By now, those of us even remotely up to date with what’s happening in the search industry know that Bing released its Webmaster Whitepaper almost 2 weeks ago.

I find it refreshing that the Bing Webmaster Center Team has referred to SEO as an opportunity to help your website stand out from the crowd in the last couple of pages of the document. Not to infer that SEO will change so much on account of Bing, but it’s nice to see the Bing team demonstrate some examples of how the search engine’s categorized results lists will affects SEO efforts in general.

I’m pretty surprised however that in the 12 days since the whitepaper’s release, there hasn’t been more community response to the post, with a mere 32 comments, and very few questions.

In all honesty, I’m not too keen on the stripping of capital letters from comments on Bing Community, but I can live with that.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like what I see so far with this search engine. But what I am having a hard time understanding however, is that in the 6 posts of Bing’s ‘announcement’ ‘annoucement’ category made since May 28 2009, nobody has bothered to correct the typo and 301 redirect to the proper spelling of ‘announcement’.

Is it just me or does $80 million to $100 million (on marketing and advertising for Bing), not go as far as it used to?

Bing was originally scheduled for launch June 3, 2009, however, Microsoft’s “Decision Engine” went live today, and aims to compete with Google and divert its share with $80 Million in marketing.

In announcing the search engine May 28, 2009 Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Bing (AKA Kumo) hopes to help users receive the information they’re searching for faster and that the decision engine goes beyond search to help customers deal with information overload. When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.

Bing Search Engine will replace Live search, and focuses on 4 key areas:

• Local information
• Travel
• Health care
• E-commerce

The main feature that I notice from the start is that aside from regular search results, certain queries offer categorized search results in the sidebar as well as related search, as seen below.

Also of interest, each thumbnail in the results of video searches will play the first 30 seconds of the video on mouse over, giving you a sneak preview before clicking the link. The world of Search Engine optimization just got another toy to play with – or rip apart, depending who’s sitting in front of the toy box.