SEARCH engine Bing is ramping up its efforts to compete with Google, with new functions soon to be unveiled and a marketing push due to begin early next year.
As Microsoft-owned Bing this week announced it was out of the testing, or beta phase, the company revealed it would soon bring in some of the most successful features from its US operation, including adding real-time data from social media to its search results.
A senior director of Bing Search USA, Stefan Weitz, said the focus of Bing in the future would be helping people get things done, rather than simply giving them lists of links to go to, as well as helping them save time.
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”People are going to see really great results from the things they expect and they’re going to see some surprises with things they didn’t expect,” he said. ”We can create experiences for you, for example if you want to go on holiday, we can strap together all the web’s power.
”It’s focusing a lot on how we can build search-and-find into search-and-do. There’ll be some pretty clear differences with Google.”
Mr Weitz said that in the US, Bing had doubled its share of queries in the past two years, moving to about 14 per cent.
”What we did in the US, which worked really well, was focused on brand awareness, with a great marketing campaign and differentiating features, that is showing them the different things that we could do that Google couldn’t do,” he said.
In the US, Bing has a partnership with Facebook and Twitter, using both to get real-time information and building this into searches. For example, letting people know which restaurants have been most popular with their friends, as well as listing nearby restaurants.