Steve Ballmer showed the D crowd a sneak peak demo of Microsoft Bing, their new search initiative slated to go live on June 3rd.
We were shown several use cases. It’s almost as if Bing starts off where Google leaves off with a little Ask Jeeves in the middle. For example, if you do a search for a particular city, you can learn about specific events for that city.
Charlene Li’s take in a recent article on Vator TV, “Bing’s goal is to improve the search experience, and it does that well overall in an incremental way, but especially in four key categories – shopping, travel, local, and health — by tailoring the experience to specific goals associated with those categories.
Why these categories? They are the ones that generate the most concentrated revenues from advertising, the ones where people need to make complex, multi-step decisions every day.”
Ballmer also showed us an image search for musicians where you’re given the option of color or black and white. The image results are vertical and it just keeps going. In other words, you don’t need to click next to go to page 2, page 3 and so on. The result: fast viewing to find exactly what you’re looking for.
You can find customer service numbers in an instant through a quick search query without having to fish through their website trying to find where they hid it five layers deep.
The same goes for product reviews. If you type in “canon camera,” you are given a series of reviews that are algorithmically aggregated from across the web, including commerce sites and blogs. You can quickly and easily compare prices and even get cashback, which is essentially a kick back from advertising.
If you want to take a trip, simply enter “flight from Washington to San Diego,” and it pulls up flights across the web. It ‘felt like’ Kayak was baked into Bing. Another cool feature was the ability to look at whether flights will go up or down in a graph.
Says Ballmer, “people are trying to monetize content. We can do a deal with someone who wants to sell something, and then snip it. There are people who want to charge for content or monetize that content from advertising.
If you actually look at real revenue on the web, there’s Google for ad revenue, there’s Yahoo, us, and then there’s everything else. Advertising on the internet is less proven than conventional wisdom. We’re not trying to live off other people’s work……” In other words, if value should be re-divided somehow between content providers, advertisers and the search engine.
Renee Blodgett is the founder of We Blog the World. The site combines the magic of an online culture and travel magazine with a global blog network and has contributors from every continent in the world. Having lived in 10 countries and explored nearly 80, she is an avid traveler, and a lover, observer and participant in cultural diversity.
She is also the CEO and founder of Magic Sauce Media, a new media services consultancy focused on viral marketing, social media, branding, events and PR. For over 20 years, she has helped companies from 12 countries get traction in the market. Known for her global and organic approach to product and corporate launches, Renee practices what she pitches and as an active user of social media, she helps clients navigate digital waters from around the world. Renee has been blogging for over 16 years and regularly writes on her personal blog Down the Avenue, Huffington Post, BlogHer, We Blog the World and other sites. She was ranked #12 Social Media Influencer by Forbes Magazine and is listed as a new media influencer and game changer on various sites and books on the new media revolution. In 2013, she was listed as the 6th most influential woman in social media by Forbes Magazine on a Top 20 List.
Her passion for art, storytelling and photography led to the launch of Magic Sauce Photography, which is a visual extension of her writing, the result of which has led to producing six photo books: Galapagos Islands, London, South Africa, Rome, Urbanization and Ecuador.
Renee is also the co-founder of Traveling Geeks, an initiative that brings entrepreneurs, thought leaders, bloggers, creators, curators and influencers to other countries to share and learn from peers, governments, corporations, and the general public in order to educate, share, evaluate, and promote innovative technologies.
