Search Clinic Blog news stories about online marketing

Aftre Facebook did a major overhaul of its privacy settings to open your data to all members, there was an immediate outcry from some quarters as the site was a bit aggressive in setting users’ defaults to “everyone.”

In addition, Yahoo got called out for trying to suppress its surveillance menu for law enforcement. And Asa Dotzler of Firefox railed against Google and urged users to switch to Bing in response to comments from Google CEO Eric Schmidt that made the latter seem indifferent to consumer privacy.

So what exactly did Schmidt say about privacy?

He told CNBC Anchor Maria Bartiromo, on the cable network’s recent special “Inside the Mind of Google,” that people who have something to hide shouldn’t be doing things online that might potentially expose them if law enforcement seeks access to their search histories.

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” said Schmidt.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and others have decried that position, especially as others within Google, such as Google VP Marissa Mayer, seek to assure consumers that their privacy is “protected” at Google.

In fairness to Schmidt he was saying that Google (and others) are subject to US law (the “patriot act”) and that law enforcement and government authorities can, as a practical matter, get access to search records because they’re retained “for some time.”

That then — the period of data retention — becomes the practical privacy battleground. 

Google’s new personalized approach to search results generally seeks to retain user data indefinitely, in cases where users don’t actively delete their histories. Danny explains how it works:

    In Signed-Out Web History, Google knows that it has seen someone using a particular browser before. Behind the scenes, it has tracked all the searches that have been done by that browser. It also logs all the things people have clicked on from Google’s search results, when using that browser. 

   

   There’s no way to see this information, but it is used to customize the results that are shown. It only remembers things for 180 days. Information older than that is forgotten. Google doesn’t know your name. If you use a different browser, Google doesn’t know your past history. In fact, you can’t even see your past history.

    In Signed-In Web History, Google knows that a particular Google user is using Google. Behind the scenes, it has kept a record of all the things that person has done when signed-in, regardless of what computer or browser they’ve used. If they’re using the Google Toolbar with the page tracking feature enabled, then it has also kept a record of all the pages they’ve viewed over time. This information can be viewed by the user at any time, and the user can selectively delete info. They can also delete everything, if they want. If they don’t, then Google forgets nothing.

For those not signed in data is retained for 180 days and is associated with a particular browser. For those with a Google account who are signed in, data and web search history are, as mentioned, retained indefinitely until actively deleted.

The Google Chrome browser has a private “incognito” mode where no web history is captured. (Microsoft’s IE8 offers comparable functionality, called inPrivate browsing.) However if you’re signed in to a Google account while in incognito mode Google will still capture your search history:

    if you sign into your Google Account while in incognito mode, your subsequent web searches are recorded in your Google Web History. In this case, to prevent your searches from being stored in your Google Account, you’ll need to pause your Google Web History tracking.

All this is not unlike the Facebook default “everyone” settings. Google will capture your search history and behavior unless you take affirmative action to prevent or block it. 

You too can opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google Opt Out ad and content network privacy policy and click on the OPT OUT button.

Save your opt-out preference permanently- With this browser plugin you can permanently opt out of the DoubleClick

It is Bing.com’s very first appearance since officially launching as the decision engine, halfway through the year in early June. 

Coupled with an $80 million dollar advertising campaign to rebrand the new search engine (formerly Live Search) and attract new users, it may have actually worked – since Bing also appeared on the 2009 Yahoo Year in Review, with searchers asking, “What is Bing?”

In fairness, Bing did officially release their Most Popular Searches for all of 2009, including data from the first half of the year as Live Search. Decidedly, Michael Jackson would have made it to the top of the list, whether it was Bing or Live Search.

Twitter seems to have infiltrated Bing in the same way, clearly users needed help trying to decide, “To Tweet or Not to Tweet?” Or could it be that the Bing-Twitter integration was that big of a deal? 

Top Overall Trending Topics on Bing in 2009:
   1. Michael Jackson
   2. Twitter
   3. Swine Flu
   4. Stock Market
   5. Farrah Fawcett
   6. Patrick Swayze
   7. Cash for Clunkers
   8. Jon and Kate Gosselin
   9. Billy Mays
  10. Jaycee Dugard

Top 3 Celebrity Searches:
   1. Perez Hilton
   2. Robert Pattinson
   3. Megan Fox

Bing plans to unveil a relevancy quiz on Facebook, so you can test your knowledge of the most popular searches in 2009. Stay tuned to the Bing blog to find out more.

