Microsoft Bing: The New Verb for Authors and Search Optimization

June 4, 2009 at 10:21 am 1 comment

Microsoft has come out with a new search engine. In a world where “Google” and “Facebook” are used as verbs, then it’s entirely possible that Microsoft’s new search engine at www.bing.com could also amend our future vernacular as well. I assume that this is a goal of theirs, among others of course.

Obviously, the search function is not unfamiliar, but Bing is more visually appealing than Live Search; and the default images on the homepage are more colorful and inviting, too.

Those of us who spend our days working and playing on computers try to learn about everything that comes to our attention that we don’t necessarily understand yet, like Bing for instance. Already, the bloggers out there are testing the new tool to see how it competes with Google. I have seen several side-by-side assessments of similar searches and evaluations of the quality of the results. Thus far, it appears that the Bing engine and Google are rather comparable to each other.

One advantage to Bing that I’ve discovered is that the image search results are displayed in one continuous page that you can scroll through, rather than page after page of 25 images.

I hope that those of you out there who are marketing your books will take the time to familiarize yourself with this new tool. It will definitely become increasingly important if it is adopted by users, and authors must be certain that the efforts they have taken to maximize your relevance in Google search results will also be fruitful in Bing.

Microsoft has already faced some criticism, as there was a “bug” that briefly was forcing users of Internet Explorer to reset Bing as their preferred search engine. Even if the users manually attempted to switch back to whichever other platform that they preferred, IE would kick the default back to Bing instantly. Microsoft addressed the issue and resolved it rather quickly, but the impression that I get is that Microsoft will be going out of their way to make Bing a hit.

We would of course love to hear more from the writers out there who are starting to explore the advantages and disadvantages of Bing so that we can all mutually benefit and maximize our presence in this highly competitive environment.

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Entry filed under: Announcements, In the News, Marketing, Self-Publishing. Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Michael J. Fox Memoir Always Looking Up: Writing with Purpose Authors Who Market: Offering Author Solutions to Promoting and Publishing Books

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