I was having a look at the US version of Bing to get a better understanding of what the UK version will look like when the army of Microsoft developers have finished customising it for a UK audience. Needless to say, the US version is a lot more functional and has a lot of nice features. One compelling feature is the travel tab, which looks to be powered by Farecast- a third party website.
This got me thinking. If a search engine's sole reason for existence is to catalogue the world's information and provide the user with the correct answer, surely the best experience would be that the user never needs to leave the results page at all? Afterall, a significant number of sites are just more specific search engines themselves - why not use one all powerful engine to rule them all (or at least aggregate the results)?
The July rise in Bing search share to 8.9% in the US, although not barnstorming, would suggest that users are happy with it. So, does this mean we could see the Farecast/Bing model extending beyond that travel vertical and territory? Google Base is probably
the oldest and most well-known example of this sort of model, and for a retailer
is an absolute must nowadays (I've seen clients get up to 15% of their revenue
from GBase). However, GBase is retail focussed and not really pushed by Google. It could do with some TLC. Yahoo ‘trusted feeds' is another that follows in a similar vein.
One offshoot of this model becoming more prevalent could be
that you may see a race between sites to make their content as readily available
to the engines as possible - this means feeds, XML type feeds. It becomes the
publisher's responsibility to make their content neat and understandable for
the engines to relay back to the user (beyond the standard remit of SEO). We could see this becoming increasingly important
in site development briefs and maybe as its own stand alone ‘feeds' channel within a marketing
department.
Obviously, from a strategic point of view, there are some
hefty reasons why a publisher would not want to hand over all content/inventory
to the engines. However, I think there is mileage in this sort of activity, but
it requires the correct commercial architecture to make it interesting to the
content owner (so they invest in producing the feeds), and to the engines (so
they push it more readily). It's almost a catch22.
