Microsoft brags that Bing is superior to Google with TV ads
Microsoft is dead serious about its new Bing search engine. Microsoft even bought out a company just to use its technology to build up Bing. The company is showing the world that it means business with a series of ads that targets the pitfalls of all search engines with the promise of a “cure.” However, is Microsoft promising something Bing can’t deliver?
There was a bit of false hope last week when reports of Bing overtaking Yahoo were greatly exaggerated. Even though Bing is nowhere close to overtaking Yahoo, the fact that this news spread like wild fire shows the level of interest around this new search engine.
Microsoft is trying to stir the pot a bit more with the latest wave of TV advertisements that attack the one inherent flaw everyone faces today with search engines – relevance. Everyone has experienced the situation where the search results have very little to do with the actual search word.
Microsoft paints a harsh picture in each of the ads showing the chaos that could ensue from unrelated search results with other search engines. Near the end of each ad Microsoft attempts to create a buzzword by indicating that Bing uses the first ever “Decision Engine.”
This feels similar to Ask.com’s (Ask Jeeves) attempt at selling a concept or novel idea. In Ask.com’s TV ads, emphasis was put on the fact that you can type the search criteria in the form of a question to get an answer. However, this strategy completely fell through after users realized that it did not work all that well.
Bing seems to improve the layout and strategic content placement over Live
Search. However, its “Decision Engine” has yet to really show the difference between Bing and its predecessor. Microsoft may want to take a lesson from Ask.com’s history as over-promising something revolutionary and failing to deliver can be much more detrimental than remaining at the number three spot in the search engine ranking.
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June 14th, 2009
I find that bing really falls flat on its face in the place it matters most; relevence. It’s strange because that seems to be the most heavily advertised point! I really like some features that bing includes, but it’s the same old same old when it comes to giving me the results I actually want (fails miserably – well maybe not quite that much).
Sorry Microsoft. I’ll stay with Google for now, but will consider Wolfram Alpha for the kind of searches it excels at. Just wish it had more up-to-date data…