Author: Vinod Rawat

 The following is a post by Mike Nichols, Corporate Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Bing. That Holiday Feeling Even after Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you might walk the halls around your office at lunchtime and still find a lot of your colleagues shopping online for the holidays.  And they’ll be in good company.  This year, according to shop.org, online sales will jump 12 percent over last year to US$96 billion dollars this holiday season.  Because nearly half of all that online shopping will start from search engines, we wanted all consumers to understand exactly what happens when they use search to find those deals.  Specifically, we want to alert you to what Google has done with their shopping site right in time for Christmas.  Instead of showing you the most relevant shopping search results for the latest coffee maker you’re looking to buy mom, Google Shopping now decides what to show you – and how prominently to display what product offers they show — based partially on how much the merchant selling the product has paid them.  Merchants can literally pay to improve their chances to display their product offers higher than others inside of Google’s shopping “search,” even if it’s not better or cheaper for the consumer.  The result of this new “pay-to-rank” system is that it’s easy for consumers to mistake an ad for an honest search. That’s not right, it’s misleading.  It’s not what you expect from search, and it’s not how we at Bing think search engines should help consumers get the best prices and selection when shopping.  In short, we think that too many shoppers who use Google for their shopping searches are getting “Scroogled” when they should be getting fair, honest, open search.  It’s like Ebenezer Scrooge met Google Shopping.  We think consumers should be aware what they’re seeing when they’re shopping online and to understand, without any hidden text or traps, the fine print of what their ‘search engine’ actually searches.  What Consumers Deserve from Search Search is a relatively new business, but the rules that govern it are old.  Success depends on consumer trust, and consumer trust depends on consumers believing that the results they see are both relevant and objective.  Users want answers, not just ads.  Objectivity is particularly important in search, because it’s hard for consumers to see what’s going on inside a search engine’s algorithm.  As Google’s founders explained when they started their company, search engine bias – the practice of rewarding some companies over others, because they pay you – is “particularly insidious… because it is not clear who ‘deserves’ to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed.”Search engines, like Bing and Google, succeeded because clear separations were kept between your search results and the ads that pay for them.