MSN Live Becomes Bing.com

Have you already heard about the shift in the big three search engines?

If not, here’s today’s buzz on the Web you simply must know: the two search monsters Google and Yahoo! now got new competition: Bing.com.

Just a few days ago Microsoft replaced its MSN and Live search engines with a new one called Bing. All searches from MSN and Live are now directed to Bing- like it or not. However, it not the same dog wearing new clothes. Bing’s results are not exactly the same as in the old Microsoft’s SEs. (Just in case, this is the link to Microsoft’s official press release about Bing.com.)

So what does this change mean for you in particular?

Simple: if you earlier targeted MSN (and probably Live Search), you now need to optimize your sites for Bing. And even if you ignored MSN before (and many people doing SEO do), it is time to play catch up as early indications are that Bing could give google a run for it’s money.

It will never replace Google, but with Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop, Bing is going to get a LOT of eyeballs. And IF it can deliver on it’s promise of “Smarter search”, then they could grab a bigger chunk of the search market.

So, MS launched a new search engine. I guess MSN Search wasn’t good enough, neither was Live Search, so this is their third try. Maybe it is just my, but why not FIX the one you built in the first place instead of creating new ones every few years.

But at this point, I’m not advising spending any time on optimizing your site for this engine yet. Even with great rankings, I’m not seeing strong referrals yet.

Jerry West of WebMarketingNow.com had shared this insight:

Don, here’s an example from one of my sites. This is from the traffic this week:

Google: 8,622
Yahoo!:   815
MSN:      380
Live:     170
AOL:       86
Bing:      49

A search engine that can’t beat out AOL really isn’t a search engine worth optimizing for. If I wasn’t disallowing Ask from indexing my site, Ask probably would have beat Bing out. Right now, I don’t see any real consumers use this search engine yet.