Whether you believe the superstition dates back to the King Harold's decision to march into Battle at Hastings on Friday 13th October 1066, King Philip IV of France's secret order to arrest the Knights Templar on Friday 13th October 1307, or even an ancient myth about Frigga, 11 witches and a devil getting together on a Friday – the fact remains that Friday 13th is considered unlucky.
For that reason, Microsoft is to be commended for for turning its back on superstition and launching the UK version of its search engine, Bing, on Friday 13th November. If it doesn't succeed, the publicity is going to be extremely predictable.
Until now, British internet users have had access to the US version of Bing, which found it hard to compete with localised services such as Google UK. At present, Google has 80% of the UK search market, compared to Bing's 3%.
However, the new version of Bing boasts all the same features as its American big brother. The 'hover mode' which lets you see page content before visiting a website, and 'visual search', which allows you to narrow a search by flicking through images, are hoped to appeal to UK users.
Ashley Highfield, MD of Microsoft's UK consumer and online divisions is also emphatic that a dedicated team has been working to tailor Bing to the British market. He also thinks it has the potential to be a hit among web users:
About two-thirds of web users now use the internet to make decisions, and half of those searches now last for at least half an hour. With traditional search, there's a lot of endless clicking in to a website, realising it's not what you want, and clicking back out again.
Bing aggregates information for you so that by the time you click in to a website, you're pretty convinced that's the information you want.
Bing has a lot of ground to make up, and user reactions so far have been very mixed. However, Microsoft is planning a major radio and digital campaign to get the word out to British users. Highfield believes that he can capture a 10% market share for Bing and, in the long term, take on the might of Google.
That's not going to happen in the immediate future, but we would encourage you to try Bing out, and then compare it with Google UK. And if you would like help with your search engine optimisation, talk to us – we check our performance in all the major search engines.
We even dare to look when it's Friday 13th.
