Bing is making Microsoft see red and lots of it. According to CNNMoney, the two year old search engine has lost a total of $5.5 billion since its inception. It looks like the people behind Bing took the saying “you have to spend money to make money” a little too literally. Can a change in the company’s digital strategy salvage Bing before it bleeds dry?
Microsoft’s President of Online Services, Qi Lu, explained that the search engine will be making major changes to its services by “reorganizing the Web.” The company is leveraging their exclusive partnership with Facebook and its integration with its parent company, Microsoft, to help achieve the lofty goal. Bing’s aim is to allow its engine to answer questions which are naturally phrased instead of simply returning a query from a list of keywords. If this can be achieved, it will greatly change the way websites go about SEO services by removing the focus on keyword specific search.
The urgency surrounding Bing grows as the search engine comes closer to losing $1 billion this quarter. We will have to wait and see if Bing’s plan can take some market share from Google while stemming the bleeding of its finances.