Forum Moderators: mack
Microsoft's new Bing search service is the fastest-growing U.S. search engine among the top 10, according to a Nielsen report released Monday.The total amount of searches on Bing rang in at 1.1 billion for the month of August, a leap of 22.1 percent over July, winning Microsoft a 10.7 percent share of the search engine market.
When feeds Yahoo fully this search share will rise beyond 25% from what we can guess with present data.
MS can really take on Google if they take this Bing seriously this time.
But the question is - Is Bing eating away at Yahoo's market share or Google's? From the looks of it, there's more searches than ever but Yahoo is losing out in a big way.
Now that the market is MUCH less friendly to risk Microsoft is able to put BILLIONS in cash on the table with re-launch under the bing brand, a HUGE integration with Facebook AND they're gearing up to launch Office 2010 with an entire web ecosystem and desktop ecosystem as well as launch a very highly regarded and anticipated operating system.
I don't see anywhere to go but UP for Microsoft at this point. In all seriousness i think Microsoft is upping the ante of search and sooner or later going to push Google to play some cards it hasn't had to play before.. to actually have competition and need to spend money on marketing rather then engineering :)
Why?
Because with actual competition, both companies will have a lot of incentive to buy up any niche engines going after the "long tail" searches.
First it only talks about the US, not the rest of the world.
In the US the perceived popularity of bing is heavily supported by aggressive TV ads, not so in the rest of the world. Even market share gained due to the TV ads: how long term will that effect remain once Microsoft needs to divert the TV ads to promote windows 7 -they need to wipe out the utterly bad taste of Vista once 7 lands in the stores ?
Secondly Google's market share grew by 2.6% in a market growing by 2.9% so they did loose just a tiny bit. The biggest looser is Yahoo, which is goig to use bing anyway, so the growt of bing might be mostly due to yahoo already loosing before they start their cooperation with the Redmond behemoth.
Unless we hear "I binged it" instead of "I googled it", there's no risk to Google.
Finally, as always, statistics can be used to prove nearly any point you like to make :)
need to spend money on marketing rather then engineering
Are you sure that's a happy conclusion? I'd rather see them always improve the search algorithm rather spend money convincing people their algorithm is great.
me neither, but I just looked at my July over August Bing organic traffic -- I'm seeing an increase of ~20%
Kind of line with 22% growth for Bing it seems...
Maybe we are only effected !
surpringly, we are not even allowed to submit to bing webmaster tools from few continents :)
I guess it doesn't matter how much faith I have or don't have in Nielsen from where I'm standing. Bing's success is obvious.
from where I'm standing. Bing's success is obvious
MSN and Live traffic have always been negligible on my sites, and so is Bing, even if I ranked well on my keywords, so I guess for me, they've always been failures. The bulk of my search engine referrals were always Google and Yahoo!.
Are you sure that's a happy conclusion? I'd rather see them always improve the search algorithm rather spend money convincing people their algorithm is great
Edit.. Remove wall of text.
I think its kind of ironic that a company in which their sole existence is based upon marketing doesn't feel the need to compete within marketing itself :)
a company in which their sole existence is based upon marketing
Really? I mean...really? Can you support that without me cracking up?.
Adwords
Youtube Promoted Videos
They're the worlds biggest online advertising company.. whats not so "marketing" about that? wow.
They're the worlds biggest online advertising company.. whats not so "marketing" about that? wow.
They're also the world's biggest search engine, with other technology-driven products like Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, Google Earth, Google Docs, etc. Surely you don't think all those products (including the core Google Search product) have been created, deployed, and maintained by marketing types? Unless I'm mistaken, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were graduate students in computer science, not MBA candidates, when they developed Google. :-)
What worries me more is that for a little while address mistypes in IE6 are answered by Bing.
Just IE6?
Address (domain) mistypes are intercepted by my ISP and returns Yahoo search page; regardless of browser.
Google may have started out as a search engine, but it is most definitely an advertising company now.
Other people might disagree with that, but in any case, ByronM was claiming that Google as a company those "sole existence is based upon marketing." Anyone who believes that would have to say that Microsoft's "sole existence is based on marketing," because Windows, Office, and now Bing (which is supported by a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign) certainly aren't selling themselves.
Getting back on topic, I'd love to hear where momotan got the information that "Most of G's search traffic comes from the partners, like AOL, CNN, bandwidth providers." Some yes, but "most"? Citation, please? And if increasing market share by "mak[i]ing a better offer and outbid[ding] G on those contracts" were so easy, wouldn't it be more productive for Microsoft to save its war chest for partnership deals instead of spending tens of millions of dollars on consumer advertising (which, so far, has provided only modest and possibly temporary gains in market share at the expense of other second-tier competitors instead of taking share away from Google)?
