Bing – Giving you more Organic Room to Compete for

Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, is giving users more options for organic search results. In turn, this means more space for well marketed sites to appear or present more search related content. The typical search engine like Google gives you one column for organic search results. In that one column you have the meta title and meta description. The other column in Google is used for advertising. Every person practicing SEO is competing for the top spot in that one column.

Bing is taking a different approach to search engine results page or SERP with a few new ideas. One of those is called Quick Tabs. This new addition provides a list of relevant and categorized items based on previous searches and clicks. Quick tabs are only available for less than 20 percent of all searches with Bing and can be found a the left hand side of a SERP.

Another new feature is Document Preview. Each search result has a caption button on the right hand side of the result. By moving your mouse over the caption button, you can preview additional information about the page. This isn’t just meta description information, it is content pulled from that page. I have also noticed information from headers and footers included in the details as well and links from those sections appear in the Document Preview.

Microsoft is taking an interesting approach to their new search engine. It seems like they are actually listening to the users and researching what they want. Instead of trying to re-invent the search engine wheel, they are trying to make it better. Only time will tell if Bing has enough staying power to make it last past the initial release hype. What do you think? Are some of these new improvements enough to improve the average user’s searching experience?