Microsoft tries to kill Google: How Successful?

Well now that Bing.com is live, see for yourself and judge how well Microsoft's Search Engine is doing. We all know the story of MSN.com and how its was always number 3 on SEO after the prince Yahoo. The undisputed king of search remain Google for its ever changing SEO algorithms.

Google is a verb to us for many a reasons, principally for innovation and 'relevant content is gold' mantra. However, if you play around with Bing, you will discover a lot of cool features and certainly not Google's "Did you mean" feature :) - when one has a typo. In a way its less annoying but some people do like that option. if one types in "ouTube" in  Bing, it directly shows YouTube.com. In case of Google, the same search would also show 'Outube Videos' - a relevant subject matter.

Let's not take sides just yet but highlight couple of key usability features as an end-user and  SME.  Spending 100 million dollars in ad campaign is yet to ensure the user base Microsoft would like to have. 

If one googles the keywords "google", "yahoo" and "bing" at Google.com or Yahoo - 10 relevant results come up. Do the same at Bing, you get 1 result for each Google and Yahoo. But when you search "bing", the engine delivers 15 links and 4 video results! [Search Result as of June 17th 2009]

Well, now you know how to eliminate SEO/SEM rivals :)

Biggest claim on Live Search promoting Silverlight, bing doesn't demonstrate that fire power in the results published above. We can expect Microsoft to force Bing down Windows customers' throat in upcoming versions loaded in PC/laptops but will that make bing the search engine of choice?

This is only two weeks in the race for the Best Search Engine. However, it does look like Yahoo is likely to split a lot of its market share to Bing because of the later's clarity. Yahoo never really got the concept of 'less is more' and always bundled up services one after another. Don't get me  wrong, those are valued service offerings but one could be a little more strategic about the user interface. Bing has clarity and cleanliness - both aesthetically and technology architecturally!

After condemning its customers to suffering by launching Vista, Microsoft has actually offered something innovative and cool. If this is the way the company is deciding to move ahead, there just might be hope! Catching up with Google in Search business is just not going to happen  right away but not-that-far-cry either in my opinion.

Digg Ads: Will it be a success?

 June 3rd  Digg Blog informed us of its  new product launch:

"Today, we’re announcing our plans to roll out a new advertising platform — Digg Ads. Digg Ads will give you more control over which advertisements are displayed on Digg. The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system."

Both from end user perspective and Corporate Branding, this will open up a new channel. The competition will harvest more filtered subject matter expertise and  eliminate poorly written/spam SEO articles  because the users define relevance. Once your content is not relevant the Ads will suffer and be buried, it the Ad money goes away the writers will have to be more careful for future endeavors.

Moving forward, in the web 3.0 platform, one could pick and choose the audience, valued service offering partners and cloud tag modulation.

Also, the eternal challenge of making the CXOs see the light about SEM/SEO will become much easier. The filtered white papers the whole proposition is promising.