With a BING!!!, Search Engines Start Making Sense

Oh, SNAP!

Bing is changing what you see when you use them to do your searching. And Google, I hope you’re paying attention, because the new Bing gets it right.

If you take a look at this article from The Washington Post, you can both see how the new Bing will look and get an exhaustive analysis of the changes. For my part, I’ll say that the new Bing just plain makes sense. Search results are search results, your social recommendations are there but separate, and of course, advertisements are included — and segregated.

Microsoft, you’re getting smarter. I still don’t know why you paid so much for Barnes & Noble NOOK, but irrelevant, you are not.

Well, maybe not that smart. Bing has way too low an opinion of my importance as “Yablon”:

I’m not entirely surprised to be absent from page 1 of Bing. Google has me at position #8, and they’ve always had a way higher opinion of my importance to people searching for my surname than Bing has. But when Bing announced their upcoming changes to the way search results are presented I started playing around, and if you look at the image I’ve included here you can see something interesting. Sure, I’m still Yablon-non-grata, but that isn’t it. Take a look at the ads on the right of my Bing search. How is it that even in a search for which I’m invisible all of the paid advertisements are about either “computer care” or “answer guy”?

Bing, it seems, is getting pretty smart in more ways than one.

I’m still not a fan of Bing Editor’s Picks, for reasons similar to how I feel about Bing Rewards; search needs to be open; I’m never going to trust Bing employees or policy to decide what’s important to me (see my thoughts on Flipboard).

But it’s clear that there’s real business change going on at Microsoft. The folks in Redmond aren’t just getting into new businesses; Microsoft is changing the way it does business. Could it be that Microsoft is grabbing the long tail?

I’m not sure I’ll actually switch from Google to Bing; that’s a business change that I would find pretty difficult — for reasons that don’t even have anything to do with the search results you get from either. But I’m thinking about it, and unless Google adapts, it could happen. Bing, I salute you. Now if only you had as high an opinion of the way we do search engine optimization as Google does.

Real business change, and from a search engine!No wonder Warren Buffett uses Internet Explorer.