Bing's season of goodwill...

I'm a big fan of Bing as a decision making engine. I like the daily images, the way it works, and particularly the image search.

Whilst Bing have somewhere in the region of 10% share of the US market, I read somewhere recently that in the UK, that figure is still only 3%, but that they are planning a big offensive soon.

Maybe it's entirely co-incidental, (but the marketing cynic in me says probably not), but I've noticed in the last week 2 interesting Bing initiatives:

1) Bing are giving away virtual currency "Farm Cash" for Farmville players on Facebook if you join their fan page. With a gazillion players of Farmville in the world, this has already added tons of Fans to Bing's Facebook page.   I  read this great article on the Bing / Farmville Fan initiative so I'll just point you over there rather than recap, but to put it in context, on Monday they had 100k fans, by Tuesday, 400k and today it stands at 593k. Nice.  Let's hope they do something useful with us all. I am running a crusade against using pure fan numbers as a measure of success on Facebok pages at the minute. So naive. So shortsighted. Grrrr.

2) They are giving 5p to UK Charity Sport Relief / Comic Relief for every 10 searches made under an initiative called "Give with Bing", and provide you with a little downloadable app / counter to keep track of the contributions you are making.

So as I've written about before recently regarding the Hula Hoops Sport Relief initiative, hooking up with a charity is a great way to make people think well of your brand, and in this case it's unlikely to actually cost Bing a lot either:

I did a little maths:  With the average UK search user performing 148 searches a month (according to a Comscore report from November 09), if you switched entirely to using Bing for a month, they'd have to give a not hugely generous 74p to the charity. And if they only have 3% of the search market right now in the UK that's not going to break the bank.
 
That said if it's that easy to make the world a better place get yourself over to Bing right now and download the counter. No excuses now!

Nice initiatives on both counts, but I'd give them more points if they actually made their Give with Bing site work in Firefox. No excuses for that these days.

Winter Olympics - get your round up here....

The Winter Olympics are currently upon us, starting in Vancouver on the 12th Feb, and somehow, despite the appetite for all things snow related amongst the huge number of avid winter sports fans I know, it just doesn't seem to get the same level of buzz and coverage as the Summer Olympics.

On the subject of which, only 898 days to go says the BT Tower out of my office window today - they've had a daily countdown showing for weeks now but it took me a while to figure out what the random number was, 'til I twigged they were a sponsor of the 2012 London Olympics).

Doh, where's the paid search on that activity??  Joined up thinking people???

However,  back to the Winter Olympics, and those ever helpful folks at Google have kindly pulled together a handy Winter Olympics 2010 quick reference guide where you can check out the medals table, get links to event coverage, see the buzz around events via a link to real time search and even check out the slopes in Street View (clearly they should have called that Piste view but never mind!).

Worth a look.

It does a nice in-one-place showcase of the many things Google brings you, that lesser geeks than I may not have realised.

But nice as that is, I still like the daily pictures on Bing. They make me smile. And therefore divide my search love :-)

 Utterly gratuitous but here's some very cool camels from yesterday

Wolfram Alpha's been busy...

It's August. Silly season in the press. The one time of year you can get a seat on the train in the morning without a fight. But whilst some are enjoying hard earned breaks for others the work continues, and the development team at "computational knowledge engine" Wolfram Alpha have been busy busy according to a recent blog post from Stephen Wolfram. Well worth a read.

Wolfram Alpha might not yet have ironed out all the wrinkles but it definitely sounds like they are making process, and I do like the way it presents results if I'm looking for certain types of answers. Google won't teach me how to play chords.Nor play the audio file too so I know what they should sound like.

Sure, WA hasn't made the impact Bing has on the overall search market but it was always going to be slightly more niche because of it's scientfic skew, and it hasn't had the might of Microsoft and some big OEM deals behind it either.

It deserves to retain a place on the search radar.

Stunning Sydney and Bingles

The Bing summer photo competition winner has been announced and the winner was this stunning photo of the Sydney skyline / Centrepoint Tower lit up during a storm.


