The marriage of convenience between MSN and Yahoo gave us Bing. The birth of this child should have been celebrated with more verve by the online marketing community as we might finally have something to stand up against the omnipresence of the great Google. Not that we have particular reasons to be displeased with Google, as it provides a fantastic service and has spawned a number of mostly free tools that webmasters are very pleased to have received. However, a monopolistic situation is never good from an overall perspective and the fact that Yahoo seemed to be floundering around in the waters was not very palatable.

In the world of online marketing, we basically rely on results retrieved through search engines more than we would wish to admit. Our websites are always optimized to make them crawlable and readable at the same time and we put great emphasis on achieving a high ranking in the eyes of Google, primarily. It remains to be seen whether the creatively promoted Bing will make any inroads into what is still a monopoly for Google, but it’s advance should be heralded by everyone in this field.

Bing markets itself as more of a “decision engine,” obviously seeking to set itself apart from Google. It suggests that it is intuitive and can really understand “what we mean” when we try and enter those all important keywords. As such, they will often return a very different set of results as compared to Google and this may in turn provide us Internet marketers with additional ideas and information for our campaigns. We can now turn to a variety of upstart sites to enable us to view interpretations of both Google and Bing (and others) at the same time.

One of our favorites is Bingle, which can be easily added to your browser bar, as can Bing and Google and Stringy. Furia is a very basic option for quick access.

If you want to take this a step further, you can choose to compare results from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, InfoSpace, AltaVista, Lycos and Dogpile using the creative tools provided by Googawho. Search3 also includes a three-way selection tool, choosing from Twitter, Yahoo and eBay.

Make your selection and try analyzing certain results from both sides of the fence, as it were. There’s no such thing as too much information.

What’s your search engine of choice?

Adam Toren