Microsoft’s efforts to challenge Google in the Internet search business have been well documented. Microsoft’s latest (and third) attempt is called Bing. Microsoft has said its goal is to turn “Bing” into a verb—just like “Google.”
I spent some time Binging, and you know what? Bing isn’t bad. It has a lovely home page, which features exotic and beautiful images from around the world. The page is clean and elegant and it’s easy to see what your next step might be for a search.
I typed in “Blind Lemon Jefferson” (a blues guitarist from the early 1900s who influenced a generation of rock musicians). The results were prompt, and again, the design of the page is clean, elegant, and well organized. Results are grouped into general areas, including lyrics, songs, biographies, and videos. The “Related Searches” feature on the left helpfully suggests other blues artists I might be interested in.
But here’s the thing: Bing search results look almost identical to Google: blue headline with a brief description, and both search engines generated the same list of sites. Bing adds a helpful pop-up window with slightly more information when you cursor over a search result.
In short, Bing looks like what Google might look like if Google decided to buff up its design and layout. Unfortunately, Bing has “me too”written all over it, and offering a “me too” product in an area where one provider already has dominant market share is not a great strategy.
And talk about dominant: according to comScore, a digital research firm, Americans conducted 14.3 billion Internet searches in May. Google owned 65 percent of the market, with 9.3 billion searches. Microsoft came in a distant third at eight percent (1.2 billion). Early results show a spike in users of Microsoft's Bing, but even if Bing doubles Microsoft’s search market share, Google will still be ahead by a factor of four.
The irony is that Google is doing to Microsoft in Search what Microsoft did to Apple in Operating Systems in the 1990s. While the Mac OS was often described as superior to MS-DOS in terms of graphics, interfaces, and technology, Microsoft’s system became the worldwide standard. In the operating system world of the 1990s, being adequate and ubiquitous trumped technological beauty and cool design.
Google might not be the most elegant search engine, but—for better or worse—it has become the standard worldwide. You have to wonder what Microsoft really hopes to achieve in nibbling at the ankles of the Google giant.