For a real-time look at what’s popular on Bing, don’t forget about Visual Search, where you can view the Top Albums, Top iPhone Apps, Top Movies and more at any given time.

If there’s one thing that both Google and Microsoft agree on, it’s that search marketing isn’t solved yet. 

Google’s vice president of search product and user experience Marissa Mayer has said:

    We’re all familiar with 80-20 problems, where the last 20% of the solution is 80% of the work. Search is a 90-10 problem. Today, we have a 90% solution: I could answer all of my unanswered Saturday questions, not ideally or easily, but I could get it done with today’s search tool. (If you’re curious, the answers are below.) However, that remaining 10% of the problem really represents 90% (in fact, more than 90%) of the work. 

    Coming up with elegant, fitting and relevant solutions to meet the challenges of mobility, modes, media, personalization, location, socialization, and language will take decades. Search is a science that will develop and advance over hundreds of years. Think of it like biology and physics in the 1500s or 1600s: it’s a new science where we make big and exciting breakthroughs all the time. However, it could be a hundred years or more before we have microscopes and an understanding of the proverbial molecules and atoms of search. Just like biology and physics several hundred years ago, the biggest advances are yet to come. That’s what makes the field of Internet search so exciting.

Well, Dr Search agrees with the philosophy, if not the time lines. 

Information discovery and dissemination is a science that is already hundreds of years old. Google, in its present state, is a small but significant wrinkle in that time line. What is exciting is that it’s marking an important change in how we look at information. 

What Google has done is introduced a “Just in Time” information economy. It’s a little presumptuous to say that we’re at the beginning and that internet search marks an entirely new science. Really, this still comes down to how we seek and use information. The internet and search has represented a monumental shift, yes, but it’s not a new ball game. And I certainly hope we don’t have to wait hundreds of years for significant advancements in the state of search.

Microsoft’s Director of Product Planning Stefan Weitz also said in an Ars Technica interview with that we’re early in the game of search:

    “’We’re not at where we’d like to be,’ Weitz began, and then dove in to explain that people are generally happy with how their search engine is working, until the data shows that they are not.”

So, there seems to be consensus that there’s a lot to do to improve web search. The question is, what does that improvement look like? A blog post by author and industry pundit John Battelle caught my attention:

    I describe my frustration with search as it relates to helping me make a complicated decision: How to possibly buy a classic car. From it:

    So first, how would I like to decide about my quest to buy a classic car? Well, ideally, I’d have a search application that could automate and process the tedious back and forth required to truly understand what the market looks like. After all, if I’m looking for classic Camaro or Porsche convertibles from the mid to late 1960s, there are only so many of them for sale, and they can be categorized by any number of important variables—price, model, region, color, features, etc. And while a number of sites do a fair job with a portion of the market, I don’t trust any of them to give me a general overview of what’s really out there. That’s where an intelligent search agent can really help.

So here, Battelle hits on the idea of search assisting in complex decisions. And then, from our own Search 2010 series of interviews, usability expert Jakob Nielsen voiced a similar concern:

    I think we can see a change maybe being a more of a usefulness relevance ranking. I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems.

In the same series of interviews, I talked to Marissa Mayer about where search may go, and she envisioned a more interactive set of search results:

    We will be able to have much more rich interaction with the search results pages. There might be layers of search results pages: take my results and show them on a map, take my results and show them to me on a timeline. It’s basically the ability to interact in a really fast way, and take the results you have and see them in a new light. So I think that that kind of interaction will be possible pretty easily and pretty likely. I think it will be, hopefully, a layout that’s a little bit less linear and text based, even than our search results today and ultimately uses what I call the ‘sea of whiteness’ more in the middle of the page, and lays out in a more information dense way all the information from videos to audio reels to text, and so on and so forth. So if you imagine the results page, instead of being long and linear, and having ten results on the page that you can scroll through to having ten very heterogeneous results, where we show each of those results in a form that really suits their medium, and in a more condensed format.

The common theme, it seems to me, is aspiring to move beyond relevancy as the metric by which a list of search results is ordered to providing us with information that we can do something with. For that quest, there seems to be two different approaches. 

