The advent of a new kind of search engine - aka Microsoft’s Bing - is affecting the way information is delivered and may ultimately force marketers to change the way they measure results.

Bing pulls content from indexed websites and displays the navigation path and variations on the search query off to the side. Clicking on the new keyword helps the searcher find information more quickly.

Preliminary data shows bounce rates on websites to have declined from people originating on Bing. But here's the catch: marketers don't know the person’s originally search query, and they only have data on the last click.

"It's not clear what will make queries return higher in results," said Brian Cummins, product manager for search marketing at Coremetrics. "We are still in a wait-to-see mode, observing the features that stick, and if people abandon an older search engine of choice for Bing.

This led some to suggest that companies should pay close attention to related paths when creating content to understand how customers are finding their site from Bing.

Preliminary tests show a clear distinction in the keywords and the content driving traffic from Bing vs. Google and Yahoo, according to Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, Webtrends marketing VP, who adds that we've moved past traditional marketing - where you buy against the CPM - into content marketing, which is a lot stronger.

Businesses monitoring traffic should have an understanding of broken links on Bing that could prevent potential customers from reaching their site, and why paid search links have also been scarce.

One of the features in Bing that deserves attention is the rollover function. People searching in the video section in Bing can mouse over clips to view the content. This   previewing doesn't "count," though in web analytics, which only measures the number of actual physical click that takes the person to the hosted site. Traditional web analytics (e.g., Webtrends, Coremetrics, Omniture) cannot measure the "rollover" view.

And page views on Bing might be lower than page views from users on other types of search engines, notes Omniture's Bill Mungovan. Consumers might be less willing to click around to dig for something on your website because they have been trained to expect answers more quickly, he said.

This means that companies will have to become more familiar with engagement versus page views to understand the length of time someone watches a video or time spent on the site - and businesses will have to pay more attention to the quality rather than the quantity of page views.

Bing's fame seems to have been shortlived: Recent data suggest it is losing popularity and no longer threatens search giants Google and Yahoo.

But Microsoft is trying to give the new service a fighting chance, reportedly spending between $80-100 million in an advertising campaign that touts the engine as the best way to really solve the user's search "problem." Google, however, holds 64% of the US online audience to Yahoo's 16.3% and Microsoft's 9.9%, according to April Nielsen data.