Badabing - it's on the up. #badabing

So, it seems that BING is making an impression in the US – comScore reporting as much as a 3% increase in the two weeks since its launch.
It will be interesting to see if this growth is sustained, or rather whether the £100million investment rolls on and on to fuel the hype of the new ‘Decision Engine’. CEO Steve Balmer suggested that MS are prepared to offer up 5-10% of its operating incoming in search over the next 5 years (possibly a staggering £11billion!) and today at Microsoft’s European search summit MS has boldly vowed that they will be the best UK search engine – quite a statement eh!

I took 5 minutes to have a scout around BING; here are some of its nicest features that I’ve noticed.

•    Search

•  Realted search, clear and logical – not too sales driven
• Introduction of categories in the linear results - Apparently to combat the huge drop off of click through rates post position 5 that Google experiences, Bing seemingly offers a more enriched list.
• Importantly – result quality seems good.
  

•    Image search

• Select by size, layout, colour, style and people – and from my test they all seem to work, makes Google’s colour selector look a bit naff!
• Viewing options on how many images are on a page, nice smooth switch over of formats
  

•    Related searches

• They seem logical and unobtrusive
• You can turn them off if they annoy you!
  

•    Video

• Roll over snippet functionality – gives you a small preview of the video in question (although this could reduce CTR on query based searches)
• Again the plethora of search filters are welcoming and useful i.e best match or most recent
  

•    Shopping

• Bit of a fail – shoots you out to Ciao! Which just isn’t as nice? Still it’s a reputable partner, although the introduction of flashing banners, adsense and tags like ‘earn money for reviews’ removes some of BING’s simple allure.
  

•    News

• Limited, but hey it’s only in beta – expect more to come in this area
  

•    Maps

• Nice link through to Multi-map – still not Google maps is it!

Follow Microsoft’s search summit on twitter hash tag #badabing.

Why sweat over charity direct mail?

We wrote about two cracking digital charity campaigns today, as well as publishing a story about the head of the fundraising body's standards committee warning of bad charity direct mail and the damage it does. We're talking about opposite ends of the spectrum here - ActionAid and The Royal British Legion using digital to its fullest creative extent at one end, and shoddy direct mail practices such as use of shock tactics at the other. A viral by international development charity ActionAid celebrates each donor as the greatest humanitarian in the world in an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek video clip that takes donors on a journey where people all over the world (including Barack Obama) thank them personally for their small, but significant contribution. The Royal British Legion, meanwhile, has created a commemorative website for the 65th anniversary of D-Day, where visitors can plant virtual flags on a Google map of the historic landing beaches in Normandy. Wonderful. Is direct mail getting desperate in these donation-challenged times? Or does this tale of contrasts expose the limitations of direct mail, when compared with digital, as a fundraising tool? For charities, response rates will be the judge.

Another attempt by Microsoft to challenge Google at Google's game.

So Microsoft's BING is here -It’s great that there’s solid movement from Google’s suitors- however the enormity of the task cannot be under estimated. Will the £100 million investment in ‘Bing’ be enough to curtail Google’s dominance? 

It really comes back to market share, MSN may well develop the best platform for advertisers and users, however if the volume isn’t there – as it is with Google – then ultimately this is going to inhibit their growth.  It looks and feels like a nice product (very Google like!)  I like the fact that they’ve stepped away from the rigidity of Live and MSN search centres, the packaging of this as its product gives it credence (in my opinion) as a serious search engine. Too often have we heard of updates to MSN and live search and ultimately they’ve always failed to deliver.
 
I do doubt that their obvious attempt to emulate Google in such a way is the way to go, Yahoo have a slight edge by reinforcing their capabilities in semantic web (something that Google struggles with) while it’s nice, I cannot see any real USP – cheesy tag line like it’s a ‘decision engine’ not a ‘search engine’ won’t sit well either!