Bing’s Update Ranks Mobile-Friendly Results Higher

No longer satisfied with their small share of the search engine market, Bing (owned by Microsoft) launched several new and revised features in order to bring themselves up to speed with the current fast pace of the search engine field–and intends to nip at Google’s heels in the process.

Consumers are increasingly using their mobile device to search for the information they want. According to ComScore research, the number of mobile web users has been on a steady increase, jumping from 400 million in 2007 to almost 1.8 billion in 2014–a rate that will eventually see mobile searches exceed those of the traditional desktop.

That being said, anyone wanting a piece of the market needs to recognize that websites need to be friendly and visually appealing to those using their mobile device to search the web, and not the cumbersome, annoying sites that end up being left in the dust of unwanted, unfriendly search results. Bing has sat up and taken notice, with their two principle updates to their search engine.

The particular focus on mobile strategy sees Bing bring forward their answer to the increasing needs of their on-the-go users who need information fast and at their fingertips. Bing’s new update, for starters, ranks mobile-friendly results higher than their desktop counterparts. Mir Rosenberg, principal program manager at Microsoft, in a blog post describing the new features on Bing’s website, wrote that “we know which pages are mobile-friendly so that we automatically rank them higher with the new update, whereas previously the searcher could have had a much bigger chance of landing on a non-mobile-friendly page or possibly had to wait for a redirect to a mobile-friendly page.” Not the best case scenario for potential consumers with very little time and patience to get the information they need about what they want–including your business.

These rankings are based on general mobile friendliness, which take the following factors into consideration: content readability; content compatibility; and functionality. For marketers, this is a significant improvement in terms of being able to be found on not only Google, but also Bing, which many consumers are using as an alternative to the big Google machine.

In addition to the mobile-friendly functions, Bing has also improved its Maps service to assist travelers based in the US, and internationally, to plan their adventures more efficiently. On Microsoft’s Research page on its website, the company announced the updates were courtesy of a technology they call Clearflow, an ongoing research project. It leverages GPS data, predictive analytics and machine learning to model traffic flow patterns; the successful result of the work that went into the project led to a version that will be in use in 72 North American major cities, where it is currently used for inferences on over 60 million road segments in North America.

Now that Bing’s mobile-friendly format in their search results and their Maps function has been revised and updated for an ever-changing, ever growing audience, it is that much easier for digital marketers to make themselves known on the results page–and put themselves on the map, all at once. How will these new features affect your business? How will you integrate them into your strategy to attract and retain your customers?