Microsoft recently launched Bing, its new search decision engine, fueled by a $100 million ad campaign to explain how it’s more than just another search engine.

How is Bing different? It’s designed to reduce the number of wasted clicks, add structure to the chaos of search results and help you find answers more quickly by taking a new approach to organizing results. Also, while Google and Yahoo rank results based on popularity, Bing ranks results by relevancy and categories.

Bing’s design is influenced by research showing 66 percent of search engine visits are for research to inform more complex decisions. It caters to users making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.

Click Killer
Microsoft’s exacting focus on eliminating clicks is apparent through several features and refinement tools, including:

• Best Match/Deep Links: This appears first in the results of certain queries and provides deep links and various contact information from the site listed. This preview of secondary links and site sub-urls solves a key SEO challenge created by Google, where generating site links is a random process.

• Preview: Users scrolling over a result can see a preview of the site content. This decreases the amount of clicking back and forth while looking for a specific site.

• Enhanced Image/Video Search: Bing serves up multiple pages of results more efficiently on a page and its video-filtering tools allows users to sort by duration, aspect ratio, resolution or source. Also of note is the 30-second video preview available by simply scrolling over a result.

• Web Groups: Results are also categorized into groups. For example, if someone searches for a city, Bing will categorize the results in relevant groups including weather, flights, hotels and restaurants.

One thing that isn’t changing from MSN to Bing is the Ad Center. Search campaigns that were previously on MSN are now shown on Bing as clearly labeled sponsored links that appear either at the top, right hand side or bottom of the search results page.

Is Bing the Thing to Challenge Google?
Marketers are watching to see if MSN’s five percent market share will increase with this new decision engine. But converting consumer behavior around search engine use to reach this goal is a long road to travel. And even then, Google’s strategy of desktop ubiquity through free email and seamlessly linked free applications makes it doubtful Bing will be more than a niche engine.

Regardless Bing has some intuitive and time-saving features and it’s more structured than Google and Yahoo. Its enhanced features make for a good user experience and a new search engine marketing opportunity.