Now that Microsoft had set the ground work for establishing Bing as its core search engine, the task that lies ahead is now focused on how Bing will interplay with other Microsoft products and services. One of these is Microsoft’s MSN portal.
Currently, Bing has taken the spot previously occupied by Live Search. The MSN site now have two Bing search boxes, on both the top and bottom part of the site. According to Microsoft’s vice president Erik Jorgensen, the task that lies ahead now is how to pull the Bing experience into the MSN portal in a sensible manner.
Perhaps something that would make the interplay between Bing and MSN as seamless as possible. Something in the line of how Yahoo! Search interacts with the Yahoo portal.
Currently, if you search on the MSN site using the Bing search box, the search results page will bring you to the Bing site, which is a totally different site. Obviously this is not a good business model. So, Microsoft must seamlessly integrate Bing with MSN.
Mr. Jorgensen also said that Microsoft is now looking into how the MSN portal can drive users into the various Bing search verticals including its local, shopping and travel search engines.
Of course this is part and parcel of maintaining Bing’s current good performance in the search engine race. Although, it may still be a long way to go before Bing reaches even half of Google’s search market share, with the way things are going for Bing, it might not be impossible anymore. And besides if Microsoft still finds it hard to catch up with Google using its Bing search engine, it can always revive the Yahoo acquisition deal. Bing + Yahoo vs Google? Now, that would be more interesting.
