The funny thing is that there is one major reason why I don't see bing taking a substantial number of people away from google, which is that on the whole google does what it should do, there isn't enough dissatisfaction with google to get people to switch in droves.
When google took on altavista pretty much any single keyword search on altavista was 50% or more spam.
That single item is what gave google traction. They didn't spend any money on advertising their service, it just worked, and so much better than the competition that if you had tried it once you were sold.
I don't remember any 'altavista side by side with google' comparisions at the time that gave you the impression that it was too close to call.
If they can be good enough to keep people from switching to Google when Bing is the default through OEM deals or IE downloads they'll gain significant market share. In the short term just keeping people would be a victory.
Unwittingly perhaps (or necessarily), Microsoft has just done Google a huge favor. By virtue of Microsoft delivering a reasonably competitive search engine, Google is now in a much better position to show that they are not a monopoly. Back in the old days, IBM, then Microsoft liked keeping Apple around for the same reason.
Conversely, Google has completely dropped all pretext of its former hesitancy to tread directly on Microsoft's turf, releasing operating systems, mobile devices, browsers, hosted office applications, and working to obsolete Exchange (Google Wave).
Nothing has really changed. Microsoft just rebranded their search engine and Google continues to create products in an attempt to 'surround' MS for a battle in the future. And as always Uncle Sam is still watching the MS monopoly in operating systems, as well as Google's monopoly in search and neither has taken a hit to it's main business. Did I miss something?
It's the same game of chess, but the pace seems to be picking up, and the strategic value of each piece placement is coming more clearly into focus. The players are locked into their strategic choices, and are now becoming more reactionary. We'll see more forced moves before either side starts shedding a lot of pieces.
just for the record: in case you are not in the US, most of the described features in this article do NOT work, you have to switch to "US" in the country locator (top-right corner) -- at least i had to, probably i am too stupid to "get it right" any other way... (probably some non-US residents could tell me whether i am nuts or not)
Has anyone actually taken a hard look at Bing? I get that it has interesting bells and whistles, but I think the search results are incredibly naive.
For example, when I search for my company I get 7 pages of results that are pages I host. Then finally at the end of page seven there are links to our TechCrunch and TradeVibes pages. I think having some diversity of results is important.
I'm using it as my default search engine and has done so since the official launch. It was pretty much just a "lets try this thing out" kinda experiment. So far I have seen no reason to switch back to google.
Short summary: My opinion on bing
* For regular searches, it does the job
* For image searches it is infinite better than google
* For video searches there is no way I'm going back to google
unlees they catch up
So just like you need a compelling reason to switch away from google, I need a compelling reason to switch back.
Your comment made me try out Bing for image and video searches. Recently I've been searching for videos quite often on Google, and most of the time, I've been disappointed. Bing is nice. I particularly like being able to easily select the source.
A quick Bing success story: I was showing Bing to a cousin from abroad who was debating going to Vancouver. The Bing background image was The Sunken Garden at Butchart Gardens in Victoria. Great coincidence.
There is no comparison, and here's proof. Google hits my website basically every couple of seconds. At this rate, Google will crawl my site in total a few times a year, since we have millions of pages.
Bing, Yahoo, and all the rest only visit a few times a day. At this rate, they will spider my site completely....ummmm... never.
It's not the quantity, it's the quality that matters. Google has stated this publicly and while it's impressive they're indexing your site every few seconds, that might not be a good thing, or the 'right' thing for a search engine to be doing.
I could care less which search engine has the farthest reach (with few exceptions). What I (and most users I would suspect) really want is the best set of results that fulfill my query.
Except it's really hard to know the quality of the page until you actually crawl it. PageRank graphs only take you a small percentage of the way to judging quality.
If I had to guess, this is largely a scaling issue which Google has dealt with admirably. I doubt bing has anywhere near the capacity (yet) to do the level of indexing as well as google.
If it catches on I'd expect the visits to increase.
Maybe bing is better, but the keyword there is "maybe".
Even if it is, this is the same battle between blu ray and dvd. Similarly to DVD, google is good enough that the jump to blu ray/bing isn't really worth it to people (if the benefit is even visible to them).
Sorry, microsoft, but I think google is going to win this round.
Search has become a commodity in the eyes of most people who aren't power users. That is to say, as long as it works, one search engine is pretty much the same as the other.
If somebody is going to erode Google's hold on the market significantly, they are going to have to introduce entirely new features, or come up with a search that is orders-of-power better than Google. That is to say, the superiority has to be readily apparent to a human user and not just a slight improvement that can to be proven only by empirical testing.
When google took on altavista pretty much any single keyword search on altavista was 50% or more spam.
That single item is what gave google traction. They didn't spend any money on advertising their service, it just worked, and so much better than the competition that if you had tried it once you were sold.
I don't remember any 'altavista side by side with google' comparisions at the time that gave you the impression that it was too close to call.