Google boss claims no sting from Bing - yet

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." ®