I promise, this is not another post about Bing, and everything it may or may not do to change the consumer search engine landscape, and related advertising industry. If you are looking for that, take a look at a very concise and relevant Forrester blog post here. I do want to talk about one of the principles that Bing is focusing on in an attempt to differentiate.

You can find it in the url of the introductory video for Bing: http://www.decisionengine.com/. Decision Engine. The point being that search is not an objective, it is a task that is employed by most people in an effort to make a decision. That is a bit of a no brainer, but a really important distinction (and I think MS is going to spend close to 100M in advertising to bring that to light). As a technology community we have just been to in love with making search better in the past 10 years. We need to change the focus to improving our efficiency in making decisions. Again, I know it sounds like a subtle distinction, but it is anything but subtle.

For example, if I am focused on making search better, I look at things like relevance of results to the keyword in use, speed of results, breadth of coverage,  autocomplete, etc. If I think about improving the decision making process, I try to understand what decisions are being made, why, and when? What data elements and information is required to make that decision, what is the best resource to get that information, who is the best person to talk to? Really, a very different viewpoint from a requirements perspective.

I often refer to the process to support decision making in business as business research (of which search is one of the tasks in that process of course, among others like analysis). So for people interested in business research Bing is important. First, even if only because of the huge advertising budget MS has, it will help shift the technology communities focus from search, to research. Second, I think it will help validate the importance of the decision making tools – something that can sometimes be hard to do believe it or not (how many of you have management or users that think your existing decision making tools like Factiva are nothing more than a search box and bunch of articles?). Last, because of the importance based on Social Intelligence (Bing organizes content based on what other users have found to be important). 

So while it remains to be seen whether it is a good tool or not, whether it will help MS gain some share in the consumer “search” market, and if it will bring a shift from keyword to display advertising, Bing is important – thanks Microsoft.

- Ken