Details of a search engine collaboration between two of the three major names in the industry were revealed today, with Microsoft and Yahoo announcing a partnership.

Under the terms of initial ten-year deal, Yahoo’s popular search engine is likely to be enveloped into Microsoft’s Bing platform, with search technologies and profit shares from ads distributed accordingly.

The move is the latest ominous sign that Microsoft really does mean business with Bing, because however mutually-beneficial the deal is dressed up to appear by the respective marketing departments, it has essentially swallowed up it’s nearest competitor in the field. Also, the ten year timescale of the agreement is an interesting note to the episode, suggesting that Microsoft isn’t expecting an overnight result and is in it for the long haul.

However the size of the task in attempting to overthrow Google hasn’t got any smaller. Even combined, Bing and Yahoo’s current share of the search market (28%) doesn’t come close to Google’s domination (65%*).

All in all, Microsoft’s recent moves on search show a certain tenacity for the fight, but it doesn’t look like it has produced a genuine gamechanger… yet.

* Comscore. July 2009.

Microsoft’s latest attempt to gain a greater share of the search engine market went unexpectedly into beta last week. Pitched as a “decision engine”, bing.com comes as the replacement for LiveSearch.

With a fresh look, stunning photographic background imagery and a reported immediate impact with users in the opening test week, is Bing the next big thing in search?

Nice touches, nothing groundbreaking

The homepage is undoubtedly good-looking, but how does Bing fare when it is actually put to work with a search? The results page looks more or less as you’d expect, with a couple of nice touches.

Related searches are bumped up to the top left, instead of appearing in the footer as you’d expect. This could be a slight time-saver if you’re not overly familiar with what you’re searching for, but it’s nothing you couldn’t get before elsewhere.

Each individual result, when hovered over, has a small pop-up containing a synopsis and various links from the same website. Presumably this is to offer as much information as possible before a user commits to a click. This doesn’t seem a million miles away from Ask.com’s thumbnail preview, which offers a sneak peek of a website on the results page. Neither are particularly useful, but at least Ask.com’s effort offers some neat visuals.

Both cases essentially miss the point of the results page and their own faith in the suggested websites - the fact that a site is appearing on the 1st page should be reason enough to click on it. Any in-depth pre-investigation required before accepting the search engine’s suggestion indicates it might not be what you’re looking for.

Advanced search offers a pleasingly flexible and straight-forward set of variables - including country and language - but these aren’t exactly daily requirements for your average web user.

Spammy returns rank strongly

The synopsis tool actually comes in quite handy as a few random searches show that while Bing is returning relevant websites, it often suggests very deep links or spammy findings. These absolutely need to be weeded out before any full launch, or there’ll be all manner of “optimised for Bing” results appearing - a sure-fire way to kill the user experience.

Loose PPC connections

Bing’s suggested pay-per-click websites seem decidedly fuzzy, which is odd given PPC’s highly manageable nature and in particular the sharp targeting available through Microsoft’s own Adcenter system.

A search for “email marketing newcastle” returns an accurate selection on organic - but a poorly irrelevant mix of hotel, job vacancy and football websites on sponsored search.

The same search on Google.co.uk returns a watertight set of paid-for Newcastle-based email marketing results.

Despite the apparently hapless targeting, Bing does repeat the top ranking PPC ads at the bottom of the page - meaning that those advertisers who are paying top dollar get a second bite of the cherry if their main ad is ignored. Good for advertisers, good for Microsoft’s pocket.

Endless images

When using the images tab, Bing doesn’t seem to limit the result thumbnails, returning as many as 1000 at a time. While this helpfully removes the need to click through multiple pages to find what you’re looking for, it also produces reams of loading thumbnails as you’re scrolling the page. Maybe that’s why every other search engine, ever, uses multiple pages.

“Verbing Up”

Google is so synonymous with the very act of searching online that it comfortably reached the brand nirvana of becoming an associated verb some years ago. While Google’s top brass have made noises in the past that this is something they’re not too happy about - it “dilutes” their other offerings apparently - it is surely the pinnacle of brand domination. This obviously isn’t lost on Microsoft, with Chief Exec Steve Ballmer openly stating that Bing was chosen as a name that can be easily “verbed up”.

First impressions…

So will we all be “binging” for our information in years to come? On the evidence of the beta, the answer has to be a pretty clear ‘no’. Bing needs to offer something that Google doesn’t, and at the moment it isn’t doing that. However, with a reported marketing budget of $100m to ease the full introduction, Bing is likely to be around for a while. We’ll see how it goes, but with such a glitchy opener and the absence of anything really new, or even useful, it doesn’t look very promising.

Of course the beta phase of any project is intended to iron out the creases, so perhaps the niggles mentioned above can be forgiven for the time being. Perhaps the full launch will be a little slicker…

All in all, it’s good to see that someone is taking a determined run at Google’s domination - it’ll certainly be interesting to see how the market leader responds in due course.

In a post on his blog last week, Udi Manber, VP of engineering at Google in charge of Search Quality, revealed that the company was ready to start opening up on information that was previously kept highly secret, in an attempt to clarify certain elements of how it works. This came as welcome news to SEO companies everywhere, but perhaps some are expecting too much and in doing so are losing sight of the fundamentals that have been available from the outset.

Google is famous for being extremely guarded on how its algorithms and ranking systems work. As Manber explains in his article, the company has ploughed one thousand “programmer years” into developing the processes, and that’s not something that any corporation is overly willing to open up to competitors and the public. While the protective stance is understandable, it has directly led to frenzied speculation that makes up a good proportion of the SEO market today. The internet is full of companies that spend their time - and their client’s budgets - trying to fathom the inner workings of the Google system in order to manipulate search results in their favour. There’s an entire team of technicians at Google who are solely responsible for identifying and stamping out these activities, but it still goes on to an enormous extent.

While it will undoubtedly be interesting to see exactly what Google reveals in the coming months, it’s worth bearing in mind that the most relevant SEO fact has been freely available from day one - and that is that user experience is the single most important issue. It was at the start, and it still is today. It’s likely to be the case as long as search exists in its current form. If the user experience is lacking in quality then people will drift towards alternative search methods, and that’s something that Google simply can’t allow to happen.

What does this all mean for your website and its own SEO? Well, always put the user first. Create an easily understandable layout and design. Write content for humans, not search engine robots. Clearly define titles and tags in a descriptive and straight-forward way. Link in and out with other relevant websites. In short, always remember that your website is meant for your users, so everything on there should work for them. When your users are happy, the search engines are happy, and Google’s revelations - whatever they turn out to be - aren’t likely to change this.