Thursday, July 2, 2009

Could Bing Challenge Google?



There has been a lot of fuss lately about the new Microsoft owned search engine called Bing. The fuss by the tech blogs, and Microsoft haters out there probably stems form the fact that Microsoft has claimed they will be spending upwards of $100 million on advertising the new search engine on television, magazines and the internet.

Can Bing's Advertising Help Them Overtake Google?
I can attest to the huge ad budget they have. For some Adwords ads (Googles ad platform), Bing comes up first even if the term has nothing remotely related to computers or search. I also noticed other ad platforms like Kontera, which sells in-text ads, also show Bing for a large array of key words. Google on the other hand has a huge fan base, who in effect advertise them for free. The moment Google announces a new feature to search, there are literally thousands of popular blogs which pick up the news story and announce it to the internet world. Remember, like Microsoft, Google has billions of dollars in cash. So although $100 million is a drop in the bucket for a large corporation like Microsoft, Google can still be using their $100 million to improve an already amazing search product.

Bings Search Results

So, are Bings search results better then that of Google? There have been arguments on both sides for this. In my opinion, after analyzing key results for key terms, it seems as though Bings database of sites it indexes is much smaller than that of Googles. For some searches, Bing may show better results, but for the majority of searches, Google is still far and away the best.

Is Bing Better then Live Search?

The answer to this quest is, absolutely. Even though I feel that Bing is still leaps and bounds from catching Google both search quality wise, and in the number of everyday users. Bing by far outperforms Live search. Bing basically is a copy of Google. They took many of Googles best features and made them their own. They not have sections for health, traffic, weather, travel videos, and even their own "Google Trends."

What will it Take for Bing to Catch Google.
In order for Bing to even come close to Google in their number of everyday users, it will take lot and lots of time, as well as money, but most importantly, something innovative and unique. Bing has modeled themselves after Google, and has many similarities to it. The problem is, Why would people who use Google everyday change their searching habits and just move to another "Google"? The answer is, they won't. Bing needs to be the first mover and come up with something uniques that Google does not already incorporate. If they can do this, and have a nice span of time before Google Copies their unique idea, I think we could start seeing Googlers becoming Bing'ers.

2 comments:

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

Good Article.

Even i have one but a little brief

http://infosyndrome.blogspot.com/2009/06/bing-at-no2-not-yahoo.html

Advise welcomed.

- Roharme

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