The freshly rolled out Bing Entertainment search section focuses on everything entertainment, as the name says it, be it film, television, gaming and music. What Google rival Bing wants to achieve with its newly released tool, first presented at a Hollywood event with a rich celebrity audience, is to somehow differentiate from its competitor through customized search tools and visual design.
So what does Bing Entertainment offer? Several tabs for those in search of something fun to do. They can either browse the entire portal – we can call it a portal as it is more similar to it than to a search engine website – or search on a dedicated section for Music, Movies, TV, Games and Video Games.
While the idea itself of having verticals is not necessarily new – other search engines, even Google with its News, Maps or Earth sections, have tried it out – Bing Entertainment has gotten a major part of it all right: other than bringing content to users, it also focuses on keeping them on the website to further enjoy what they have found. Those visiting the Entertainment page can listen to about 5 million songs and watch 20,000 television episodes. The over 1,500 TV series are offered through a Bing partnership with Hulu, Viacom and CBS.
Other than reading what’s hot on the music or movies scene and browsing through video game reviews and spicy stories about trendy celebs, Bing Entertainment users can also purchase the music they like from Amazon, iTunes and Zune. And of course there is a social media component: relevant tweets are linked to the on-page content and users can also share their search results on the social networking sites they are active on.
“Now we have millions of things going on and lots and lots of devices to consume it — the television, tablet, the phone,” said the general manager for Bing product management, Mike Nichols.
“The new entertainment-search experience lets you spend less time searching for great content and more time enjoying this great content.”
Microsoft just launched a cool portal packed with information that always attracts people, entertainment stories, and they don’t even have to invest a lot in generating content – they seem to be taking most of it from the existing entertainment.msm.com!
With millions of dollars invested in development and marketing (even product placement in movies, although that’s not working on all viewers, as the verb is still “google” and “bing it!” remind me of a very funny Friends episode), Microsoft is seeing some return on investment – in market share. A year after the Bing release, the search engine went up from 8.4 percent to 11.8 percent in April and even more as we speak.
While they are unlikely to get a lot more of the Google market share which still represents two thirds of the market, they are still getting some ground back, probably to compensate for the losses generated by Google Docs and Gmail to Microsoft Office. The two companies seem to be working hard to take over each other’s core businesses. I wonder what we should expect in the future? Android moving to desktops and Bing ads challenging Google?
About Alina Popescu
