Bing has now been around long enough for people to start looking for referrers in their server logs. Most people aren’t seeing a ton of traffic from Bing so they think it’s not a big deal.
It’s a dangerous and possibly self-deluding conclusion for any content provider. Remember: you — the content provider — are not the search engines’ market. You are, in fact, the product that they’re selling.
Bing is not innovating in search, as far as anyone can tell. It gives some very different results than Google; in many cases, it presents much deeper results than Google’s while missing other stuff.
Where Bing (and Yahoo) are innovating are in user experience. The goal of all these search engines is to give their users as much information as possible without their leaving the SERP. You want them to click on your URL to see your content and ads. But the search engines would just as soon that their page be the final word. That’s why Google is relying less on Description tags and more on page scrapes and microformats for its snippets. It’s why Bing has page excerpts pop up next to the URLs on the SERPs.
Bing has looked at the heat maps of what people look at in SERPs and is innovating around that upper left quadrant of the window. Google is making more options more easily available to searchers. But what kind of business model would your site have if it only existed to send people away? Right: none. The search engines are ever more in the business of helping people stick around, showing your information on their pages, and building environments where they let people leave only if they really want to — but would rather have them stick around, thanks.
August 26, 2009