Bing and The Evolution of Search - Yusuf Mehdi at SES NYC 2010

The last time we saw Yusuf speak was at an IAB event at AdWeek in New York last September. His presentation was described as “spectacular” by Randall Rothenburg from the IAB, so having him talk at Search Engine Strategies this year has created quite a bit of excitement.

As Senior Vice President of the Online Audience Business at Microsoft, Yusuf is responsible for the team behind Bing. As a veteran of Microsoft, with over 19 years under his belt, he’s no stranger to data and the search conundrum is a software problem he relishes in tackling head on with our engineers.

By conundrum I mean actually being able to answer the question, or help the user make a decision about what they want to buy, where they want to go, or if they have the information they desire.

Yusuf put it very well when he said that consumers are searching in a very different way. Queries that need specific information retrieval like “Obama’s stance on health care” are becoming more and more frequent as consumers become more demanding in their asks of technology.

Even the simple queries like “Ford Mustang” need so much filtering. What is the user looking for? A photo, some prices, to rent one, some specs, directions to a dealership?

What’s Yusuf’s team is trying to do is to get to the crux of what the user is looking for quicker and more succinctly.

“Understanding user intent and mapping it into tasks and into action."

Mike Grehan, who was moderating the chat, asked Yusuf about how SEOs can optimise for Bing and we’re all pointed to Bing Webmaster Center where all the best practices are listed, along with a really engaging community team who are on hand to answer questions in the forums.

Then came the demo, the content of which you can read on the Bing Blog, but my favourite bit was around travel and mapping.

Just the richness of the results for a query like “miami beach” stands out a mile as Bong starts to provide official sites, weather, map choices and details of flight deals all on the one page of results.

He then showed some of the video overlay technology that Blaise demoed at Ted in February. It’s amazing how far we’ve come since Photosynth was first announced over 3 years ago.

The final announcement was a foursquare app for Bing.

(I kinda knew something was happening when Dennis Crowley, their CEO, appeared on our table just before the keynote kicked off - he very kindly gave me a foursquare sticker!)

From the Bing Blog:

“The foursquare map app is a powerful combination of the spatial canvas that Bing Maps provides, combined with foursquare’s user reputation service ability to see who has unlocked specific badges, where and who has been crowned mayor of certain locations making it easier to explore any city in the world as if you were a local. 

Let’s say you’re travelling to New York City for the week, but you don’t know what’s hot in Greenwich Village.

Selecting the foursquare Map App in Bing Maps, and zooming into to Greenwich Village will get you tips that show you what locals are saying about the hot spots in that area. It's like an interactive day planner, designed to help find the best things to do in that area.”

For all our coverage check out our SES NY tag!

Cheers

Mel

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