Search and advertising, we are a small share….It’s all about Google. They have share, we don’t have share.

These were the words of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer back in February. He did accept that nobody has any competitive edge in the search and advertising space other than Google. Its a complete monopoly by Google, but now Microsoft has come up with their new search engine – Bing. Here’s the video of Steve Ballmer announcing the debut of Bing from the D7 stage.

So, how much of an impact does the arrival of a new search engine makes to Google? Well only time will tell. But one thing is sure that its gonna take something out of the world to beat Google in their game.

Probably the arrival of Bing has created lot of ripples in the industry. Every day there is so much spoken and written about Bing, its positives, its negatives, its features and many more points. Almost everyone associated with the search engines has been publishing their views, thoughts and reviews about Bing and whether it can displace Google as the #1 search engine.

But Paul Savage, a web programmer and SEO specialist had other ideas to when Bing was launched. Instead of reviewing it, he developed a cool tool which allows you to compare search results for Bing and Google at the same time.

I tried searching for the keyword – ‘i am sam’ and here is the screen shot of what I could see.

Now its interesting to note that both these search engines are giving different search results. I won’t dwell into the review part, but one thing is for sure that Microsoft has made it very clear that they are not going to allow Google to play the monopoly. It has been a long time that Google has been the most used search engine, and Yahoo and Microsoft have been fighting for the remaining bits and pieces, but not any more. MS has taken the first step to make this search industry more competitive and I am happy about it. This is so because this competition will give us a chance to witness some great innovations that may be round the corner.

By the way, if you are a Yahoo faithful, you are not lucky enough to compare the results for Yahoo and Bing. I am afraid, you will have to stay contented with search results for Google and Yahoo for the time being.

Bing – Microsoft’s popular search engine which was launched couple of weeks ago has earned a PageRank for itself. Managing a comfortable PR 2 in just 20 odd days is amazing. Many webmasters struggle for months to start their PR counter.

Another striking feature is that if you type the keyword Bing in Google, you will see that www.bing.com occupies the top position on the SERP, displacing www.bing.org. Displacing an .org site in 20 days is not easy.

Also, the backlinks that Google show for Bing are well above 24,000. Whoa! Thats quite a number.

All these happening have left me ponder over a few questions.

1. Google’s Sandbox – Why did it not apply to Bing?

2. If Bing attracted more than 24,000 backlinks in less than 20 days, then it is OK with Google. But if any other website earns even more than 10 backlinks in a day, then it is treated as SPAM. Why this partiality?

3. For the keyword – ‘Microsoft’, Bing rank on the first page of the Google SERP. Mind you that Bing has been stripped off the meta tags and only contains the keyword once on its home page. So how did Google’s algo determine the relevance of Bing with Microsoft?

I have many such questions which will be always puzzle for  SEO Company or firm. I am still trying to find answers to them, but if you are lucky enough to find them before me, feel free to share them via your comments.