Google boss claims no sting from Bing - yet

Google CEO Eric Schmidt insisted yesterday that Mountain View wasn’t concerned about the arrival of Bing, even as stats for Microsoft’s revamped search engine made a healthy upward swing following its launch last week. "It's not the first entry for Microsoft. They do this about once a year," said Schmidt in an interview with …

[Jerome 1]

Why Yahoo?

I've never understood how Yahoo get their 20% share. Microsoft's measly 10% or so is easily explained by the fact they are the default search in that horrendous browser that people who don't know about Firefox use. But how does Yahoo, whose search results are as bad as Microsoft's were pre-Bing, manage to rack up 20% of the market?

[Martin Lyne]

Percentage

"Microsoft unveiled Bing early last week. Since then the company has pulled in 11.1 per cent of US searches from 2 June to 6 June, according to the latest Comscore stats.

In comparison, during the final week of May Microsoft grabbed a 9.1 per cent share of the search market."

So.. how many millions of dollars later and they garner.. 2%. Hardly a "Healthy Upswing".

I've visited Bing 3 times now, once because a client said the domain was taking them to a strange page (missing parts of a link and using IE) so I reproduced.

Once to see what it even looked like and once when I accidentally typo'd something in IE when testing IE6 compatibility.

That's 3 visits they wouldn't normally have had. Not going back. Looks fugly as sin.

[Wade Burchette]

Won't last

Here in the stateside part of the world, Microsoft has been on a huge advertising blitz. So naturally people will start to use it. But it won't last. Live search (of which Bing is really just an extension of) couldn't find the ocean standing in knee deep of water. I don't care what a Microsoft funded "blind" search study says. I know this from firsthand experience. Already there are stories floating around on the tubes about how Bing came up with bad results. Microsoft really needs to stop trying to do what others do better and just keep focusing on Windows and Office.

[Mark Malley]

I've switched

I think it's healthy to give the new search engine in town a try, if folks weren't willing to do it with Google it wouldn't be in the position it's in. That said, there are features I like about both.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Won't last

Try the Bing/Google/Yahoo blind test. Bet you'll be surprised ... http://blindsearch.fejus.com

[Kyle 9]

Bing Is Not Google

B ing

I s

N ot

G oogle

[zak_neutron]

Hmmm...

I have just tried x3 searches on 1=Bing 2=Yahoo 3=Google for a relatively new IT term: The name of the new Fedora 11 (linux) release = "Leonidas"

Result for Bing: result no. 42 (page 5) - a phoronix link about Fedora 11

Result for Yahoo: result no. 59 (page 6) - a softpedia link about Fedora 11

Result for Google: result no. 3 (page 1) - the actual fedora project web site

Methinks some spin searching is occurring!!

[kit]

search results for "the cost of cellulosic ethanol"

Just a search result for the test "the cost of cellulosic ethanol" on http://blindsearch.fejus.com

http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=cost+of+cellulosic+ethanol

and judge the search engines yourself.

[Geoffrey W]

@Leonidas

Funny? I tried "Leonidas" on the blind search page and did not see fedora anywhere. I tried Leonidas directly in google and it sure aint at number three or anywhere on the first 3 pages I got.

All I got were pages about spartans and chocolates.

[Wade Burchette]

To AC #1

The "blind" search you are referring is not so blind. I don't care what some "blind" search says, my firsthand actual factual real-world experience shows Google to be the best. I'm no fan of Google, but until someone else is just as good, I won't be using anyone else. I care about results. Microsoft will never have a good search engine because they are too divided. Those who do everything do nothing well. Microsoft will always have a lot of money, they don't need to try to do what everyone else does.

[Anonymous Coward]

@ Wade

Re: "my firsthand actual factual real-world experience shows Google to be the best"

And yet without the Google branding you were as likely to prefer the Yahoo or Bing results.

Just goes to show how powerful the Google brand really is.

[GrantB]

blindsearch - nice idea

I tried it and 2 out of 3* I tried, the best result was Google; the other was Bing.

I think blind and or A/B testing is important, but it does miss a couple of things:

1) I use iGoogle as my start page, have Gmail for home and Google Apps. I have results ranking switched on. Simply testing a search engine does not compare the entire experience. It would have to be a much better search experience to make me even think about bothering to switching over the FireFox default search engine, and my carefully arranged iGoogle home page when my browser starts up. And my short experience today and when Bing was first released shows that it is not as good. I am old enough remembering telling people to use Alta-Vista.. until I first tried some new start up called Google.

2) Google as a brand is 'better' than Microsoft. MS playing hardball & inflicting Vista on me, has adversely affected the 'brand equity'. In the same way beer in branded beer bottles tastes better, the perception is Google is nicer. Subjective, and possibly wrong, but MS benefits from its brand name in things like re-branded OEM keyboards and mice, but suffers from it here. Certainly my perception is that MS don't do search well.

Interesting thought experiment; if MS implemented bing as a re-branded interface to Google, the search results would be the same, it would have been much cheaper to implement.. but people probably still would not use it.

* Search terms: codeshed, fanatics models, online analysis.

Searching for local terms such as 'Warriors' (an Auckland NZ based NRL team) fails as it search is not localised unlike my normal search. Not all of us live in the US.

[Janko Hrasko]

test search on Bing

Tried to find Vista service pack 2 for 64bit on Bing? Did I find it on the first page? No.

Google did.

Nuff said.

[Tom Paine]

Uberfail

No-one who's poked around on YouTube for search for "Bing-a-thon" is likely to forget the enormity of the atrocity Microsoft's legendarily lame marketing crew inflicted on a suffering North American public. Seriously, go look for some; it's literally jaw-dropping. You thought the Seinfeld ads were bad? You ain't seen nothin' yet...