome feature), a 3D Bird’s Eye View of the business in Maps, customer reviews, and more.
Why did I point all the refinement features and options Bing shows users? Because it’s important to know what users are seeing so that you can fill out your own local search listings to take advantage of all the refinement options.
So let’s do it.
To list your local business in Bing, head to the Bing Local Listing Center. From there, you’ll be able to check to see if you already have a local listing set up. If you do, you can modify it. If not, now’s the perfect time to create one.
Once you start creating/modifying your account. Bing will ask you to log in using your Windows ID. If you don’t have one, you’ll have to create one. From there, you’ll be asked to enter in your contact and business information, as well as a laundry list of supplemental information like additional phone numbers, Web pages, email address, hours of operation, payment methods, photos, etc. There’s also a long section for additional information like your company tagline, business description, brands carried (if applicable), specialties, affiliations, languages spoken, parking options, etc. It’s always in your best interest to create as complete a profile as you can.
From there, you can select up to six prioritized categories to place your business in based on associated keywords. You’ll also be able to supply information about features, cuisine type, prices, atmosphere, etc. Make sure you fill these out the best you can so that you can take advantage of Bing’s great local search refinement options. If you list it as an option, you won’t show up for it when a user looks for it!
Once that’s complete, Bing will ask you to review your business listing on the map, fixing the pushpin locator, if necessary. If everything looks good, submit your listing and you’re done. That’s it! Freel free to congratulate yourself on a well used 10-15 minutes.
It’s really important that you take the time to complete accurate business listings in Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other third-party service providers. The more accurate information there is about your company out there, the better chances your customers are going to find you. And when it only takes a few minutes, is there really any excuse not to give your Web site the best possible chance at ranking?
No. There’s not.
Brennon Slattery
Jun 3, 2009 6:45 am
Microsoft really knows marketing. But its latest (unintentional) attempt to promote the new search engine Bing may have gone over the line. According to reports, a glitch in Internet Explorer 6 forced Bing onto users as the default search engine. Even when users manually altered their preferences, Bing emerged once again.
Search Engine Land contacted Microsoft about the bug. Microsoft acknowledged the problem and responded at 2:45 a.m. that the bug is now fixed. End of story, right?
Perhaps. But when you take Microsoft’s history into consideration, the force-feeding of Bing almost makes sense. I am not suggesting Microsoft intentionally created this bug to get people hooked on Bing. I am saying there’s a correlation between the problem at hand and problems Microsoft have encountered in the past.
Let’s look at IE8, for example. When the Windows 7 Release Candidate was updated a month ago, IE8 was automatically pushed as the default browser. This caused competitors Opera and Firefox to raise a battle cry, claiming Microsoft was once again forcing its hand in the browser wars by not giving users a choice. Further governmental investigation was even suggested. But Microsoft shrugged the episode off, and a workaround was quickly discovered.
It’s the little chinks in Microsoft’s armor that gives the company its overarching bad name. This latest episode is just one scratch of a million that ought to give consumers pause when trusting Microsoft.
David Coursey, PC World | Tuesday, June 02, 2009
One thing I’ve noticed since I started playing with Microsoft’s Bing “decision engine” is that there isn’t very much “there” there. And the only decision Bing seems to care about helping me make is a pretty simple one: Buy it here or buy it there, but again there isn’t a lot of, well, you know.
Even if Bing knows about the product I am interested in, which so far it most often does not, Bing then makes a fool of itself. It’s “cashback” feature is most often, again in my experience, associated with laughably high prices. Great, the product costs 20 percent more and Microsoft will give me 5 percent back. What sort of deal is that? Call it getting Binged.
Warning: The prices shown on Bing already include the cashback discount. That high price you see is already discounted, except this is like a rebate: You pay the higher price now and get the money back in 60 days.
(If you ever find the cashback price to be the lowest price, please drop me a line. I’d love to see.)
Now, I like Microsoft as much as the next guy, but not enough to pay more so that Redmond can get its cut and give me a little back. Also, with Microsoft getting a piece of the action, how do I know the “decision” engine isn’t tuned a bit in the company’s favor? It would be easy for Microsoft to leave out the lowest price if the company decided to enhance its revenue a bit.
