Microsoft Bing will more tightly integrate with Web services providers, and the search engine will improve its coverage in search verticals this spring as it seeks to gain market share from powerhouse Google, a Bing director said. Microsoft Bing Director Stefan Weitz said Bing will "broker out to different Web services to bring that information and those services back into the page." Since its broad June 2009 launch, Bing has grown from roughly 8 percent market share to 11.5 percent, according to comScore. Adding more Web services could help Bing pad its growth.
Microsoft Bing will more tightly integrate with Web services providers,
and the search engine will improve its coverage in search verticals
this spring as it seeks to gain market share from powerhouse Google, a
Bing
director said.
The idea is to more quickly and accurately connect consumers to popular Web services and applications.
Bing already boasts a travel site that lets
users plan trips, book flights and find hotels using several different refinements.
Bing also lures users with Bing
Cashback, which provides savings for users who buy products from retailers
after finding them through Bing.
Soon, as part of its effort to better divine user intent, Microsoft
Bing Director Stefan Weitz said Bing will "broker out to different Web
services to bring that information and those services back into the page."
Weitz declined to specify what Websites and services Microsoft
might feature. The search engine already
integrates with Twitter for real-time search, and
Wolfram Alpha to provide consumers computational information.
"It's not just about presenting you a trail to go
down to where users have to do a lot of work to figure out what they're trying
to find. It's about understanding intent, what task that user is trying to
accomplish and then building that experience that is specific to that task. For
that, we have to do a lot more than index Web pages."
That "lot more" includes aligning itself more
closely with popular Web services and e-commerce sites to enrich the user
experience. This will make Bing less about finding answers to questions or common
queries and more about helping users conduct transactions.
"What we're seeing is a Web of objects," Weitz
told eWEEK. "They'll tweet (post a message on Twitter), then go somewhere
else and book a cab on
RideCharge, or do a query on
OpenTable, or whatever it might be. What we're doing now with Bing is looking
at those objects and what people are doing on the Web. A lot of people are
doing these complex tasks that keyword searches just don't work for and we're
tying those things together."
Weitz pointed to the Bing event search page, where users
can type in an event and Bing will query against different ticket providers and
bring back relevant results. "We're trying to go where people are going to
be in a year versus focusing relentlessly on where they are today, or where
they are today or where they were a year ago where it was a much more
keyword-based approach."
Weitz's message is subtle but clear. While Google has
commandeered the search market for the last decade with basic keyword queries,
Bing's goal -- and perhaps its best
chance for success -- is nudging people toward this new search paradigm.
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