Microsoft, with Bing, appears to be favoring Battelle’s “online valet” model—an all-knowing wizard that helps guide us through complex decisions. Indeed, the branding of Bing as a “decision engine” reiterates that aspiration. Bing’s strategy, still in it’s nascent stages, is to pick the categories where complex decisions and the need for more useful information abound: shopping, local, travel and health.

I believe Bing is on the right track, but they’re still are too bound to the typical search format. Even searches in these targeted categories don’t usually deliver a search page that offers substantially more useful results than Google. 

If the goal of Bing is to be a decision engine, it should rise to the challenge more boldly. For example, I’m thinking of buying a Prius, which, with all the trade-offs between a higher sticker price but potentially lower operating costs certainly qualifies as a complex decision. To echo John Battelle’s wish, I’d love a digital valet to go out and gather all the relevant information and then guide me through it. This is what Bing promises to do. Let’s see how it delivers.

Dr Search has had some questions from our UK readers who pointed out that the Bing local listing center was only accepting US based businesses.

While UK listings were showing in search results, this was sourced from other data providers and it didn’t appear there was any way to get your information included.

Well, thanks to one of our loyal readers, it appears you can! Microsoft gets UK local business listings from a company called Market Location.

Here’s a screenshot from multimap.com (owned by Bing) on how to get your business listed:

All you have to do is simply visit http://www.marketlocation.com/changereq/ and add your details!

There’s been a bit of discussion on the issue over at the Bing community forums, and some readers have confirmed the inclusion of previously unlisted businesses by using the form above.

So if you’ve got a UK business, add your details with the form above and please leave a comment if/ when you get included! 

The Search Clinic wishes you Good Luck!

Cyber Monday (the first Monday after US Thanksgiving), marks the start of the online holiday shopping season for most retailers. 

With a flurry of online activity expected on this day, it’s important to ensure your website’s going to capture the attention of as many shoppers as possible.

In 2008, Cyber Monday spending hit a record high, with consumers spending a whopping $846 million online. 

The good news for retailers is that Cyber Monday is only the start - with strong online sales expected to continue right through until the New Year.

So the big question is: are you ready? The key to improving your sales during this period is to focus on marketing that can deliver instant results.

In the online world, this typically includes:
    * Google AdWords / PPC Advertising
    * Local Search Listings
    * Featured Listings on smaller search engines

Google AdWords (PPC) Advertising
Google AdWords advertising would definitely be the number one way to target holiday shoppers. It offers pinpoint targeting and instant exposure enabling you to get on the first page of Google when customers are searching for your products and services.

Key Benefits:
    * Campaigns can be live within hours.
    * Ability to target customers via keyword and location.
    * First page placement on Google.

Local Search Listings
If you’re targeting local customers, a local search listing across Google, Yahoo and Bing is another way to get on the first page of organic search results. It’s simple to setup and there’s no limit to the number of people who click on your listing.

Key Benefits:
    * Once verified, listings are live almost immediately.
    * Can be included on the first page of results.
    * Free organic traffic.

Featured Listings
If your customers use a search engine besides the top 3, there’s no harm in being found there either. Top 10 featured listings can help boost the efforts of your PPC and Local campaigns.

Key Benefits:
    * Listings are live within 48 hours.
    * Traffic is free – no click fee’s.
    * Keyword targeted traffic.

This year, Cyber Monday falls on the 30th November, so there’s only a few weeks now to get prepared. But don’t leave it to the last minute!

Bing and Microsoft can smile at the latest search engine market share report from Experian Hitwise.

Google is still light years ahead of Yahoo, Bing, and Ask … but Experian Hitwise shows Bing with a 7% increase during October, while both Google and Yahoo saw small drops in search share.

Experian Hitwise also updates some stats related to search queries:

    “Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, increased 3 percent between October and September 2009. Searches of eight or more words increased 4 percent. The same time period showed that shorter search queries – those averaging one to four words long – decreased 1 percent from month to month.”

The September search share statistics are out and Yahoo! is the biggest loser yet again as Google and Bing increase their traffic.

According to statistics released by Compete, Yahoo’s search share continues to take a steady dive. It lost another 1% market share last month and has now lost a total of 5% since September 2008.

It’s a whole other story for the new kid in town, Bing, whose search share continues to rise and unlike many of the other major search engine also had an increase in the number of total queries.

