Differentiation is the search direction that Bing has to choose

Regular search competitive space increasingly cramped, bet on the difference or Bing the only way

Last September, Bing launched its "Bing It on" campaign in the United States-allowing users to compare which search results are better when brand recognition is removed. Bing is said to have chosen more users than Google, while others say Google's search results are better than Bing's. Conclusions vary from person to person.

However, whichever search results are better, a more important fact is that, despite Microsoft's belief that more people choose to agree with Bing search, Bing's share will not be significantly improved. This means that improvements in the homogeneity of conventional search results have made it difficult to ripple through the search market.

Differentiation, thus becoming a choice to explore the direction.

Social signals

This week, Microsoft's senior vice president, Shen Xiangyang, returned home a few months later. In introducing the latest changes in Bing, the introduction of social signals was first mentioned. In fact, about last May, Bing Search (English) began with a new column on the right-hand side of the search results page to show social search results.

If your Facebook buddy message has content that matches your search keyword, it will be searched. In the US market, Bing has a certain advantage because they are partners with Facebook, and Google and Facebook are more often defined as competitors. Google can only reinvent itself.

Similar attempts are being made in the Chinese market, where search engines have been embedding content from social networks in their results. The more radical route is the search, which does not list the results of social networks alone, but rather uses social cues to make a real difference in the sort of search results.

This exploration is fraught with controversy. Shen Xiangyang also does not have a definite answer.

Why is Bing's social search on the far right, rather than in the regular search results? We tried a different way, Shen Xiangyang said, but the current test results show that the introduction of social search content into direct sequencing does not significantly enhance the overall relevance of search results.

What is the problem, the data source or the mining way? Shen Xiangyang: This is because social signals are not strong enough. In his view, the value of content flow in social networks still needs to be developed to be more important. Bing will continue to watch the social impact geometry of the search, which will still be done in the United States rather than in China.

Knowledge map

In Bing's three-column search results, the left side is the web search results, the right side is the social search results, and the middle column is used to place the knowledge map results. This function can systematize the search results and obtain a complete knowledge system through any keyword. Last May and December, Google and Bing launched similar products respectively.

For example, search for the keyword "Michael Jordan berkerley". Michael Jordan is usually understood as NBA star Jordan in the United States, but plus Berkerley is actually looking for a professor at Berkeley with the same name. The knowledge map needs to find the right entity object based on this keyword. This is the first step.

The knowledge map should then provide a variety of information related to the Michael Jordan, such as a list of other professors close or close to him. And the discovery of this level of human interaction comes from the involvement of the user, who also searched for Professor Michael Jordan.

Search relies on interaction with the user to excavate the relationship. The side effect of this approach is that the higher the search volume the more accurate the result, that is, the Matthew effect of a single large family will become more obvious.

And how to find the right entity object is also a challenge, it is estimated that the number of such entity objects is about 300 million, each object has its own different content. Another difficulty comes from dealing with natural languages, and some knowledge has not the only multiple answers, such as the question of India's longest river, which has different answers.

But these problems do not lead to a trip to Bing. In addition to market competition considerations, Shen Xiangyang also pointed out that "search to the end represents the accumulation of human knowledge, this is a great thing."

What about the Chinese market?

All of the above are happening in the United States, so what about the Chinese market?

Is bing an important factor? According to CNZZ data, Bing's share in China is only 0.5%. So Bing doesn't matter? According to comscore, Bing, the global search market, has been Yandex, but still ranked fifth; in the US market, Bing, after Google, occupies a 16.5% share and is a partner in Yahoo's search.

This situation is related to Microsoft's decision a few years ago--fight in the US market. More than that, Bing misses the window of opportunity that Google's China policy adjustment brings. Shen Xiangyang, head of Microsoft's global senior vice president and search business, also admitted: "We are not strong enough in China to invest enough."

Now these two are not enough, and there is no sign of any relief. Bing has pinned some hopes on Chinese users who need English-language searches (apparently not a large group), and is also willing to work with domestic search engines (the last time and Baidu held hands for half a year); Via browser? Bing has not thought it out yet.