If you counted on Microsoft’s “Live Search” search engine to drive online conversions to your website, you’re in for a rude awakening.

Why?  Microsoft launched Bing, their new search engine a little over a week ago - they’re actually calling it a decision engine, as Aaron covered recently.

The decision factor is certainly something that Microsoft thinks will give them a leg up on Google and Yahoo (more so Google).  Some of the usability features in the new Bing search engine which help the user make a decision are:

• Related keyword search results, along w/ (only) the Top 5 results of the user’s original query.  This doesn’t happen for every query used, but Bing does attempt to “guess” what you’re searching for and expands on the search w/ 3 search results for approx. 5 related queries.
• Bing utilizes AJAX scripting to show a “preview” pane for most search results.

The Bing interface utilizes AJAX scripting to showcase the website previews and was discussed by Scott Grizzle of NeXplore Corporation, a developer of web tools and interactive advertising products:

“Bing is purported to have some pretty interesting features that make search more efficient such as a website preview pane, video preview, and helpful groupings of search-results by category,” said Scott Grizzle, chief marketing officer for NeXplore Corporation. Continue reading in AJAX World Magazine (6/1/09)

Sample screenshot of Bing preview pane (click image to view larger size):

Sample preview pane in Bing search results

Ok, so Bing likes to provide a variety of useful results and a preview… How does that affect you?

Read more »

One of the top site analytic/measuring companies in the world, Nielson/NetRatings, announced plans to shift from reporting Page Views as the metric of how popular a site is, to using how long users spend on a website (or Time Spent on Site).

With the continued emergence of AJAX, dynamic content, online videos and other new technologies, the “page view” has lost it’s accuracy, which has led marketers to rely on other metrics like “time spent on site”.

There’s a lot of talk about how this affects where Google ranks among other sites… The talks are trivial in my opinion, since Google is primarly a search engine and visitors aren’t suppose to spend a lot of time on the site.  The visitor is suppose to quickly find what they’re looking for and go to another website.  Spend time worrying about non-search engine sites, not Google.