Advertising has been around for centuries. We can examine ancient man and discover even back then they had advertisements for their limited products and services.

Bottom line, every business has a message.

Whether the message is meant to brand or to provoke buying, we can thank the ancient Egyptians for making the first sales messages and wall posters that announced their discoveries. Even in ancient Greece and Rome, they used chiseled tablets as their form of advertisements.

It’s safe to say that just as soon as every culture developed their alphabet and language, shortly thereafter, we saw advertising to the masses. Advertising isn’t just delivering a message to a source (target audience), it became the  ability to communicate to a mass audience as a source of power and influence. Advertising began to take history to a whole new level and changed the way businesses communicated to society. As our culture develops and as technology changes the way we communicate, naturally, the way we advertise changes as well.

However, some things don’t just change, they evolve.  Such as life, advertising descended from a common ancestry.  To be more definitive, evolution is established when two opposing forces have processes that constantly introduce variation and particular variants become more common or rare.

The variants that become more common were unclear until Charles Darwin and his theories of Natural Selection were made available to a wide audience in 1859.  Natural Selection, by definition, is the process by which certain heritable traits—those that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully reproduce —become more common in a population over successive generations.

The way Google calculates their organic rankings and how almost every other search engine calculates their natural results goes through processes and updates based on Charles Darwin’s theories of Natural Selection.

Let me explain how…..

Natural selection is an important process (though not the only process) by which evolution takes place within a population of organisms (in our case websites). As opposed to artificial selection, in which humans favor specific traits. In natural selection the environment acts as a sieve through which only certain variations can pass.

The main key to becoming the highest ranking webpage is relevance. The Search Engine (Environment) acts as a sieve through which only certain websites (variations) can pass, or be shown on the front page of results.

Paid Search, PPC, Sponsored Ads (Artificial Selection) are based on keywords in any given AdGroup that are in favor because of personal, (Human) traits to promote above Natural search results. In terms of “evolution” the introductions of new websites and the constant changes in paid search is where the processes constantly introduces variation.

The two opposing forces that allow for evolution to occur are not Paid Search vs. Natural Search.  It’s you vs. your competition.  The question is, will you evolve to become the common or will the evolution of advertising have you become the rare?

There was once a boy named Bing who was rich. However, there was a more popular boy named Google who was notably richer. Bing strived to reach the opulence that Google had attained and became known for, but all of the new toys Bing bought did little to bring him closer to the eminence of the beloved Google. Bing eventually got weary of being unsatisfied with the return on his investments, and took the bravely modest step of becoming a minimalist.

You’ve heard the maxims: less is more, money can’t buy happiness, the best things in life aren’t things, get rich or die trying. Well that last one is a bit different than the others, and one that Bing has rescinded from its favorite quotes section on Facebook. The Microsoft owned search engine is moving away from the feature heavy, everything-you-could-ever-need-in-your-face approach, and embracing a cleaner, less cluttered version of its search engine results pages. This is a drastic change in direction, evidently with the purpose of completely differentiating from the highly decorated Google SERP.

The most salient changes are concerning the evisceration of the left sidebar, which previously hosted related searches and search history, as well as a simplified and more subtle logo and top navigation.  The related searches have been relocated and now reside beneath the ads on the right sidebar.

Compare that against the old Bing results page:

The new Bing embraces widespread white space, and places actual search results center stage with zero distractions.

What kind of impact will this have on paid search ads? Ads could potentially benefit from this change, as there is really nothing else to look at other than search ads and organic search results. The previous Bing design, and the current Google design, included various options above the fold that essentially competed with search results for the eye’s attention. I could see Bing ad click through rates improving due to less overall click options.

Perhaps Bing is coming to terms with the stark realization that their algorithm will never be as technologically advanced as Google’s, so the logical strategy is to now rely on display aesthetics to win over searchers. Interestingly Bing is not providing the option to revert to the old format, but is instead fully embracing the uncluttered cleanliness of the new design. There is backfire potential here, as some Bing loyalists that may have been in love with the old display are now feeling forced into this new design that they didn’t ask for.

Time will tell if the minimalist spirit will manifest and amplify Bing’s market share to lofty new heights. It will also be interesting to see how Google reacts, if at all. Bing has claimed that they are not yet finished with the design, so we will likely see more alterations soon. It is now the time for us searchers to choose what we prefer, more or less.