NP: John Cage, 4'33"

The Wall Street Journal reports that MIcrosoft's new search engine might attract advertisers due to its focus on transactional markets like shopping and travel. Douglas Rushkoff at The Daily Beast disagrees, on the premise that catering to advertisers doesn't really make a lick of difference if the actual searchers don't respond to how Bing presents itself. And the existence of advertisers on Bing is wholly irrelevant if nobody is over there searching.

I think I side with Rushkoff on this one, because Microsoft's strategy seems to be to divide and conquer the actual practice of searching by being more helpful for certain kinds of searches. As it stands, search marketing works because searchers are inherently looking for something, and search engines help them find those things. You've got to really kick some butt on these areas of specialization if you're going to convince people that you can handle all their search needs, though, because inertia is a bitch. Searching one place for content and another for shopping just isn't a tenable view of the market, to me.