For so many years Microsoft turned their nose at search. Now they are playing catch-up to Google. This philosophy is more of a way of doing business for Microsoft. They tend not to innovate but to take other companies ideas or products and put their spin on them and use their marketing muscle to enter the market (See GUI Operating Systems, Xbox, Zune, Mobile, etc.).
Microsoft’s reluctance to really commit significant planning and resources early on to their search and internet properties has allowed Google to become one of the most valuable companies in the world with their main source of revenue being Adwords, the Pay Per Click advertising within their search engine. Google commands anywhere between 70% – 75% of the overall search market share (depending on which study you read). The Bing and Yahoo advertising partnership hasn’t really panned out as planned. My belief is that the unknowns with Yahoo as a company has really lead to less people using the site and also less willingness of advertisers to give them money.
While I think that Bing has started serving more relevant results, there is still a disconnect between their results and Google. When I do comparison searches, Google still provides me relevant results more often. Time is money and I can’t afford to do three searches before I get what I want. I think in 2011 the results in Bing have gotten much better but they still have a high reliance on anchor text which spammers can easily use to manipulate the rankings.
The problem Bing has is no one is using their search engine. Yahoo has a great suite of tools and content to help drive people to their site which in turn leads to people doing searches. I also think Bing is on the right path in terms of their tools as well, Bing Maps is a great tool and in some instances may be better than Google (see Traffic updates!). So the bottom line is, for Bing to gain more market share in 2012, they need to serve up better results to their users. I would have no problem using Bing more often but I need to get what I want in one search, not three.
