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Today I would like to have a little chat about search, in particular Bing.
Lately there have been reports of Bing gaining momentum and gaining market share against Google. But is this growth real, is it sustainable, how is it derived, and is it going to end up biting Microsoft in the butt.
Bing has been making deals, making them quickly and partnering with many companies. As a user of both Bing, I do think their search is pretty good, however the search business is user driven not business driven. I believe that Bing is setting themselves up for disaster by "paying" for positioning within other sites because the focus is merely on getting users, not user experience.
Before we understand the potential for Bing to fail, we should look at why Google has been so successful.
Why does Google Rock the Search Market?
In a few words, SEARCH QUALITY. Nothing more, nothing less. Google has always made decisions based off of users, people that use their search. If they users are not happy they are going to elsewhere to do their search. Without people searching they have no business...no traffic to allow their ad based module to continue churning out billions of dollars per quarter.
Because of their focus on users, Google pisses off a lot of "marketers". They don't care.
Google recently slapped many of the largest content farms online including ehow.com, ezinearticles.com, and wiki answers because guess what, the user experience of these sites was not high quality. Instead these sites were gaming Google's search engine rankings through duplicate content, keyword stuff, paid back-links, and other black hat techniques.
Google has claimed that it makes over 500 changes per year. They are have mastered the roll out process and are constantly updating their search to reflect what people want and removing content that people simply are not benefiting from.
Partner up with us, PLEASE!
Bing on the other hand is relying on partnerships with large companies, large web entities, and offline promotions. The problem is that this does not make their search any better, in fact, they should be spending this money instead on competing with Google in terms of search quality, search experience, and the addition of new features.
It is the same as relationships. You can't buy love and you can't buy users. The honeymoon stage is going to quickly end when people find out their search results and experience is not as good in Bing. In fact, this will only take minutes to decide and people will decide why they were using Bing in the first place. Were they tricked? No, they were pushed in this direction with some big partnerships.
The latest deal that has been brokered by Microsoft has been within Research in Motion, the maker of BlackBerry devices. We will see what sort of impact this has on Bing's market share...
What do we think as users?
You know what I think. I think this is the beginning of the surge before the storm. Bing is not running a sustainable business model. They are currently spending $3 in placements in order to get back $1 in advertising. This money would be well spent if they were attract repeat users...but it is attracting many one time users. People know and love Google.
I know there are likely some Bing users out there that love the search. I also know that there are some people that are "Googlers". I would love to hear both sides. If you have any feedback, hit me up with some Street Talk.
I am very greatly pleased to read Kyle.Truly speaking he is a great thinker,well speaker,good-wisher and perfect advise. I like him and his writing of good thinking.
This is interesting more because Microsoft got into trouble with Windows because they tried to put everything the customer wanted into it. Now they are trying to buy love, and Google are succeeding in giving their customers what they want. I think maybe Bing has fallen into the trap of trying to tell us what we think!
I agree. Bing is now going after Google via legislation simply because they own such a monopoly. It is funny when the tables turn (what about the monopoly they had on the OS market), how companies react. Bing is going to have to get creative and they have made some good moves recently by incorporating many of the social aspects into their search results. It is going to be an interesting year in the search market.
I agree Wayne and I have tried to move over to Bing a few times out of fury with some of the "big brother" style moves that Google has made over the years. I always end up coming back. They say that Bing's (and Yahoo for that matter) market share primarily consists of blue collar workers. Bing as an advertising medium definitely converts, but I don't think they can sustain this spending spree to try to attract new users.
I am a regular user of Google. I have tried Bing too but I naturally return to Google. Just do. So Kyle I agree with your point. Bing must create a reason for folks to choose them over Google to be a long term success. Tough job. I have read that Bing reaches a different demographic than Google. Maybe so but based on those who arrive at my sites for search engines, that demographic doesn't search nearly as often as does that of Google.
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