9400 photos were submitted which is pretty respectable for a relatively small scale initiative that I only saw publicised within the Facebook environment. And if I was Jeremy Somers (the winner) I'd be pretty chuffed that sometime soon I was going to log in to Bing and see my picture there for a day. I'd also be suspecting that he'll be telling his friends not only of his win but also to keep checking back to Bing to see when his photo is posted.

Involvement and WOM propogation. Nice.

And I'm a bit behind the program but Bing were also involving the video-creating communities via a another competition:

"Since everyone is having fun with the name, we thought it would be interesting to see what you can do with it, put to a little music! Got a fun jingle, or as we like to say in the halls around here “Bingle” you want to share?"

$500 as the prize was hardly going to break the marketing budget, but I reckon the views of the videos submitted where worth far far more than that, not to mention the involvement of those that bothered to take part. Worth a snuffle around YouTube (oh the irony, owned by arch-rival Google!) - there's some super cheesy versions like this one and some which have clearly been thought about quite a lot! This was the winner:

Bing-oo!

Just in case the search news of the week had passed you by, Microsoft and Yahoo! have announced a 10 year deal whereby Yahoo search will be powered by Bing and ad sales will be handled/ consolidated via Yahoo.

Consolidation in such a competitive market place, and one dominated by as powerful player as Google makes an awful lots of sense, albeit 10 years as a deal term is a very very long time in digital terms. Bing already have circa 15% of the search market, which is not to be sniffed at in ad revenue terms, and certainly means it is worth ensuring your site is optimised for Bing as well as Google at the very least.

Banging on about Bing...

I know, I know, I've talked about search and Bing a LOT recently but it's important. Competition in the market is healthy.

I have a Gmail account, I use the Google reader for RSS feeds, this blog is written on a Google owned platform, I upload to YouTube (owned by Google), and I am enormously excited about the scope and potential of the Google Wave (a new communication and collaboration platform/approach coming soon) so I'm far from entirely disloyal. But it's important to share my love too.

I am enjoying playing with Bing not just for the way it processes queries and displays results, but for the small moment of happiness I get from the stunning pictures they have on the homepage everyday. Yesterday it was Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and the day before a stunning image of a turtle which made me think about a great holiday in the Whitsunday's last year. I engage with it. I play guessing games with myself as a result of the image I see. And clearly I am not alone and Bing have twigged that too as in the last week they've taken to adding clues under the image.

This morning I logged in and spent a few moments trying to work out where I recognised that skyline from. After a quick memory scan, and even before I looked at the clues, I realised it was the Yarra river and Melbourne, a city I love but haven't been back to for a few years now. But the fact that I go back to see the picture every day and I've been telling lots of my colleagues to do the same too, suggests they've got something right.

In an earlier post I talked about how smart it was for Bing to have launched a homepage photocontest via Facebook. I logged into Facebook this morning to find a status feed item reminding me that voting for the photocompetition closes on August 3rd, and encouraging me to go a vote (which I duly did). I'd encourage you to do the same. Why not? It's easy to do and easy on the eye. Well done, Bing, I think you are doing a good job. You are demonstrating that you are understanding your consumer and what is motivating (some) of them to use your decision making engine, and, how social media spaces can work hard for you: you don't have to drag people out of an environment that they are in anyway to make them consider and engage with your brand.
It will take a long time to shift people's behaviour from using Google as default, as there's many more of us using search than the was when the big shift from Yahoo search to Google happened in the late 1990's, but I feel compelled to encourage people to explore the search options available too us. There's more to search than the big G.

Time Savers...

I had an extraordinarily busy week last week with limited time to keep up with the new developments in the wired world (ironic really given that I was delivering an intensive 3 day course on digital marketing), but one thing I did trip over was:

BingTweets - an interesting mash-up of Bing (the search / decision-making engine) and Twitter. Run a search. Try it with something topical. Why a time saver and why do I like this? Because it gives me search results plus a notion of real time and what's being said about that topic right now, without me having to use multiple tools. As I said to a friend last week, it would be an interesting exercise to do live with clients to make them realise the real context in which people naturally talk about their brands, rather than the version they prefer to believe.

