In November of last year, I wrote a post about the changes coming to Microsoft’s search engine. In this post I highlighted some of the plans for upgrades and the new branding push of 2009. Now that we have seen these upgrades and the launch of Bing.com, I thought it’d be a great time to revisit Microsoft.

So, Bing is finally here. I won’t go into all the details of Bing.com, but if you’d like to read more on the GroupM Search POV, you can find it in this SearchFuel post.

It feels like we’ve anticipated its birth forever. Last Friday marked Bing’s ripe old age of one month. What have we seen in the first month? Well, from my perspective, it’s been mixed. We had a ton of hype at the beginning…and then news changed newer topics as it always does.

From an advertiser perspective, we’ve seen some client’s traffic drop. I can’t seem to attribute this to anything other than matching sponsored ads differently with the new topic breakout down the left of the query screen. Instead of an ad matching simply to a keyword query, now the ad may match on one topic of that keyword query, but not another in the topic from the list on the left. In theory, this means some advertisers may see more traffic, some may see less. I’ve also been told small tweaks were made to the algorithm; however, they shouldn’t affect any legitimate clients- they were mainly changes to help flush out some of the link farms still getting through.

From a user perspective, I like it. The organization of results suits my personality well. I’ve found it easier to decipher what’s going on when looking at that intimidating page of blue links and text. While I hate to say it, there are still some instances when I search for something on Bing, I’m forced to visit another engine before finding what I’m looking for. However, these instances are much fewer and far between than they were with Live.com.

Bing. Bing. Bing. Like a cherry…?? What do you think? Do you like the new name? I must say, I think it’s better than Live.com. Bing has a little more punch; a little more pizzazz. If you’re an advertiser, how have your results been? If you’re a Live.com,now Bing.com user, have you noticed a difference in your search results? Are they better? Worse?

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