Should you Google(GOOG) or Bing? This is one question that Google would hate and Microsoft would love netizens to ponder over. Of course, as per the latest ComScore report, Google is still the king of search with US market share of 65.4% in October 2009. And, none of the challengers, and even all of them put together are in a position to dethrone Google. But, there are valid reasons why Google is unsettled these days.
Google claimed the throne of world's largest search engine (in 2000) within two years of inception (1998) by indexing over one billion URLs. Google should thank Yahoo, the current challenger for claiming that throne. A year later, Google tripled its indexes. In another three years, its index base rose to 6 billion. On July 25, 2008, Google announced that search engine indexed over 1 trillion unique web pages from all over the globe. Of course, Google's search index span was around 40 billion at that time. Despite, the phenomenal growth in search span, Google lost world's largest search engine status in July 2008 to a start up Cuil.
Cuil claimed to search more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft. Despite such a strong entry cuil fizzled in the very first month. Cuil is now almost written of as it doesn't feature even in the top 11,000 most trafficked sites. Volume is not the name of the game; relevance is the name of the game.
Where Cuil failed, Microsoft's Bing seems to be succeeding. Bing was launched on June 3, 2009. In four months, Bing US market share rose to 9.9%. Of course, Bing has the lineage of MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search. More importantly, it can bank on Yahoo deal that made Google in the first place the largest search engine in 2000.
Google is definitely worried about Bing for the simple fact that Microsoft owns Bing. Microsoft did not get serious about search business until after Google proved the business model and started encroaching on its home turf – software services. Of course, Google is worried of Bing for many reasons including rising user acceptance.
Bing is winning market share for a variety of reasons. Bing makes search easier through ‘Explorer Pane' - a left hand side menu that categorizes search results and also prompts. For e.g., if user has clicked ‘shopping' and then search for ‘Michael Johnson' who is a popular singer, Bing provides categories like ‘brand', ‘price' etc which make user to narrow down search instantly thereby saving lot of time. Bing does not stop there – it also provides some general links for Michael Johnson in the same page, so that user can switch from task based search to general search related to that signer.
When searched for a topic, Google and Yahoo provide links for the query along with some preview.
