Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: 02/06/2009
No Bada Bing for Rightmove
Finally Google has a competitor in search. Microsoft’s new engine
Bing, which went live yesterday delivers comparable and in many cases more relevant results than its arch rival. If, and it’s a big if, Microsoft can take market share from Google it could be good news for local
real estate agents who should benefit from Bing’s algorithm at the expense of larger property portals like Rightmove.
A quick comparison of three high volume overseas property search phrases,
Property in France,
Property in Spain and
Property in Portugal reveal no results for the UK’s market leader. Rightmove ranks in the top 10 on Google (UK) for all three terms.
Bing’s results seem to favour the homepages of agents and specific country portals over larger, more authoritative and linked to sites like more generalist overseas portals and information hubs like Wikipedia and newspaper sites. The differences are quite subtle but you can see the trend by comparing
Bing, with
Google here.
It’s better but will anyone care?
The reaction from the online marketing community to Bing has generally been
positive. As a user, you’ll see a number of improvements to your search experience including:
- Superior image and video search.
- Video playback when you hover your mouse over the search results. Good news for teenagers looking for porn!
- Useful related search links on the left of the page to help you find what you need more quickly
- Useful biographical and historical links. See here for an example
- A quick and intuitive user interface
Although it’s a great effort, the problem for Microsoft is that Google is so deeply ingrained in people’s habits that the improvements may not be radical enough to shift behaviour. The likely result is that Bing will take what tiny market share Yahoo has left and leave little dent in the dominant position of Google.
However, Microsoft has huge resources and will likely throw everything behind promoting Bing. If it succeeds, it will be good news for agents and not just because the algorithm slightly favours the little guy. Competition in the paid search space will keep Adwords prices down.
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