Bing Offers Music, Games, TV Within Search Engine

Have you ever wondered why casinos in Las Vegas are able to survive when offering dinners for 99 cents? It's a marketing tactic designed to lure consumers, with the hopes that they will stay and purchase regular-priced items out of convenience. Microsoft is now using a similar strategy to attract curious individuals to an all-new revamped version of their Bing search engine.

Bing to Offer TV, Games, and Music

Bing now features an entertainment page that will let users watch TV shows, play games and listen to music -- all without leaving the website. This, Microsoft hopes, will entice users to make a few searches while enjoying all of the new 'bells and whistles' of the site.

The need to beef up Bing search figures is the result of Microsoft's continuing battle with Google for control over the search engine market.

Microsoft at War with Google

According to Rob Enderle, a popular technology analyst at Enderle Group, the rivalry between Microsoft and Google "has become a full-on war".

Enderle continued, "I'm not too sure it can get any hotter. Microsoft is trying to make Bing ever more capable. The goal is to get you to live within their search engine and not go to any other sites, certainly not Google. The more you can do with Bing, the less likely you are to wander someplace else like Google. It's textbook customer containment." (Source: computerworld.com)

Even though Microsoft has invested a great deal of time, advertising dollars and manpower into developing their search engine, Bing has yet to make a significant impact on Google's stranglehold share of the market in the one year it has been available for public search.

Bing Slips, Google Soars in April

Google's 71 per cent take of all U.S. searches recorded this past April means that the company actually experienced a 2 per cent increase over its numbers in March, according to a report from online traffic monitor, Hitwise.

Bing, on the other hand, saw their figures slip 2 per cent in April, topping out at a 9.43 per cent share of the market for the month. (Source: macworld.com)

To give Bing more of an online presence, Microsoft plans to stick with what is working for them: the company has found that entertainment-related queries generate a lot of interest from users. Other popular searches include health, travel and shopping.

Analysts expect that Internet users everywhere will likely benefit as a result of a Google-Bing search battle. Almost all parties are in agreement that Bing's innovation will push Google to make similar changes in the near future.