If I were on some weird reality show (I know, the "weird'" is redundant), where they made me hire a search strategist, and they only let me give one instruction, it would be this: To understand search, you have to understand human behavior.

Microsoft is often referred to in the tech industry as "the ultimate platform player," because its considerable fortune has been earned by dominating platforms, most notably the Windows platform that most of the world's PCs use. Lately it has been adding platforms, notably Xbox, which has morphed from a games platform to an interactive device capable of serving all varieties of content, including streaming videos and access to social networking sites and services, and it continues to develop its Windows Mobile platform, whose latest iteration is version 6.5. There is no doubt in my mind that Bing will quickly be …

Last week the Bing crew invited a bunch of search marketers and bloggers and some other "influential" folks out to Bellevue for a two-day indoctrination demo/feedback event. It's always an interesting mix when you put bloggers and SEOs in the same room -- kinda like mixing gasoline vapor and a box of lit matches, really. Where the sparks really started to fly was when all the one-box and instant-answer functionality was being demonstrated. It didn't take long for one of the bloggers to ask why Bing was trying to steal their traffic by keeping people on Bing.

In a recent survey, we asked B2B buyers how they prefer ordering the things they order all the time. Sixty-three percent said they prefer to order them online. The next largest group was the 15% who would go the traditional route of ordering from a local office over the phone. Another 12% said they'd prefer to order from a real live sales rep. In a recent presentation to a client, I kept that pie chart of results up for a while, allowing it to sink in, because I think the implications are astounding. Then I said, "Look at the chart …

Over the last 15 months, I have been analyzing both Twitter (feeds and search), and the Google "real-time" Search Options feature for Web Search. During this time, I have come to the following three conclusions about the prospects of real-time social search engines: 1) The reality of the robust real-time search concept is much closer than we think; 2) real-time search results have a number of common uses, and are highly preferable over "anytime" search for a wide variety of search tasks; 3) the best way for real-time social search to come to full fruition is for Google to acquire …

Microsoft is hoping, of course, that Bing will wipe out Google's dominance in one fell swoop. That, next month, their $80 million ad campaign will cause their 8% market share to morph into 80%. That they'll finally be able to put that pesky Google decade behind them. They won't, of course. They won't because they seem to be forgetting some key fundamentals of the space in which they operate.

I've spent many hours with Bing over the past week, read all its supporting documentation, watched Microsoft's "why we built this thing" videos, and seen all of JWT's new ads for the service. At a certain point in my total immersion in Bingness, I came very close to being seduced by the idea that Microsoft, by making search results more concise and easier to find, might actually advance the search industry. But my joyous reverie was shattered when I recalled a fundamental lesson of merchandising, which is that by making things too easy for your customers to find, you can …

In my last column, I proclaimed search to be going out of business. So what comes next? The answer lies in the question "why?" With search marketing, we started to see a shift in advertising that has been well-documented. The days of being tied to push marketing based on what people watched and what those people liked were over. We had a data vault like never before; and inside the vault is the consumer's expression of intent.

I seem to be in the minority. Everybody (including fellow Search Insider Aaron Goldman) seems to be jumping on the Bing bandwagon. It's generated some good initial reviews, and Aaron goes as far as to say, "Bing is far and away the most serious challenge to Google that anyone's ever posed." Don't get me wrong. Bing is a good step forward for Microsoft. It shows they're serious about search. But unlike Aaron, I don't think Bing is going to make a significant difference in market share numbers. I think Microsoft will get a temporary blip, causing everyone to rush to …

I must say, I've been having a lot of fun with Microsoft's new search, er... decision engine, Bing. From the name (see "Top 20 Bing Puns" and "Bada Bing: Will Microsoft Make Search Sexy?") to the platform itself (see "The More I Bing, The More I Like"), Bing has given me plenty of writing fodder. And, while I've already spewed nearly 3,000 words about Bing on my digital marketing blog, I've been saving the most important 1,000 for this column.