In the recent weeks the search engine business have seen new competitors rising up to the mark with the launch of Bing by Microsoft and Hunch by Flickr. Both the new search engines are trying to differentiate by saying that they aren’t really search engines, but rather more of a decision maker.
Bing claims it is positioned to provide answers while Hunch helps you make smarter decisions. Well, you know, however they position themselves, I still view them as search engines anyway! Of course I give them credit for making the effort to be different and trying to create and dominate a new space within the business of online search.
So, with these new lifestyle search engines in the market, have you tried using them yet? By now I think most people have heard and tried Bing. I even saw some traffic coming to my blogs from Bing searches. I suppose the one pleasing thing with Bing is the aesthetic value. When people talk about Bing, the first thing they say is “Look how nice it is!” and I agree. It is aesthetically pleasing alright.
One of Bing.com’s serene looking landing page
With Hunch, it’s been a bit more quiet and perhaps not many have heard of it. But you know what? The people behind Hunch are quite a clever lot. When you first go to the Hunch page, you will be asked to answer a series of questions. I don’t know how these questions are supposed to be filtered to help the engine know you and thus return pages that it thinks you will want, as the questions are quite general. But what is smart about it is that it can actually milk advertisers of a lot of money!
See how smart the line of questioning is at Hunch.com?
Just look at one of the questions I was asked about which type of fries I prefer. Listed as options are wedges, thick fries, McDonald’s fries, Burger King’s fries and some normal fries. Don’t you think this kind of survey result will bring a lot of value to McDonald’s and Burger King? They may be willing to pay a lot of money for Hunch to ask this kind of questions to millions of people!
Whether any of these newbies will be a real threat to Google remains to be seen but many are of the opinion that they aren’t really big threats to the search engine giant who has a big market share by now. But don’t judge too quickly. Let’s just wait and see…because it all comes down to who has the smarter way of milking money out of advertisers to beef up the bottom line.
So, are you going to Bing it, Hunch it or Google it now? =)
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I think it is time for some change of attitude.
Therefore, my pick is…I’ll fu*k it.