What is Bing bringing to the table?

The search engine wars have heated up recently with Microsoft's Bing joining the game. Make no mistake, Microsoft is trying to take Google down and is putting some major money and resources behind it, ie. the creative team that basically stole the Google "concept" of using a distinct sounding, simple name for a search engine. Can you imagine if they named it Supercalifragilisticexpealidocious? Anyways, Microsoft seems to be pleased with the early results and are calling it a success so far.

As we all know, humans are creatures of habit and the habit for most humans the past number of years has been to log onto Google when needing to find anything online. How is Bing going to change people's habits? One way would be to make their search engine different, and I know that Microsoft probably has different bots that run behind the scenes and filter results, etc., etc. But 90% of people don't really know how a search engine works, or really care to find out. They want something that that provides value to them that they can see/use. Now in their latest advertisements (which are actually pretty good) Bing makes itself seem like it is different, calling itself a decision engine and adding an airplane, shopping cart, buildings, and medical symbol next to its logo........ohhhhkay. Don't really understand the significance of those but i'll let you run with it. Here's one of the commercials


What does a decision engine get me? Let's go to Bing to check it out. Okay i'll type in Hawaii Tickets as per their commercial. Bing! Make my decision for me decision engine.......oh. The results are pretty typical of Google's. Hmmm. Thats not really following through on your promise, or maybe you just haven't explained well enough what makes your search engine a "Decision" engine. Might want to think about that, or at least explain it somewhere on your page. Just a thought.

I wonder what "Decision Engine" even means, I think i'll Google it.

Google makes my life easier

Maybe thats why their stock is completely overpriced?

Last week I talked about how Google sent me this great offer that made me feel like an important part of their monstrous engine. I blogged about it. This week I had the follow up call with a competent, nice, helpful optimization strategist to further discuss their offer. Here's what she told me the offer is:
- They will come up with an optimized adwords campaign for our main line of business
- 3 different text ads and the keywords that go along with each ad
- Using a qualified adwords strategy team that will work personally to help improve the value of our adwords
- Will return the proposal with the completed campaign in 5 working days

oh, and did I forget to mention that this is all.....FREE. All my company has to do is promise to use their proposed ads for a month since they will be putting their time into it.

Yeah, as in doesn't cost my company a dime, and hopefully will help return a greater ROI with the current money we are spending on adwords.

She was basically daring me to say no. How can you possibly turn that down.

I'm getting Google's search expertice, their knowledge in adwords, and a finished marketing campaign for $0. If I didn't know they had more money than God himself, I would feel sorry for them.

But it just goes to show you how well Google knows how to play the game. I can't even imagine the number of companies that use Adwords as a main source of their marketing, so when they are offered a way to use this chunk of their marketing budget more effectively they might just be a little excited. Hmm maybe that will lead to some goodwill towards Google, a blog entry, a mention to a colleague in passing. Well played Google, i'm thoroughly impressed.

When you add that to the list of other things that Google does for me for free (Analytics, maps, etc.) it makes one wonder: Why Bing! when you can Google?