On May 28, 2009 Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer introduced the world to their new incarnation of its search technology, Bing. Every day web users were given access to Bing on June 3, 2009. Why did Microsoft alter the search engine and what does this mean to the search engine ranking your business already has achieved? Will your keyword ranking suffer at all?

The initial answer is quite easy to answer. Microsoft is desperate to grasp some of the market share that Google now enjoys. Do the names Magellan, Open Text, Info Seek, Snap and Direct Hit ring a bell? These are all Search engines that Google has gobbled up in the last decade. In 2006 the market share for Google and Live Search were 49.2% and 9.6% respectively. At the time of Bing’s launch the market share of Google had grown to 72.4% and Live Search had fallen to just 6.3%. With the Google slice of the search engine pie so large and not slowing down, Microsoft had to make some changes to their search engine offering.
The second question is not so easily answered. When first looking at it, the rankings you and your SEO provider have achieved should not be affected. Some features of the new Bing areinnovative and could facilitate an ease of use which could be advantageous to your website visitors. One major difference is the fact that Microsoft calls their latest offering a “decision engine” not a “search engine”. The primary reason for the title alteration is that Bing is supposed to assist the user in making decisions by delivering the best results, presented in a more organized way to simplify key tasks and actually help you make decisions faster. There are specific features such as cash back on great products, and Price Predictor, which will tell the user when to buy an airline ticket in order to help get you the best price. Bing will also offer compare and contrast features so your customer will be able to compare your product, price and shipping requirements against others. It could be wonderful for your business to have such features at the tip of the user’s fingers. A primary goal of all websites is for the consumer to make a wise choice (the decision to buy) at a fast pace. Bing says it will do just that.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Microsoft plans on spending between $80 million and $100 million marketing Bing. These figures represent almost a quarter of their yearly advertising budget. This large amount of advertising can only assist all of those websites ranked on Bing. High rankings should translate into higher rewards. It is like getting free advertising. Your SEO company should work very hard in the next year to increase your standings on Bing so you can enjoy the effects of this advertising push.
Microsoft reports that your website’s rankings may fluctuate a bit at first. They say that the rankings will stabilize “in a short while”. Since the searches are going to be more narrowed and refined, it is believed that URL’s with hyphen separated words will have an initial bounce. But the results are too new to analyze. We can only rely on the information that Microsoft is telling us at this time.
Should you change your SEO optimization strategy? It is always a good idea to speak with your professional, but right now,probably not. Remember how small Bing’s percentage of the total search engine really is. A month into its launch, Bing’s share has grown to 8.23% of all searches. While this is not a large, the upward trend can only help those websites rank well on Bing. Microsoft’s Bing has come quite far in a short amount of time. Last year the term that was searched the most|the most commonly searched term} on Live Search was “Google”. After its unveiling, Steve Wozniak, the Apple co-founder called Bing “astounding.” All the buzz can only improve web traffic and hopefully increase web sales.