Bing Search Engine by: Sue Cooper

  The Bing search engine is Microsoft’s foray into the search engine market. It is not their first attempt at creating a search engine though. In fact, the Bing search engine was developed from the Microsoft Live search engine. It is a powerful search engine which yields many relevant results for just about any keywords you enter.

The results obtained from Bing are typically quite useful. They are also well laid out with a list of results appearing in the main column of the results page. There are also subheadings, which feature related keywords and a few results for these related keywords. This feature is useful from a user’s perspective because it can help them find a wide variety of information for one subject rather quickly. The layout also clearly distinguishes results from sponsored sites by placing these results on the right hand sidebar under the column heading Sponsored Sites. The other keywords featured on the results page are listed at the top of the sidebar on the left hand side for easy navigation. There is also a list of related searches you can jump to for even more information.

The Bing search engine does not just let you search for relevant websites though. Like other popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo!, there is also the ability to search for keywords in specific categories. Some of these categories include images, videos, shopping, news, maps and travel. There is also a really cool visual search feature which lets you navigate through pictures which may be of interest to you. To use this feature you can either enter keywords or navigate through a series of categories until you find a photo of interest to you.

Although Bing might not be the most well known or the most popular search engine available, it is definitely worthwhile for website owners to monitor their rankings and take measures to attempt to improve their rankings. This is simply because it is a Microsoft product and many people are fans of anything Microsoft does and will utilise this search engine out of brand loyalty. However, it does not make sense to optimise for this search engine at the expense of more popular search engines, such as Google. For example, it would not make sense to make changes to your website simply to improve your Bing ratings if these same changes lowered your Google ratings.