Not so new, but a service I love and find incredibly useful when I've been away from my inbox for a few days is an email "snooze" button provided by a site called Hit me later. Basically you can forward an email to a given email address and specify when you want it back (i.e 4 hours, 24 hours etc and it'll send it back to you at the designated time, meaning it appears at the top of the email pile, which I find incredibly handy as a means of prioritising / not forgetting important emails when you have a full inbox and lots of FYI's / junk to clear out before you can actually deal with the important stuff.

Google this, Bing that, Search Me

It's been a busier than average few weeks in the world of search engines.

With over 80% of web journeys starting with a search engine (according to some recent EIAA stats) , it's little wonder that in the last round of IAB/PWC figures that PPC / paid for search accounted for circa 60% of digital media spend in 2008. Success in search whether it's natural search rankings of paid for listings, is all about being at the top. Page position is everything.

Search is an interesting marketplace. Google has become a verb. But B.G (before Google), we all happily used Yahoo or Ask Jeeves, and before that those of us who've been navigating the interweb for over a decade can probably recall using AltaVista. Search wars are nothing new. They've just got a bit more interesting recently, as people try and challenge the dominance of the almighty G.

A few weeks back we saw the launch of Wolfram Alpha a "computational knowledge engine" that process queries and returns results in a very different way to Google. A simple search for "London Weather" in Wolfram Alpha gives me current weather across a range of metrics (pressure, dewpoint, temperature), details about the weather station used, graphed trends over time, whereas Google gives me a snapshot for the next few days and text links to the BBC and Met Office. WA has been called the search engine of choice for scientists and techies. I like it. For certain searches I will almost certainly use it over Google because I get a more holistic view of related information and answers in easy to process format. Try it.

Last week saw the much discussed launch of Bing, the latest incarnation of search offering from Microsoft. Although they are positioning it as a "decision engine" rather than a search engine. It's visually arresting without question, with big beautiful pictures that change everyday, and the reason we're all supposed to love it is because it's taking a "vertical" approach to search so that we get actual results relating to our searches (e.g integrated price comparison results) that we can interact with without leaving the search results page. Full functionality on this level hasn't hit the UK yet but most of the reviews I've read seem quite positive, and I do rather like the fact that video search results auto-play in the results page when you hover over them, which plays nicely into that notion of content snacking and removes the frustration of you ending up on a click-chase to find the content you were actually looking for.

But the fact remains that in the time-stretched world we live in, we're creatures of habit and it's going to take a lot of motivation and perceived benefit to convince the masses to shift from the habitual Google search to trying something new and getting used to processing the results in different ways. I hope the media buzz does succeed in convincing people to try it though. It's healthy to have a competitive marketplace.

For me search-wars don't stop there either. Visual search is going to play a big part of the future. Younger generations process information in increasingly visual ways rather than the text-based world I grew up in. So why wouldn't they want search results presented in the same way? More and more kids start their information searches with YouTube, not Google.

I increasingly play with Search Me, I like the interface and the way it presents results. Like Bing, I can get an at-a-glance view of results that enable me to judge much more quickly whether a suggestion is what I am looking for or not.

Mobile search is going to get bigger and bigger as penetration of smartphone continues to grow rapidly and the networks facilitate mobile web use via sensible data packages that remove the barrier of un-predictable pain in the wallet. Image recognition based search apps like Kooaba and SnapTell might still be relatively fledgeling but the potential of this for consumers and marketers alike fills me with excitement.

But search engines still only reach the consumer actively seeking information, and there are times when brands need to interrupt people to get their message across, so getting overly-obsessed with search engine marketing would be potentially missing the chance to talk to lots of potentially valuable prospects, via paid for advertising or deeper consumer connections created in a myriad of ways.

So challenge yourself, go play, there's much more to search than Google if you can be bothered to try.