What impact will Bing have on search engine optimisation?

Microsoft's Bing search engine is rising in popularity

Usage of the Microsoft Bing search engine grew by 70 per cent in 2009 and was responsible for 4.1 billion searches, according to figures from search engine research provider comScore.

As Microsoft’s Bing search engine continues to rise in popularity, Computing found out what organisations need to know about Bing and how much attention they should pay to Google’s new challenger.

One of the catalysts behind Bing’s recent boom is Microsoft’s partnership with Yahoo. Microsoft is providing the technology behind Yahoo’s once-dominant search engine.

Bing is currently responsible for 12.1 per cent of all searches and Yahoo is responsible for 18.3 per cent, according to comScore's most recent figures.

This means that optimising a search engine ranking for Bing will also improve content relevance for Yahoo’s search engine as well.

But in what ways does Bing’s technology differ from Google?

According to Cedric Chambaz, Microsoft’s marketing manager for search and SMB, successful search engines have a lot in common.

“A search engine, irrelevant of the technology or the brand behind it, is all about delivering the most relevant results. The question is: how do you qualify relevancy?” he said.

Experts say Microsoft has worked hard to emulate the Google search.

Richard Baxter, founder and director of SEO consultancy SEOgadget, said the major difference between Bing and Google’s search engine is how it presents search results, rather than the criteria it uses to rank them.

“It’s really clear that Bing has invested a lot of time and effort improving the search algorithm to improve the quality of the results for users, so their results do tend to mimic Google’s a lot more frequently than you’d expect,” he said.

“Google and Bing rankings are more similar than they’ve ever been before. What’s quite interesting is that, from the perspective of the ordinary user, there are very few differences.”