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Does Bing Have Google Running Scared?
suraj.sun alerts us to an anonymous-source story up at the NY Post, not what we would normally consider a leading source of tech news, claiming that Microsoft's introduction of Bing has alarmed Google. "...co-founder Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft's rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service, The Post has learned. Brin, according to sources..., is himself leading the team of search-engine specialists in an effort to determine how Bing's crucial search algorithm differs from that used by [Google]. 'New search engines have come and gone in the past 10 years, but Bing seems to be of particular interest to Sergey,' said one insider, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The move by Brin is unusual, as it is rare these days for the Google founders to have such hands-on involvement in day-to-day operations at the company, the source added." CNet's coverage of the rumor begins with the NY Post and adds in Search Engine Land's speculation on what the world of search would look like if Yahoo exited the field.
Nothing to see here, move along...
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
And Seinfeld falls into this statement where exactly?
Google is Kleenex. You don't even really care that your wife bought Puffs. You'll still call them Kleenex and 9 out of 10 times you're going to pick them first by name. This simply isn't going to go the way of a meme. People aren't just going to jump ship in droves because it's different and not nearly as convenient. Start worrying when the numbers start talking. Getting excited about ANYTHING Microsoft does online is beyond premature. Hell, it might be IM-mature technologically speaking.
This is how market competition is supposed to work.
Evil or not, a Google without competition inevitably stagnates.
The word "best" does not mean "good", in this context it means "everything else [Microsoft does] is even worse"
so you believe that google's algorithm is the absolute best and no one could ever develop a better one?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Any self-respecting organization will take a close look at a competitor product, specially when such competitor happens to be one of the world's largest player in the industry.
Bing will certainly snatch a fraction of the market share owned by Google; modern top management theories demand that Google determines whether the market share lost to the rival will be a single user or a more considerable fraction.
It is not about Sergei pissing his pants, but about him and his company designing a solid strategy to respond to their competitor's move.
Aeroespacio.org
Maybe because SEOs aren't targeting Bing yet. It's the same reason most viruses are for Windows.
So how are you doing with your Zune? Happy with your Vista installation? Do you miss MS Office's Clippy? Are you old enough to remember Microsoft Bob?
What M$ has going for it is consumer inertia, monopoly business practices, and a big installed base. Your belief in their genius at understanding consumer wants is faith-based. The list of M$ marketing and tech failures above is a long way from complete.
That said, I use Bing occasionally when I don't find what I want in the first couple of pages of google hits. It isn't better, but sometimes, different is what's needed. As for their translation setup... the dual window thing might be useful for a professional language translator who's trying to clean up the translator's output, but if one doesn't speak the language, google's straightforward translation interface that simply throws the translation on a page works better.
While google should watch them as they do any other competitor, they have no reason for concern. At least not this year.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Microsoft does marketing better than everything else they do?
Yes. They're a marketing company that has some tech leanings - it's been this way for as long as I've been into computers (the early 80's)
I don't buy it. Embrace Extend Extinguish comes to mind for starters.
You mean the marketing thing they need to do because they're incapable of engineering something good themselves?
I'd say their ability to control the markets they are in is also more effective than their marketing.
Umm, marketing is how they control their markets.
I'm sure there's more if i cared to keep going
Maybe you should, because the examples you gave only undermined your point.
Yup, that explains their pitiful market share and the general dearth of resources, so easy to observe in what goes on over there. They are as good as gone...
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
Rupert Murdoch's NY rag (the WSJ being the other)? Then it's scurrilous and almost certainly not true. Google isn't worried about Bing. The whole thing smells of astroturf and paid shills operating under cover of darkness.
Parent got rated "+5, insightful"...really? More like "-1, full of shit".
See for yourself. http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=hardwood+suppliers&btnG=Google+Search
I'm no carpenter, but I looked at all of the first 20 links and only one of them was a link farm. The rest were either actual vendors of hardwood floor supplies or legitimate lists of suppliers (like the ones magazines often have). In nearly every case there was an actual physical location or an online store where I could purchase wood.
If you're going to troll for Microsoft, go do it somewhere where people are too dumb to verify your claims.
You're probably correct, but by the same token, Google has taken over the search market by competing with incompetence.
