Bada Bing, Bada Boom for Microsoft's new search engine?
With over 80% of the global search engine market (reference), Google dominates the world of internet searching. But is all that about to change with the introduction of Microsoft Bing?
Bing, which officially went live on 1st June 2009, is a replacement for Live Search, which had around 2.5% of the market.
The success of Bing relies on it offering something new and innovative that Google doesn’t. So does it actually have anything that makes it stand out from the crowd?
As well as offering a general search engine, Bing also offers more specific ways of searching, such as allowing searchers to refine health searches using related medical concepts ((http://www.bing.com/health), offering a video search (http://www.bing.com/videos) and xRank (http://www.bing.com/xRank), which allows users to search for celebrities, musicians, politicians and bloggers, read short biographies and news about them, and track their trends or popularity rankings.
Of the ten additions Bing provides to its search service (health, images, local, maps, news, shopping, translator, travel, videos and xRank), only three (health, travel and xRank) are not already done by Google. But could these three services be the reason for giving up Google? Let’s take a look at them in more detail.
As detailed above, Bing Health, which is based on Medstory, allows users to refine health searches using related medical concepts to get relevant health information and allow users to navigate complex medical topics with inline article results from experts. If you’re a hypochondriac or have an obsession with medical topics, this might be useful. To be honest though, if I want medical information explained simply, I just use Wikipedia.
Bing Travel (based on Farecast) searches for airfare and hotel reservations online and predicts when is the best time to purchase them. Here, Wikipedia can’t help (although Yahoo can: travel.yahoo.com). However, I would imagine most people would prefer to use already established sites which have been created specifically for checking cheap flights (e.g. SkyScanner) and hotels (e.g. LastMinute).
Bing xRank keeps track of notable celebrities, musicians, politicians and bloggers and ranks them in order of popularity from Bing search query results. For wannabe paparazzi or celebrity stalkers, this will be very useful. The xRank homepage tells you the top-ranked celebrities as well as “Today’s xTreme movers”, which ranks the top search keywords on Bing in terms of search volume movement in the past 24 hours. Exciting, eh? No, not really.
So, in conclusion, it would appear the Microsoft team has a lot of work ahead of it if it wants Bing to overtake Google as the primary search engine. In my opinion, the extra services Bing currently offers are not enough to make the majority of people switch from Google.