Listing on Bing? Coz It’s Kinda Important

Bing.com, the new “decision engine” from Microsoft builds upon, Live.com and of course MSN.com. Because of this you probably think that your site will automatically be listed. Turns out mine had some trouble being found by Bing so I had to do it manually, which you can do here.

But why is pinging Bing so important? Surely it has no dent on Google.

Well, recently stats came out for June and it recieved almost 50 million vilitors for that month. You may think that 50 million is pretty small, but lets just put this into content. It got more than Twitter, which is getting publicity left, right and center. More than Digg, a very popular user generated news site, and more than CNN, one of the most accurate and well-respected news sources in America. I know that Microsoft arent competing with these sites, but to get more than pretty established websites in the first month of launch, its great. For any site that is a hug achievement, but its a momentous one for a site that Microsoft owns.

Now how did they get it? Well obviously most of that was redirected from Live.com, and even more obvious is the influx of new visitors, dying to see what the whole fuss is about. But to keep 50 million users a month, they need to start getting people to make the switch. How? Relevant searching. I’ve started using Bing, whilst going cold turkey on Google, in order to see if it has any effect on my daily search needs. For the most part, no. But there are a few things missing from the “decision engine” before I decide  to make the switch permanent. Things like money conversions are missing. The extended features the US site has is missing, we have localized search and that is it. And I dont think its integrated enough with the rest of the Microsoft websites.

Overall getting listed on Bing may not be a priority right now. But soon, we might have Microsofts second coming. And I cant wait, Google is getting boring.