For some reason, Bing have decided to use listings data from third party 118 Information rather than collecting and maintaining their own database. A benefit of this approach (for business owners) is that your listing will potentially show up on all these services, in addition to bing.com:

• 118118.com and via 118118 voice services
• BT.com and via 118500 and also in The Phone Book (they still print that?!)
• Yahoo.co.uk
• Scoot.com
• Multimap.co.uk
• Touchlocal.co.uk
• 192.com
• City-visitor.com
• Also satnav systems such as BMW

There’s plenty of information around the web on how to get better visibility in Google Maps (check Tom Critchlow’s presentation at the excellent Think Visibility conference earlier this year) but it’s not clear yet how to influence listings on these alternative services. Google’s listings pull in related information, reviews and links from all over web. By comparison the Bing listings are pretty thin.

Getting listed

Although Google still dominates search in the UK – their image search alone gets more traffic than Bing does in total – it’s still worth making sure your business is listed. The process is pretty straightforward. Head over to their request form and search for your business. If it’s listed already you’ll have an opportunity to check and edit your details. If it’s not there yet you can add the details from scratch.

118 will call within 24 hours to confirm your listing. I wouldn’t bet against this call involving some encouragement to buy ‘enhanced’ position. (I’ll update this post when I’ve received my call.)

A Microsoft employee (working in his own time) has developed a ‘blind taste’ challenge where you compare the results from three search engines: Google, Yahoo! and the recently launched Bing. You choose your favourite set of results to reveal which search engine they came from. The results can be surprising. In my tests I found that I preferred Bing’s results almost as often as Google’s, with Yahoo! coming in a poor third.

Microsoft’s strategy with Bing seems to be working. Three weeks on from its launch, they have maintained their market share of 12% in the US (it’s lower in the UK). Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer spoke this week of the company’s plans to invest a massive 5 -  10% of its operating income over the next five years, citing their investment and subsequent success of Xbox as the model.

But here’s my advice to Microsoft: sort out the basics. A search on Google for Microsoft’s adCenter (their competitor to Google’s AdWords) brings up the following result.

Have they learned nothing? They really need to improve:

• cross-browser compatibility (you can’t access adCenter using Safari);
• the user interface (adCenter is clunky, badly structured and has no offline tools like AdWords Editor); and
• the description that other search engines display in their snippet (tell me why I need to use adCenter).

What’s your take?

• Have you used Bing? Did you like the results?
• What about Microsoft adCenter? Have you found it worth the time and effort for the volume of business it generates?

Leave your thoughts in the comments.