Where Bing Beats Google

Now we SEOs love to focus on everything Google, and for good reason.  Google has completely dominated the search engine market for years, but Microsoft’s Bing has grown in popularity over the last year.  Over the last year though Bing grew threefold according to a recent report from an independent marketing group “The Search Agency.”  So what is Bing doing different to justify this threefold increase, and is it something Google should be worried about?
Search Operations

Both Google and Bing use search operations to help find extremely specific results.  Most people don’t know about these search perimeters, and some say you need to speak a new language, but for SEOs these unique search perimeters can really save you hours of work.

For SEOs Bing offers some search perimeters that Google doesn’t offer.  LinkFromDomain:ExampleURL.com is just one unique perimeter shows the best outgoing links for a site which can be extremely useful when figuring out linking partners in a particular niche industry.  You can also use “contains:FileType” when searching for specific documents.  For example if you need to find a PDF document that talks about biochemistry you can type in “contains:pdfbiochemistry.”

 

Flight Prediction

Bing

Like Google Bing can show you what flights are available in your area, but Bing does something that is rather cleaver.  Whenever I go out to buy tickets the one thing I think about is am I getting a good deal on tickets or not?  Well Bing helps answer that question by showing you the estimated price difference for different days based on past cost patterns.  Bing also provides quick green and red symbols to quickly glance if the deal is good or if you should wait for something better.

 

Licensed Photo Search

Something that I use frequently is Bing’s easy photo license search.  Google simply doesn’t have and easy creative commons photo search option.  Before I found Bing’s licensed search option I usually had to go to Flickr’s limited creative common photo search option.  Bing has a licensed section that is extremely easy to use and brings up an easy to navigate image SERP.  Google’s licensed search is so deeply buried in the settings options that most people don’t even realize the option exists.

Better Video Search

Bing 1

Google has a video search option, and you would think being the owners of YouTube you would have the best video search options on the internet, but they don’t.  Bing is the king of video search.  When you search for a video Bing gives you a row of thumbnail videos.  When you place your cursor over one of the thumbnails you get a preview of the video that automatically starts playing.  Plus you can see more than three videos without having to scroll.