Here is a rundown of the market share for each search engine.

The all mighty Google remained pretty stable from last month, but has grown over 4% from this time last year. I wonder if we will see this same growth this time next year or will Bing cause Google’s growth to slow in 2010?

The introduction of Bing to the market seems to have had little effect on AOL and Ask. Both search engines market share has remained quite constant over the last few months. Although with less than 4% market share combined, it’s hardly going to cause any sleepless nights for Bing.

So how did search do overall in September? Not too good actually! Searchers submitted 200 million less queries than in August. There’s no cause for concern yet though as this will likely bounce back with with Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas all just around the corner.

It has been reported that Microsoft will announce a deal with Twitter today to gather its real time data. We’re able to confirm that from a source as well and provide some additional details.

The deal will make Bing the first major search engine to have access to Twitter’s “Firehose” of tweets. It’s not exclusive, however. Google potentially could still do a deal, to.

We’re told that:
    * The deal will be announced today shortly after Microsoft’s Qi Lu takes the stage at the Web 2.0 conference at 11:30 Pacific Time today. Some sessions are being broadcast live here, and Lu’s might be one of them.
    * There will be a standalone Twitter search service offered at Bing, with some ranking technology other than sort by date involved, and that shortened URLs will be expanded. That service should go live today.
    * There will be some integration within the regular Bing service itself

Discussions to gather data from Facebook are also continuing, and there’s a chance a deal might be concluded for announcement today.

We’ll update as we learn more. To understand the importance of Twitter and Facebook data to the major search engines, see my What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players. It covers what Bing currently does with limited Twitter data it’s able to get now.

We hope more working relationships with organizations in the search business will mean even more variety for users.

Twitter has now been running for almost 3 three years and has become a huge treasure trove of information and links – which makes it hot property for the likes of Google and Bing (aka Microsoft).

The major search engines have deflected the need to talk real-time data with Twitter for some time – but times have changed.

A few months back, Twitter repositioned itself as a search engine for its own content. Given the rapid adoption of the platform, this move caught the attention of the major search engines.

This week, Twitter is in separate discussions with both Google and Bing. The aim of discussions is to strike deals that would see both search engines incorporate Twitter’s 140 character messages in their respective results.

Kara Swisher via the Allthingsd blog provided further background on the discussions (via unnamed sources):

    “a number of scenarios are being discussed to compensate Twitter for its huge and potentially valuable trove of real-time and content-sharing information, generated from the data stream of billions of tweets from its 54 million monthly users.

    These include a number of structures, including a payment of several million dollars to Twitter, along with various revenue-sharing proposals that would give Twitter a piece of the revenue made from search results.”

If a deal can be struck, it’ll be music to the Twitter team’s ears. While the platform’s adoption has grown at a remarkable level – they’ve been unable to find a sustainable way to monetize the service.

With a solid revenue stream, Twitter will be able to continue their innovation in the real time publishing area – which is a hot button at the moment.

What will be interesting is to see how the tweets (twitter posts) are incorporated into the search results. And even more interesting will be to see how they are ranked. Some interesting times ahead for SEO.

Stay tuned, as we’ll be sure to let you know comes from the Twitter Google and Bing discussions.

You can see the Search Clinic Twitter account at Twitter.com/SearchClinic

The latest search engine results figures have been released by Nielsen, and its more good news for Bing. 

According to their data for August 2009, Bing now captures a total of 10.7% of all U.S. searches. This strong figure also makes Bing the fastest growing top 10 search engine with an increase of 22.1% month-over-month for August.

With the growing importance of Bing, website owners need to ensure they are claiming their share of Bing’s search traffic.

Bing’s latest enhancement to its search engine could help expand the value of search even further. It’s allowing users to get social with its search listings – welcome Bing & Ping.

Social media is rapidly changing the way we digest information, and more importantly for businesses, the way we make buying decisions. Nowadays, friend referral is one of the leading factors in people selecting a particular business or product.

Bing have recognized the importance of being able to share what you’ve found and now incorporated sharing options directly into their SERPs.

As search engines continue to expand the information and detail contained within their listings, the need to go to the listing destination prior to sharing is getting less and less important.

It’s currently in beta testing with sharing options assigned to enhanced listings such as movie times, news, restaurants etc. If you wish to get involved in the beta program, you’ll need to become a friend of Bing on Facebook – another clever social ploy!