A quick search of google's investor relations website and only 3% of googles profit is licensing, 66% of its revenue is google sites and 31% of its revenue is non google sites.
I'd be willing to bet 100% of Microsofts revenue is licensing and services and about 20% of its losses is search marketing ;)
Edit:
Sources -
[investor.google.com...]
I think my generalization was a lot more valid then that signore_john.. You're grasping for straws if you think Microsoft's primary revenue is advertising revenue.
Before you can discuss business, you've got to understand the vocabulary. "Advertising" isn't a synonym for "marketing."
Like other large marketers such as Procter & Gamble, Kraft Foods, or Unilever, Microsoft spends huge amounts on marketing (including advertising) to create demand for its products.
Still, this thread isn't about marketing or advertising; it's about the Bing search engine's market share. Can Microsoft use marketing (including, but not limited to, advertising) to achieve what it hasn't been able to achieve through bundling or consumer demand? If Comscore's numbers are accurate, how much has it cost Bing to achieve its larger (but still small) share of the U.S. search market, and can it sustain that growth rate while achieving and maintaining profitability? Can Bing become a serious competitor to Google if it doesn't find acceptance outside a country that has only a small percentage of the world's population? You can dismiss Google as a "marketing company" if you wish, but right now, Bing is a small player in a limited market, and it's a pretty safe guess that most of Bing's gains have been bought with marketing (including advertising) dollars.
I also question, why are you claiming i diminish the value of google (which i dont) but your expressly diminishing the value of bing as growth out of marketing and not growth do to its exponential technological leap in seach engine technologies. You have to admit, the leap from live.com to bing.com wasn't just a simple re-brand but a huge technology leap.
My point is that the competition for SEM markets such as Google and Adcenter is good for us, the consumer. Right now the community speaks for google and google has never had to define itself.. now it will. (and not just on its technology.. but in the sense of marketing itself..)
You can frame the definition of marketing all you want and you can change the context of the debate to include the all of microsoft or the subject of bing itself
Actually, the subject of this thread is Bing, or at least it was until you tried to make it about Google. Also, I'd disagree that Bing represents an "exponential technological leap," since it's returning pretty much the same kinds of search results that Google and Yahoo are. It may be a better me-too product than earlier Microsoft search products were, but it's still a me-too product with a few cosmetic enhancements.
IMHO, Bing will never a serious threat to Google for the same reason that Google's Android and Chrome OS aren't likely to be serious threats to Microsoft: Those products are sideshows to each company's core products. In the case of Bing, is the question of whether Bing has 10 or 20 percent of the general Web searches as important to Microsoft as, say, whether Microsoft has a presence in social networking, "cloud computing" apps, or new CPU-powered devices that don't fit under the current headings of "desktop" and "laptop"? Probably not--and that's why Bing will remain a sideshow to Microsoft's core software-related businesses, just as Android and Chrome OS will remain sideshows to Google's core search-related businesses.
I'd also add that you're terribly naive if you don't think Microsoft isn't committed to Bing, Social networking, Cloud computing so on and so forth. Microsoft put 240 million into facebook for a valuation of 10 billion and extended that partnership with a bing exclusive search deal. Microsoft is also pushing facebook on Xboxlive as well as twitter. Cloud computing is important to microsoft as well with Office 10 coming to desktop and web versions as well as microsoft showcasing MANY "cloud" based systems from silverlight applications to silverlight hosting to silverlight CDN all the way to their "live essentials" and "live labs" products which enable cloud storage, cloud computing, synchronization, remote support.
i could go on and on, but i have a feeling none of this would matter and i would just be cornered to defend myself against whatever misconception there is about microsft and the public perception of google.
I simply want to hear google speak for itself one of these days and if bing keeps this growth up, by god google will be forced to play that card and sooner or later the community will see the direction google wants to be rather then the big black box it is today.
The thing Microsoft need to achieve is people making Bing their default search engine.
That's a key tipping point. The Bing add-on for Firefox has 670,000 downloads and it's very early yet.
I wish Bing the best. I like the Home page design choices. The results that I am interested in tracking are pretty good, reasonably accurate IMO. So far, I like it. Have not used enough for serious searches to say if I will begin to reach for it first. Solid research results are key to turning me.
The competition of Firefox hasn't had much positive benefit with IE; still junk. But they've cracked the market and given us a great choice.
Love Google - but competition will be better for us - and Google if they are on the ball.
Would like to have seen Cuil do well, but I don't like the results at all. Didn't meet half the hype.
The typ0 Ging.com pops up some other search engine. Too lazy to check and see if they've been around or if Bing screwed up. B-G is an extremely common typ0. Would they really have missed that?
