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.

“Profit is sanity; Turnover is Vanity.”

It’s exactly the same in the world of search marketing:

“Conversions are sanity; Traffic is vanity.”

It’s easy to be seduced by the ever-increasing traffic that comes to a site as a result of improving on your search engine optimisation or buying clicks on the pay-per-click platforms. But if that traffic isn’t converting to something tangible – sales, enquiries, sign-ups, downloads, etc than you have acquired nothing more than boasting rights.

The moral? Make sure that you always idenity at least one action that you can track as a ‘conversion goal’ within your stats and measure your site’s performance against that. Don’t look just as the volume of traffic.