Good morning search marketers, do you love an underdog?
Ten years ago, Microsoft introduced Bing. The company is celebrating the birthday of its search engine next month, but we're sticklers for detail and published our look back and ahead at Microsoft's search business on the anniversary of its actual launch day, May 28, 2009. It may be easy to dismiss Bing as a distant second-fiddle to Google, but don't be so quick to dismiss its contributions.
"While there are certainly many ways in which Bing helped advance our industry (Bing Webmaster Tools being one of them), I think the open access to their API has had an even more profound effect on the search ecosystem in general," said Russ Jones, principal search scientist for Moz.
Advertisers have watched Bing evolve out from under Yahoo's thumb and push beyond scrambling to match Google's ad features. "Today, Microsoft Advertising has carved out a permanent place at the table when it comes to paid search," Melissa Mackey, search supervisor at Gyro, who remembers the Bing's launch, told us.
"What I find most exciting about Microsoft Advertising," said Jeremy Hull, SVP of innovation at iProspect, "is that they're once again moving away from simply providing parity with other solutions."
Microsoft has the luxury of not having to rely on an ad-driven business, but under CEO Satya Nadella, who led the launch of Bing, after all, search and advertising have been elevated internally. With artificial intelligence powering new features, data integrations with other Microsoft properties such as LinkedIn and other efforts, Microsoft is making a huge bet in advertising and on the advertising group, executives told agency representatives at the Microsoft Advertising Partner Summit in Seattle last month.
We'll be watching where it goes in the next 10 years.
Read on for your daily Pro Tip, favicon etiquette (Shocker, it didn't take long for SEOs to start testing Google's favicon guidelines) and more.
Ginny Marvin
Editor-in-Chief
