Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, has been supported by a generous advertising budget and drawn some interest from a variety of sources. But how does it affect business-to-business?

Do we have to create new pages or even entirely new sites, as some have suggested?
We may not know the definitive answers for some time. But right now, it looks as if the answer is no.

Microsoft own position is that good content, appropriately coded, will do well in Bing.
Assuming then, that B2B marketers will not need to take extra programming or content steps to take advantage of Bing, how will B2B audiences react? Will they be lured away from Google by Bing’s nifty new features, including categorized search, quick tabs and related searches?
The jury is still out on that point. Currently, Bing is getting slightly less than 10 percent of all searches, while Google still has the lion’s share of 80 percent in the U.S., and 90 percent worldwide.

Based on our testing, we don’t think B2B searches have high enough volumes to activate many of Bing’s most highly regarded innovations. A quick summary:

• Quick Tabs: Bing tries to “proactively anticipate the searcher’s intent,” supplying the most frequent ending point for similar searches. In the B2B examples we tested, there were not enough searches to produce a result in many cases.
• Related Searches: The choices presented sometimes were not relevant.
• Reporting five results: The Bing team chose to limit results to the first five places, because its research showed that more searchers took advantage of the categorized results (Quick Tabs and Related Searches) than used the results in places six through ten. Our experience is that B2B searchers are more accustomed to digging deeper, so they may not see this feature as a benefit.
• Search history. Recognizing that many searchers try multiple queries before choosing a result, Bing allows users to see a list of previous searches.
• Results improvements. Bing attempts to enhance the search experience with tradeups like offering secondary tasks (like checking shipping data or flight info), or picking Best Matches. Again, B2B searches did not always produce results.
• Caption improvements. Descriptions of links offered a rollover bar with additional text, page translation, data extraction (from objects like Flash) and local listings. This works on B2B sites. 

Will the lack of B2B results prove to be a limitation for Bing? Or will the enhanced search features attract B2B users and eventually build out the new functionality to B2B’s more limited numbers? It’s much too early to tell.

The best advice: monitor your search analytics to determine whether a significant number of your visitors are using Microsoft’s new entry to find your web site.