Bing Business Portal Challenges Google Places?
Last week, Microsoft’s Bing, the heavily touted, (but perhaps not so heavily used) new search engine that was supposed to provide an alternative to the pervasive Google, launched a service that may be designed to compete with Google Places.
Google Places, (which grew out of the Google Local Business Centre), was designed to let business owners list their businesses, including the location and a variety of other details, on a service which would integrate with Google Maps and search results to display local businesses in the search engine results when a relevant keyword got searched.
Google Places took off well, with local results sometimes even displacing the search engine results for related queries. It remains to be seen whether or not Bing’s Business Portal will have the same sort of effect.
The Bing Business Portal
This service has grown out of the Bing Local Listing Centre, (much like Places grew out of the Local Business Listings), and apparently, everything that was in the Local Listing Centre has already been transferred across to the Business Portal.
Much like Places, the Business Portal allows business owners to claim, create, verify and manage their business listings. Owners can identify search categories in which they’d like their listings to appear, customise their listings, and even create a free mobile site through it.
They can create custom menus, and even create deals in the form of coupons that can be published on Bing and on Facebook.
Following Google?
Nothing really that can’t be done on the Google Places listings in the end it seems, with the exception of the mobile site, and perhaps the finer points of managing and publishing the deals, especially to its mobile apps. (Google allows you to add coupons to your listing, but that’s about all.)
They are considering a range of additional features, but so far, there are no details on what that might be.
The real question according to the experts is what sort of user support this will have. Google has apparently had very mixed results in this regard. (I haven’t had any problems myself, but then, I’ve never had to ask them for anything yet either.)
How Is Bing Doing Anyway?
This latest service is definitely an expansion of the options offered by Bing. However, I’m curious to know just how Bing is doing in the search engine market stakes.
According to the people at NetMarketShare, the current global search engine market share is as follows:
- Google Global: 84.68%
- Yahoo Global: 5.15%
- Baidu: 4.30%
- Bing: 3.91%
The remaining 1.96% is divided between Ask, AOL, Excite, Lycos and Altavista. So nice as the idea is, it may be too little, too late for Bing. But you never know…
