Wired: Kayak Wants Bing To Stop Copying

[engine]

Wired: Kayak Wants Bing To Stop Copying [wired.com]

“We have contacted them through official channels about concerns about the similarities between Bing and Kayak,” Kayak’s chief marketing officer Robert Birge told Wired.com “From the look and feel of their travel product, they seem to agree with our approach to the market.”

That’s careful language for “Microsoft copied our stuff wholesale.”

Microsoft’s Whitney Burk denies that there’s any copying going on.

“We are discussing the matter with Kayak,” Burk said in emailed statement. “Bing Travel is based on independent development by Microsoft and Farecast.com, which Microsoft acquired in 2008. Any contrary allegations are without merit.”

Copyright law offers some protection for a website’s look-and-feel, but it’s not easy to prove.

[maximillianos]

Microsoft... copying something? I can't think of any cases where that would be true... ;-)

[conor]

Who would have thought it ... Microsoft ripping off some elses idea, is soooo not in their corporate culture ;)

[Gomvents]

I just checked out kayak - there is nothing super-unique there. It's like hundreds of travel sites out there...

[bateman_ap]

I just checked out kayak

Ah their plan worked :)

[whoisgregg]

Search Engine Journal did a side-by-side of screenshots from the two services. It's awfully similar. The positioning of elements and language used is virtually identical. The main difference is the Bing header is taller. Otherwise, even the advertising is positioned similarly and styled similarly.

It's hard for me to believe that the designers at Microsoft & Farecast who worked on this portal didn't specifically use the Kayak interface as inspiration.

What a shame. ::sigh::

[Strapworks]

Bing isn't close enough to lose anything to Kayak. Just another marketing tactic by a failing website.

[Hugene]

By "Just another marketing tactic by a failing website" you mean Bing right ? ;)

[BriGuy20]

People were using Bing when it first came out (#2 search engine), if that's continuing I wouldn't call Bing a failing website.

[JS_Harris]

Bing has never been #2, not even remotely close according to my stats. G and Y are safe, actually even G's image search is beating bingo in my case traffic-wise.

[edited by: JS_Harris at 10:40 am (utc) on June 27, 2009]

[ken_b]

Bing has never been #2

That may be true for your site(s), but not for others.

In my case, Bing has already passed up Yahoo to take second place. That still leaves Google in front by a lot of course.

All of which only goes to show that results vary by site.

[Ozymandias]

I thing the reason Bing is #2 right now is it made quite a buzz when it launched. I would expect it to fall back to third in several months, I think right now its a lot of people testing it out and evaluating it. Regardless, it has significantly increase MS's market share.

[arizonadude]

I think right now its a lot of people testing it out and evaluating it.

I don't think it's going to fall back as much as people think. If people are evaluating and liking it, whey would they switch back?
I've been using it solid for several weeks now and have been able to find exactly what I was looking for each time on the first page. I can't say the same for Google when I used it last. I'm a 10 year Google die hard and see no reason to go back to using the plain boring google.

Google has morphed to something I do not recognize anymore. What drove me to use them in the beginning has been lost.

[graeme_p]

I liked Bing at first but I soon ran into limitations. My experience has been that it sucks at long phrases and ambiguous words. I used Blind Search for a few days to check I was not being biased, and that confirmed it.

[arizonadude]

My experience has been that it sucks at long phrases

No worse than Google, for the long phrases I do on Google, all I get is junk.

Guess it just depends on what your searching for.

I'm still using Bing and in fact don't like going to google anymore because the boring white blinds me.

[bouncybunny]

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