Dr Search is a big fan of search engines making their listings more interactive and social. Whilst sharing of listings is only a small part of the social media picture – it’s an important step!

Searchers are no longer just potential visitors or customers – if you’re search engine listing is engaging, this new Bing enhancement allows them to be your social media marketers too!

Dr Search has been heavily documenting the rise of Bing on this blog, and there’s no denying it has definitely improved Microsoft’s position in terms of search market share.

So now the question for website owners and SEO’ers remains - “How do I rank higher in Bing and drive more traffic to my website?”

While the jury is still out on definitive strategies for top ranking success in Bing, there seems to be a growing chorus of support for certain tactics, which I have detailed below:

* Backlinks While backlinks are still used in the bing algorithm, it seems not to the same level as Google. Backlink counts for top 10 sites in Bing are much lower than Google, suggesting less importance.

* Anchor Text It seems that Bing focuses more heavily on links with relevant anchor text, so that should influence your linking strategy - get your text anchor text right.

* Onpage Optimization One of the more contensious factors, but many SEO experts believe Bing is weighting more heavily towards on-page optimization. Not sure this will remain the case, if in fact it is the case.

* Keywords in URLs add significant ranking benefits

* Title Tags are as important as always

* Internal link anchor text seems to add significant weight to content relevance

* Age & Authority It appears that Bing places a higher weighting on site/domain age and authority than Google. Again a factor that is surely not sustainable given the importance of social media and blogs in terms of relevant results.

Below is a chart that SEOwizz produced based Bn some analysis they conducted. They compared the top 2 results for the search “SEO Services” in Bing and Google to determine what factors matter most for the two respective websites.


As you can see from the general consensus and SEOwizz’s experiment, the top ranking factors for Google and Bing do differ.

The important thing to note is that none of them compete, so to get Top 10 rankings in Bing and Google wont compromise each other. Smart site owners should be covering off the factors of each search engine to maximize their website traffic.

If you’ve done your own research into what works and does’t work for Bing SEO - we’d love to hear what you’ve learnt.

It’s amazing what a several months and a new search engine launch can do for bargaining power in the search game.

The ongoing saga that is the Microsoft and Yahoo! deal is back on again. And apparently this time it’s a more realistic proposition than ever.

If you cast your mind back to late last year, rumors about a Microhoo (Microsoft and Yahoo!) deal were filling our feeds daily (almost). The last roll of dice saw Yahoo! desperately seeking a Microsoft buyout after Google walked away from an advertising deal.

Even with extensive public discussions about being “ready to sell” by Jerry Yang (Yahoo!’s CEO at the time), Microsoft and Yahoo! never got any closer to the closing the deal.

Since then Microsoft has been busy working it’s Bing angle. With a massive amount of fanfare, Microsoft relaunched its search offering under the Bing brand, and whilst only new, has made some inroads into the search share that has eluded it for years.

Now that Bing is live and eating into Yahoo!’s share of the search engine market, discussions have reignited over search and advertising between the two companies, and industry insiders suggest they’re very close to signing the deal.

From a report in the 24/7 Wall Street blog:

Sources at a major client of investment house ThinkEquity say that the firm considers a Microsoft (MSFT) link-up with Yahoo! (YHOO) in the search business to be “imminent”.

And in the same post, speculation about the details of deal included:

Yahoo! will be paid $3 billion upfront and will get 11o% of the revenue that its searches provide after traffic acquisition costs in each of the first two years. In the third year, that figure would go to 90%.

While both companies continue to trail Google by such a significant amount, a union of forces like this will boost the appeal of their advertising offering, but it will take more than an advertising deal to change user search habits and that’s where the sustainable advantage lies.

Search Clinic guidelines that might help Bing's MSNBot (The Bing web crawler and other web crawlers.

The web crawler used by Bing is also known as MSNBot.) effectively index and rank your website. Bing has also provided a list of techniques to avoid if you want to make sure your website is indexed.


