I was at the Bing Search Summit 2010 in San Francisco to hear what the folks at Bing are up to and what their product roadmap for the future looks like.

Bing is moving the needle inch by inch trying to change the game to compete against the market incumbent Google who has monster sized market share.   In attendance for Microsoft Bing was Satya Nadella SVP Online Services Divsion, Brian MacDonald, Harry Shum, Erik Jorgensen, Derrick Connell, and Blaise Aguera y Arcas.

The Bing search summit event wasn’t announcing any news although some of the press and bloggers ran with the update that Bing was phasing in the Yahoo integration with algorithmic search first this fall followed by integration of paid search.  Not really news but an update relative to their big plans to power Yahoo search.  Yahoo in that Microsoft “outsourced search” deal will still have full control over the user experience on the Yahoo.com sites.

Market Share Gains For Bing

Bing is gaining share with their focus on user experience and design layout.  The numbers are up in terms of unique users.  Bing is up to 91 million up 27% from 72 million.  Microsoft Bing still has a very low share relative to Google, but it’s clear they are making ground by cracking into double digit share with 12.7%.  Part of this gain is Bing’s focus on being a decision engine not just a set of results.  Clearly, Google is taking Microsoft Bing seriously in that just last quarter Google tried to copy Bing’s image on the home page.  Google instantly pulled it do to their poor design and implementation (an backlash from their users).  A nice win for Bing in that Google is paying attention to Bing and that Google is willing to change their product to match some of Bing’s new features.

Focus On User Stickiness – Inside or Outside Search ??

One thing that struck me was Bing’s focus on user experience.  It’s much different than Google.  Bing really is driving a focus to get new users or early adopters.  Additionally, Bing is focused on those users who require what they call “long sessions” or task oriented searches.  In other word Bing is focused on “Task Completion”.  This task focus plays well for their future and for certain tasks (like maps and deep search) Bing seems to be a better search engine.  During the Q&A I asked if Bing was “portal focused” in creating stickiness.  The execs pounced on that to clearly state that they are not going down the portal mindset – that is to try to lock in users to monetize them.  The don’t mind creating good user experience to stay within Bing as long as it’s not portal like.  For instance they are willing to send users to other sites as long as it’s not at the expense of sending them to irrelevant content outside of the Bing site.  This is a good sign that Bing has a clue on the preferred user experience.

Google on the other hand has a issue with their stickiness strategy.  Google wants to create faster search to monetize their ads verses creating a compelling user experience.  In terms of stickiness Google tries to lock the users in via applications around search verses inside search which Bing is trying to do.

The question becomes what is the preferred user experience “inside search” or “outside search”.  That is the fundamental difference between Bing and Google.

We see it in the approach in Bing where the emphasis is on tasks and design.  Bing is hyper-focused on look and feel or creating a canvas for the user.  This showed well in how they are moving to their Maps application.  Also, Bing is focusing on the top queries like News, Entertainment, Finance, Games, Maps, etc verses the “long tail” content from blogs and smaller web sites.  When asked Bing management told me that the marketplace will fill in those areas with applications that could be plugged in to Bing.  Bing management also talked about how their API is getting some traction although I don’t see that in the marketplace.

Future Focus For Bing – Incremental Improvement vs Big Moves

I’m still waiting for a big move from Bing to really move the ball down the field.  Right now Bing is getting better little by little – or as they say incremental improvement.  The big question is what will be their big move?

Currently Bing’s incremental improvement is on user experience around visual experience and user intent – figuring out what the user really wants.  This approach fits with their positioning of being a decision engine.  The visual experience efforts allows them to “tweak” the user interface and add content around search results.  So if you’re searching for Lady Gaga they can present a variety of diverse options such as a web page, songs to play, images, news stories, and other relevant content around the users intent for some task centered around Lady Gaga.  Of course there is a ton of work to do on maximizing that user interface or screen real estate.  Additionally there is some serious “under the covers” compute and retrieval needed to meet the speed requirements expected by the users.  Think data mining in real time.

Where this all is leading is Bing’s real big move:  Mobile.   All of the “incremental improvement” is a positioning game to move fast in mobile.   In order to be a credible player in the search business in mobile a provider needs to “nail” both user interface and fast discovery to reduce the noise and increase the signal.  It’s a lot harder to do this in mobile because their exists so many different use cases for the mobile user.  Unlike a desktop user mobile user has realtime discovery issues.  Maps are the most basic.  Going beyond Maps requires some real computer science voodoo – simply put the search engine needs to be intelligent, fast, and simple to use.

Bing’s has to lay the foundation for what their engineers call “spatial canvas” for user interface for mobile and combine the back end intelligence for “mega powerful” and “mega fast” presentation of relevant information.  This foundation will set the stage for Bing’s real big move:  Mobile.

My Angle

Although Bing has very little share compared to Google, it’s clear the Bing team sees the future of search as being something completely different than it is today.  It’s not about MSN, or being a portal.  From my discussions it’s clear that Bing gets that the future of search is a “data driven” world and that Mobile search will define Bing.

I still think that with “generic search” Google is much stronger for quick and dirty results.  Bing has it’s work cut out for them to catchup to Google.  Google can act like they don’t care about Bing, but I have seen that Google does care about what Bing is doing.  Google is taking Bing seriously.  Users might just be surprised by the incremental improvements of Bing.  Based upon their iPhone app that I saw yesterday such as the design and use of social data, I’m encouraged by the possibilities of Bing’s mobile potential.

Bing’s big move will be mobile.   Their angle will be about nailing the user experience and some serious engineering behind it.

Update: Additional coverage from Kara Swisher from AllThingsD:

Kara’s Live blog of the event

Kara’s followup post with commentary and interview of Bing’s Senior Vice President Satya Nadella

Video #1 with Satya Nadella on Bing 1 year later

Video #2 with Satya Nadella – On Bing in general and the Yahoo integration.