Microsoft’s negative $5.5-billion-and-counting search engine has come a long way since its initial implementation in 2009, more than doubling its initial market share of 8.4%. The problem is that market share has not been chipped away from Google.

Image courtesy of Microsoft and CNN

Now with the recent implementation of Bing Webmaster Tools and the brand new Disavow Links tool, Bing is really shaping up to take things to the next level with their engine. Google has been frustrating webmasters everywhere with Panda and Penguin, and now with the possibility of negative SEO on many minds a way to ask search engines to ignore ‘bad’ links is necessary.

I believe this move is meant to show consumers that Bing is more agile than Google and listens to consumers, with the obvious long term goal of increasing the Bing user base while at the same time lowering that of Google. Bing has also integrated many social signals directly into its search result pages, and forged numerous partnerships to deliver a better overall search experience. The coming months should be interesting to see how the search engines evolve, but I feel that Bing is definitely on the right track to become a true competitor to Google.

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