Use the following techniques to ensure your website is technically optimized for MSNBot and other web crawlers:

* Use only well-formed, HTML code in your webpages. Make sure that all paired tags are closed, and that all links open the correct webpage. For information on validating your HTML code, see either HTTP Compression and HTTP Conditional Get test tool or W3C Markup Validation Service or use a comparable tool.
* If your website contains broken links, MSNBot might not be able to index your website effectively, thus preventing people from reaching all of your webpages. For information on finding broken links on your website, see the Help topic for the Webmaster Center's Crawl Issues tool.
* If you move a webpage, set up the webpage's original URL to redirect people to the new webpage. Indicate whether the move is permanent or temporary. For more information, see What to do when your website is relocated.
* Make sure MSNBot is allowed to crawl your website and isn't on your list of web crawlers that are prohibited from indexing your website. For more information, see Control which webpages on your website are indexed.
* Use a Robots.txt file or meta tags to control how MSNBot and other web crawlers index your website. You can use the robots.txt file to prevent web crawlers from crawling specific files and folders. For more information about the Robots.txt file and the Robots Exclusion standard, see A Standard for Robot Exclusion. This site might be available in English only.
* Keep your URLs simple and static. URLs that are complicated or that change frequently are difficult to index as link destinations. For example, the URL www.example.com/mywebpage is easier for MSNBot to crawl and for people to type than a long URL with multiple extensions. Also, a URL that doesn't change is easy for people to remember and bookmark. That makes your webpage a more likely link destination from other websites.

Bings guidelines in full can be found at:
http://help.live.com/help.aspx?project=wl_webmasters&market=en-GB&querytype=&query=&tmt=&domain=help.live.com&format=b1

Dr Search has been having a lot of fun recenly blind testing Google against Yahoo and Microsft's new search engine Bing.

Since Microsoft launched their new search engine Bing.com people all around the globe have been testing the site and providing their feedback on the results.

Initial reports have been quite positive, with many people saying they’re impressed with the quality of Bing search results. Statcounter is even reporting that Bing has overtaken Yahoo! as the number two search engine in the U.S!

While these stats will probably level out in the coming months, the Search Clinic does agree that Bing is a significant improvement from Microsoft’s previous ‘Live’ search engine.



But is it possible that Bing’s results are actually better than Google’s?

For most of us, we’d quickly dismiss the idea because we’ve considered Google to be the holy grail of search results for such a long time. But if you were subject to a blind test, an unbranded comparison between Bing, Google and Yahoo! – would Google still come out on top?

Take the test for yourself: Blind Test Search Engines at http://blindsearch.fejus.com

Using the site above, you’ll be presented with 3 unbranded columns of search results and you simply pick which one you think is most relevant. After you choose, it will let you know which search engine provided the results. Keep a tally and after 10 or so searches, let us know which search engine came out on top! You may be surprised!

In the tests taken so far Bing does seem to rank our websites better than Google.

Bing also seems to concentrate on shopping, so if your website provides online goods or services Dr Search strongly recommonds that you factor this into your optimisation and links.

Like buses, we now have two new search engines to consider. Last week I posted about the launch of Wolfram Alpha. Now low and behold we have the launch of Micorsoft's bing – The Decision Engine.

“Decision Engine?” You may wonder… well that’s how the marketing team down at Microsoft have decided to position the new search experience.

At the D7 conference, Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) debuted the new search engine to an expectant crowd. While the unveil was hardly a shock, the “decision engine” spin was what caught the attention of the audience.

The philosophy behind bing is summed up in this introduction snippet:

"The truth is you’ve evolved. It’s time search caught up. So we had an idea. Start over. And we did."

"We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine. With a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world class search service, Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions. We included features that deliver the best results, presented in a more organized way to simplify key tasks and help you make important decisions faster."

Bing will officially launch (which is expected to be 3rd June 2009) covering 4 decision areas:

* Shopping
* Travel
* Health
* Local Business Search

The launch of bing will come accompanied with a $80-$100 million advertising campaign which include TV, print and radio. In the same vein as Ask.com’s 2007 campaign, insiders suggest the campaign won't go after Google or Yahoo! directly, but rather question the state of current search in general.

While bing is still officially under wraps to the public, Microsoft have released several videos and documents to educate and build buzz on the discoverbing and decisionengine websites.

Here’s the product tour video, to wet your appetite about bing.

If you want to watch the other videos or get access to a range of bing related downloads (think toolbars, mobile versions, gadgets etc), head over to discoverbing.com

Once you’ve had a poke around, come back and share your thoughts. Do you think bing is the going to change search forever, or is it simply some clever Microsoft marketing hype?