Google boss claims no sting from Bing - yet
No strip search required
Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything
Google CEO Eric Schmidt insisted yesterday that Mountain View wasn’t concerned about the arrival of Bing, even as stats for Microsoft’s revamped search engine made a healthy upward swing following its launch last week.
"It's not the first entry for Microsoft. They do this about once a year," said Schmidt in an interview with Fox Business Network on Tuesday.
"I don't think Bing's arrival has changed what we're doing. We are about search, we're about making things enormously successful, by virtue of innovation."
He also mulled over the different search offerings users can access via the interwebs. "Google is about getting all the information and organising it. Yahoo has a different strategy. We think ultimately Bing will evolve to a different strategy as well," he said.
However, in the week following Microsoft’s launch of Bing, Comscore results showed the software giant’s share of US web searches climbed above 10 per cent for the first time since 2007.
If Schimdt has it right those figures will, over the coming months, be seen as something of an anomaly with stats swelled simply by web surfers curious to take a look at Google and Yahoo!’s search rival.
Microsoft unveiled Bing early last week. Since then the company has pulled in 11.1 per cent of US searches from 2 June to 6 June, according to the latest Comscore stats.
In comparison, during the final week of May Microsoft grabbed a 9.1 per cent share of the search market.
But Redmond still trails a distant third place behind Google’s mammoth share of over 60 per cent of all searches in April, while Yahoo! racked up more than 20 per cent last month.
Schimdt added yesterday that Google, like Microsoft, was keen to scoop up smaller tech firms to beef up its tech portfolio. The company will be eyeing up cloud, mobile and open source distribution software outfits over the next year, he said.
"We have been wandering around looking at all of the different companies,” he said. “With the big ones we haven't come across anything we've particularly liked. We are definitely talking to a number of smaller companies but we've done that routinely." ®
COMMENTS
Uberfail
No-one who's poked around on YouTube for search for "Bing-a-thon" is likely to forget the enormity of the atrocity Microsoft's legendarily lame marketing crew inflicted on a suffering North American public. Seriously, go look for some; it's literally jaw-dropping. You thought the Seinfeld ads were bad? You ain't seen nothin' yet...
test search on Bing
Tried to find Vista service pack 2 for 64bit on Bing? Did I find it on the first page? No.
Google did.
Nuff said.
blindsearch - nice idea
I tried it and 2 out of 3* I tried, the best result was Google; the other was Bing.
I think blind and or A/B testing is important, but it does miss a couple of things:
1) I use iGoogle as my start page, have Gmail for home and Google Apps. I have results ranking switched on. Simply testing a search engine does not compare the entire experience. It would have to be a much better search experience to make me even think about bothering to switching over the FireFox default search engine, and my carefully arranged iGoogle home page when my browser starts up. And my short experience today and when Bing was first released shows that it is not as good. I am old enough remembering telling people to use Alta-Vista.. until I first tried some new start up called Google.
2) Google as a brand is 'better' than Microsoft. MS playing hardball & inflicting Vista on me, has adversely affected the 'brand equity'. In the same way beer in branded beer bottles tastes better, the perception is Google is nicer. Subjective, and possibly wrong, but MS benefits from its brand name in things like re-branded OEM keyboards and mice, but suffers from it here. Certainly my perception is that MS don't do search well.
Interesting thought experiment; if MS implemented bing as a re-branded interface to Google, the search results would be the same, it would have been much cheaper to implement.. but people probably still would not use it.
* Search terms: codeshed, fanatics models, online analysis.
Searching for local terms such as 'Warriors' (an Auckland NZ based NRL team) fails as it search is not localised unlike my normal search. Not all of us live in the US.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Top 10 SIEM implementer’s checklist
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
