A lot of articles have already been written about the merits of Microsoft’s new "decision engine" Bing and how it could potentially change search engine optimization (SEO) but according to one expert, Bing has a major flaw – it’s too easy.
Writing for MediaPost’s Search Insider blog, Steve Baldwin says that Bing may be committing one of the major sins of the marketing world in making things too easy for customers to find.
Although Microsoft is marketing Bing as the solution to what’s ailing the search engine industry by focusing on "finding" things rather than "searching" for them, Baldwin says search wasn’t really broken.
According to Baldwin, it’s the search that actually draws people to sites like Google and in the long run can make us more knowledgeable.
"Google’s users don’t object to having to click many times to find whatever the heck they’re looking for. Some might call this wasteful: I call it an educational, horizon-broadening way to spend your time," Baldwin writes. "Furthermore (and it’s really a very small point in the overall scheme of things), running a query-driven click factory happens to be insanely profitable for the search engine, so why mess with it?"
It’s still unclear how or if Bing will change the face of search engine optimization, but at least for one day, Bing surpassed Yahoo for the number two search engine in popularity last week. According to statistics from StatCounter, Bing almost doubled its market share last Thursday – a day after its release. But by Friday the site was back down to previous numbers.
