Allen Weiner

It’s been a month now since the launch of Bing, Microsoft’s most recent entry into the consumer search arena. In our report, “Bing Takes Wing Against All Odds,” we pointed out that the Redmond software giant was entering the game rather late and was taking on the difficult challenge of moving up from third place in Comscore’s search engine rankings, taking on both Yahoo! (in second) and Google (the leader).

One key point made in the report was Microsoft’s need to take advantage of whatever momentum it was able to build based on its extensive and expensive ad campaign. The need to continue to add new features and functions that afford greater utility was essential to prove it was a serious, long-term contender, albeit a bit tardy. Based on such features as “quick add” to Hotmail, it may be a sign that Bing may have the chops to send a scare into its competitors.

“Quick add” offers the ability to seamlessly add the results of a search query to an email message. I cannot find such a feature in any of the competitors. I opened a new mail message in Hotmail, went to the Bing search pane, typed in “Ryan Howard” and was then offered text, images or video. I selected video and with one click could add the video to my email. Very slick.

I am not alone in my feeling about Bing; The New York Times’ David Pogue who says that in many ways Bing is better than Google. He was particularly taken with Bing’s ability to provide relevant structured data for results in Bing’s target categories: travel, shopping, health and local. All of its research and focused planning may have paid off for Microsoft in developing a winning game plan for the consumer search market.

Cool features and funny (depending on your POV) TV ads (here’s one), are fine, but what can we expect in terms of results? The thinking here is that, based on its current momentum and ability to add utility, Bing could gain as much as five share points by the end of the year. Five points keeps Bing third among the big players, but it would impress consumers, the (ever doubtful) cognoscenti and advertisers. Count Google and Yahoo! among those who should be concerned (if they aren’t already).