About the author: Stacey Clermont is an Internet Marketing Specialist at Element Fusion

We've all seen Bing's commercials, haven't we? The ones about “search overload," a condition we've never heard of, that is tearing our society apart. Bing’s $100 million ad campaign showed us disturbing scenes of how Google’s generalized search results are forcing us to verbalize anything and everything related to the topic at hand. Bing boasts of being the world’s first “decision engine," claiming that it can provide valuable information on shopping, traveling, business, medicine and other more specific interests that Google doesn't address. I have to admit, the claims were intriguing.

I was amazed by the precision of their attacks. They didn't hold any punches. Screaming people, confusing conversations, and animal sounds all erupting spontaneously in the streets. It was all very alarming and fantastic at the same time. The first time I saw one of their commercials, my mouth hung open. I didn’t know what was happening until the Bing icon came on the screen. “What has search overload done to us?” we were made to wonder. Well, apparently it hasn’t done enough. Bing’s impact on the market thus far has been minimal.

Bing’s search traffic pretty much just took over its predecessor’s, MSN Live. The 2009 search market is still overwhelmingly favoring Google. Even after Bing launched, Google commanded over 75% of search traffic, according to one study. Bing currently has around 8% of traffic, which is just slightly higher than what MSN Live commanded.

Admittedly, I was little disappointed with the public response. I was pretty excited about Bing's release, as most SEOs were. As soon as Bing was open for business, I jumped on my computer and tried some random searches to compare it to Google. I liked Bing a lot. I thought it was really easy to use and it did provide up-front data on products, places and people. I also liked the maps app, which has a 3D viewing option. Bing has obviously made a lot of effort to compete in the search engine space.

But, did I switch over to the decision engine? Nah, I still like Google’s features and it has never steered me wrong. “Search Overload” is just hype that hasn't converted me, and based on recent statistics, I'm thinking it's not really working on others either.

What do you think about Bing? Let us know in the comments.

I always think it's fun to check out Google's year-end zeitgeist at the conclusion of each year. This publication documents the most popular searches and search trends of the previous year in an effort to communicate the "spirit of the times" through search data. So, if you haven't already, take a look at Google Zeitgeist 2008 for a fun and quick way to discover what the world was searching for last year. To take it to another level, you can visit the year-end Zeitgeist archives and do a little comparing to see what's changed over the years.

I'm no professional analyst, but I must say I found it interesting that "how to kiss" (number one in the how-to category for 2007) was outpaced by "how to draw" (previously number two) in 2008.

Of course, there may be more helpful and substantial conclusions to be discovered in the Zeitgeist. If you uncover something of note, please let us know in the comments.

Tomorrow morning, we'll be rolling out improved search functionality on our LightCMS, SkyCMS, and WaterCMS systems. All websites running on these products will receive the upgrade automatically at no extra charge. The search functionality is completely rebuilt, offering a much improved experience. Here's a look at what will change:

1. Everything runs faster and indexing takes place a lot faster, so content can be indexed more frequently (two times per day).
2. Search results are generated at the page level instead of the element level, making the results much easier to decipher.
3. Search results are paginated for a more orderly display.
4. The search terms are now highlighted on the search results page.
5. The search field now supports some basic inputs such as boolean logic (using "AND" or "OR"), phrases (using quotes), and exclusions (using NOT).

There you have it. The upgrade won't require any changes on your part. Just go searching and things will work a lot better. And also, stay tuned in the weeks ahead as we've got even more search improvements on the horizon.

Scheduled downtime

The update is scheduled for 9:00am CST (GMT-6) on Thursday, December 18th, 2008. There will be a minimal period of downtime (estimated at less than 5 minutes) as the changes go live on the system.