It’s official: Bing.com – Microsoft’s new search engine to replace its own 3rd ranked MS Live Search – passed former number 2 major search engine Yahoo! as of June 10.
bing Decision Logo
According to online user tracking by comScore, Hitwise and Stat Counter –
ComScore: With release of Bing.com at the end of May, Microsoft increased its share of the U.S. search market to 15.5% in only one week. That’s up almost 2% from comScore’s tracking data the week of May 26-30.
StatCounter: In classic horse-race lingo, StatCounter reported that Microsoft’s Bing had “overtaken” Yahoo Search for second place, with 16.28% of U.S. searches to Yahoo’s 10.22%.
Back at the horse track – MS Bing is now Place (2nd); Yahoo! Search is Show (3rd place). And, the winner? “Google still dominates the U.S. search market with 71.47% market share.”
Hitwise: Ranking more than 450,000 web sites, Hitwise claimed that Bing.com ranked “merely” fourth in its Search Engines category. Hmmmmm. But Hitwise did note that Bing came from behind (from ranking 5,120th for an empty placeholder web page before the new search engine was launched) to rank 17th among those half-million web sites a week later.
Got a Bad Case of “Search Overload”???
As for why Bing.com galloped ahead of 2nd place Yahoo! in barely 10 days, search engine watchers claim:
· Microsoft has put $80,000,000 to $100,000,000 behind its Bing.com launch advertising campaign. That’s a very big marketing carrot that drives a lot of eyeballs.
· Microsoft is making good on its promise to be a Decision Engine, where searchers are not buried in irrelevant web page results. Instead, Bing searchers find side-by-side listings of links and related resources … some that shout out what they contain in a mouse-over, so the searcher need not click thru every search result to find the answer they’re looking for.
· Bing invites searchers to explore by channel – Images, Videos, Shopping, News, Maps and Local, Travel and Health.
· Bing offers a “cure” for search overload. If you’ve seen any of that big ticket television advertising, then you know the tag line: What has Search Overload done to us?
The ads feature seemingly normal humans – a pregnant woman with her friend, a boy and his dad looking at high-priced flat-screen televisions, two friends eating lunch in a restaurant – who become zombies at the mere mention of a keyword. For example, the friend asking, “So, when is the baby due?” produces a flood of hits containing the word baby … including the useless fact that some live-bearing species of shark eat their babies after birth. (Whaaaaa? Forget Mother’s Day!)
Mention of plasma TV at the electronics store reduces the young boy to spouting definitions of plasma physics. And the keyword hits just keep coming faster and faster, until you can’t even hear the pile of keyword results spewing from various zombie mouths.
As a former ad agency creative director, I’d say this is a pretty clever hook. Microsoft is putting the “Bah-Dah BING” on a dirty little secret about search engines that ONLY match keywords:
You end up buried under a lot of useless, irrelevant results. However, when the search indexers (spiders) are coded up to find “natural language patterns” — or when what the search spiders find are double-checked by human and expert filters – then you’ve got the cure for Search Overload. Tah-dum. Or, bah-dah bing.
What? Me worry, Google?
Apologies to the old Alfred E. Neuman of Mad Magazine who tried to be nonchalant about everything, What? Me worry? But some search engine watchers actually claim 1st Place search engine giant Google is afraid of little Bing.com.
I don’t trust the source on this one, but rumor has it that Google co-founder Sergey Brin is so “rattled” by Bing’s recent launch, that Brin organized a Google update team to figure out how Microsoft’s – not in 3rd place anymore – Bing actually filters, cleans up and delivers useful search results.
(That’s from the New York Post, the celebrity gossip tabloid of record for sleepy subway riders and strap-hangers in metro Manhattan.)
But this, from Sterling Market Intelligence analyst Greg Sterling, is believable:
“Google may have all but dismissed Bing before it launched because of Microsoft’s search engine track record (and the fact that its old) Live Search wasn’t received with the same favor from analysts, investors and consumers as Bing.”
“I don’t think they are shaking in their boots at this point. But Google has to take a competitor like Microsoft very seriously because they have the capacity to invest millions of dollars into search. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google was taking a closer look and trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm and trying to assess how big it really is.”
Ahem.
Wholesale Business Searchers Don’t Like Search Overload Either
This seems like the right time to mention what Vertical and Business Search Engines do best. By their very structure and operation, Verticalized Business Search Engines sort and filter, slice and dice the piles of information overload that come up in purely keyword searches. Vertical SE’s work a specialized topic area of the big world wide web; and they use their own keyword search software – plus human specialists and expertise – to sort out irrelevant results.
Wholesalers, resellers, distributors and manufacturers don’t find much use for weird facts on baby-eating shark moms when they search for suppliers of baby clothing or women’s baby (maternity) apparel. Or, a business purchaser seeking a reliable liquidation specialist in consumer electronics who mistakenly types “plasma tee” into a search box would rather not scan the latest plasma physics research from Princeton.
If wholesale and business searchers go to the right search engines, they need not waste time going into search zombie overload either. Try these:
1. Top Ten Wholesale.com to zero in on over 50 Top Keyword categories, used by 10,000 business searchers per day, to locate wholesale distributors and product suppliers for resellers. Search by merchandise category or brand name … from Apparel, iPods, Fashion Sunglasses and Fragrances to Dollar Stores, Holidays, Airsoft, Leather, Jewelry and Toys.
2. Manufacturer.com to find offshore manufacturers, licensed wholesalers, exporters and Buyer/Seller listing exchanges for everything from consumer electronics, industrial/medical equipment and luggage … to men’s, women’s and children’s clothing makers; toy manufacturers, electronics components and licensed, branded manufacturers of gifts and crafts, timepieces and eyewear.
3. Off Price Network.com for a searchable wholesale supplier directory of the global discount marketplace. Apparel, Handbags, Fashion Accessories, Jewelry and Off-Price Merchandise – at every price point from Designer to Below-Wholesale Liquidation Lots.