That’s not something I think Microsoft is likely to do, but when they make such a big deal out of a cashback program that isn’t such a big deal, what’s a user to think?
Maybe the Bing buying, er, decision engine will mature over time, adding products and making the cashback a better deal. Or will vendors somehow send a different price over to Bing so that Bing’s lowest price with cashback is the same as the regular price shown everywhere else? Not sure how they would do this, but gaming search engines is big business and where there’s a will…
I want to like the little snippets of page information that appear when you hover your cursor off to the right of a search result. Except, of course, that most often the information presented was more useless and distracting than helpful.
News is another example of Bing’s unbearable lightness. Now, some people will probably like Bing’s spare presentation of the day’s events. If you like empty space on the page and very, very limited customization features then Bing is for you.
If, on the other had, you’d like your decision engine to help you decide what to think about President Obama or the state of the planet at the given moment, Bing doesn’t do it.
My Google News page has been customized to watch topics that I care about. It presents many more stories on many more topics than Bing shows on its news page, yet it is easier for me to skim.
To be the winning search engine, you need to either do all things really well, which Bing does not, or do one or two things really well and find an audience that really cares about those things. I don’t thing Bing does that, either, and whatever audience it does find seems, for now at least, to be no threat to Google.
Special note to readers in Redmond: Don’t buy Yahoo Search and merge it with Bing. You’d only chase people away.
David Coursey, obviously, isn’t wild about Bing. Not that he loves Google, though now that Bing is around he likes Google a lot more. He tweets as dcoursey and can be reached using e-mail from the form at www.coursey.com/contact.
Computerworld – Two days earlier than expected, Microsoft Corp. had its new search engine – Bing – up and running.
And Bing appears to be working as advertised so far today. Queries lead to search result pages. Several links included in search results quickly led to the right pages. The site was lively, offering up categories of searches, images and video.
Microsoft Bing, according to some analysts, appears to be off to a good start.
While going live a couple of days early may not stick in people’s minds over the long run, Microsoft does benefit by not being late.
“Being late would have been bad,” said Andrew Frank, a research vice president at Gartner, Inc. “I don’t think a few days early makes a lot of difference. There hasn’t been a lot of chatter about it.”
After weeks of speculation and online chatter, Microsoft last week took the wraps off Bing, which is the update to its far-from-beloved Microsoft Live Search. The update, which was code-named Kumo, comes with a phalanx of related services, like Bing Travel, Bing Cashback and Bing Maps for Enterprise. Paired with the company’s hefty marketing muscle, the new service is expected to help Microsoft take on search behemoth Google Inc.
Trying to get away from the search engine moniker, Microsoft officials are calling the new offering a “decision engine.” It’s designed to help people search the Web more intelligently – to find the right information that can aid them in making decisions.
“I think the benefits are subtle,” said Frank. “I don’t think they jump right out at you when you first start using it. It takes a while to appreciate the difference and I think the difference is a lot more pronounced in certain categories, like travel. Microsoft has focused on some specific categories, especially for ‘decision uses,’ as they call it. But you have to happen upon a lot of this to discover it.”
Frank noted that Bing makes some features accessible in the margins of the search results. Users, for instance, might be able to roll over a result in the margin and get pop-ups that lead to more information. The features, of course, aren’t hidden, but they’re not jumping out at users, either.
Dan Olds, principal analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group, said he’s been using the new search engine this morning and so far he’s been getting some useful information from it.
“It pulls up some different results than Google does,” noted Olds. “They’re using different algorithms so that isn’t surprising. Though, on very focused searches, the results are very similar.”
Olds said he likes the search history and related links sections.
“A lot of times I’m looking to track down some fairly arcane data and when I hit a blind alley, it’s useful to be able to see some of the other searches I’ve run without having to hit “back” 100 times,” he added. “The related links listing is helpful because it gives me some alternate links that may be closer to what I’m looking for, or that may give me additional information that I didn’t originally search for.”
With Google scheduled to make a search announcement on tomorrow – following on the heels of the Google Wave announcement late last week – analysts say Microsoft may have a hard time dominating headlines on the topic and getting some early traction for Bing.
