Microsoft's Bing Is a Search Portal, not a Decision Engine

Microsoft calls its new search engine, Bing, a "decision engine," even hosting a preview at decisionengine.com. The high-minded concept works to some degree, but a large number of the searches won't involve decisions at all, unless you're making a decision on whether you want to know the weather, or whether you'll check out pictures of Kris Allen or Adam Lambert. I've spent the last few days trying out a live preview of Bing, and it's much better categorized as a "search portal." The idea of a search engine is to get you where you want to go fast, based on the queries you enter. The idea of a portal is to give you all the content you need so you don't have to go anywhere else. Bing is a hybrid, a search portal that lets you keep searching and refining your query without ever leaving the site until you absolutely have to. Here's how it works for a few different kinds of searches: Other engines keep you around to some degree. For instance, Google offers a lot of shopping search refinement on its own site. But Bing is pulling together all of Microsoft's assets and seemingly every content aggregation mechanism it can come up with to keep consumers around. That's why it's a search portal unlike any attempt that has come before it. Given how long consumers may wind up staying on Bing, it's possible that conversion rates for marketers both in the natural and paid results could be higher, even as referred traffic could be lower. If the share of traffic referred by Bing dips from what Live Search used to refer, check on what those consumers are doing when they arrive to see if they're any more valuable. ~ ~ ~ David Berkowitz is director of emerging media for 360i. He blogs regularly at Inside the Marketer's Studio.

Microsoft's Bing Is a Search Portal, not a Decision Engine

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