I'm not personally convinced that the Google engine is really that good, in fact by design it's all but worthless for certain types of query. Originally it was designed to be fast and to not need to be able to comprehend the content of the page. Over the years they've had to change that because of the gamesmanship that inevitably occurs when you're at the top. And for the queries that I like to make, it doesn't do any better job of finding things than the older MS search did.
It's a sad state of affairs, but right now we should all be cheering on MS in their endeavor this one time, they are the only company right now that's even trying to bring Google into a more reasonable share of search queries.
You're making a mistake a lot of people make, and that is grouping 'everything that is not tech' into the marketing category. The GP is right, Microsoft is horrible at marketing, have you seen their commercials? Where do you want to go today? Or the infamous Seinfeld shoe commercial? How about the words they choose, like Zune, or WinCE? Compare those to the little logos picked by Intel, the most successful of which may be 'Intel Inside.' Managers had no idea what Intel even was, but they knew they wanted it inside. Intel is always doing some little thing like that, whether Intel inside, or MMC, or the Intel Bunny suits. Compare Intel's website with Microsoft's, which one seems to suck you in more? Which one seems directed at helping you buy? That is marketing. I mean, have you seen Developers Developers, Developers? Do you really think anyone decided to try Microsoft because of that?
No, Microsoft is not good at marketing. What they do well is business. They have the sharpest business techniques you will ever see a company run. They originally got in the door by convincing IBM to give them the deal. All the way along, they've been making deals that somehow turn out best for them. With windows, they started by playing nice with IBM as long as possible, even promoting OS/2 for a while, until the precise moment when they needed to backstab them. With Netscape, Wordperfect, they kept on pushing their average products until the other companies made a mistep, and they were ready to pounce. If Google ever DOES make a mistake, they will be ready to pounce.
THAT'S what Microsoft does. They are always waiting and ready when their competitor stumbles.
Qxe4
"Yes. They're a marketing company that has some tech leanings - it's been this way for as long as I've been into computers (the early 80's)"
Sure, who can forget the famous 1984 commercial and the 16 page insert in Newsweek magazine for Windows 1.0 .. oh wait.
Correct, because the best defense from an allegation is to find an example of someone else doing something similar to the allegation.
Cf. Republicans brining up Clinton whenever Bush is being criticized.
You're confusing marketing with advertising. There's much more to marketing than advertising and Microsoft is exceedingly good at the former despite being poor at the latter.
Or, for a more recent example, Democrats bringing up Bush whenever Obama is being criticized.
One involved 8 years of prosperity and stabilization around the globe with a blowjob wedge issue.
The second involved 8 years of chaos, global instability, pockets of illegal prosperity with a Trust me and God bless America sock puppet hopin' to get a blow job for his wedge issue and not Torture, Massive Debt, Hate from Allies around the Globe, on and on and on.
I'll take a guy gettin' his nut off and doing the job over that douche of an alternative.
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought your own examples would suffice once you recognized there was a difference between marketing and advertising. For example, Bill Gates convincing IBM to allow them to write the DOS for them is pure marketing whereby Bill Gates created his entire software empire by creating a market out of software sales that would have been developed in-house and given away by IBM if he had not done so. In the case of Netscape and Wordperfect, Microsoft made it easy for users of MS alternatives to read competitors' files while only creating content in their own standards which many here call "embrace, extend and extinguish." This is a pure marketing ploy to make your product the only one in the market which reads everything while making it difficult for your competitors to read your output. This makes using MS products the path of least resistance for those reading documents while forcing everyone else to also buy MS products to read the documents produced. This was not an engineering decision but a carefully considered marketing decision.
But these are just your examples. Microsoft has exhibited marketing excellence throughout its existence from choosing to offer discounts to computer manufacturers who do not sell systems with alternative OSes to MCSEs and Microsoft Solution providers who are provided with primarily marketing resources rather than technical resources. Apparently, much of what you think is just "business" is the particular subset of business known as marketing.
Did you forget all the google chrome ads and promotion of it in youtube? And how they pay firefox and opera to include google as the default search engine. That counts as marketing aswell.
Your example is not Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. It has nothing to do with it. The idea of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish in example is:
Java was developed by Sun as an open standard for programming applets that were OS independent.
Microsoft licensed that technology under the terms that they not modify it to make it platform specific.
Microsoft ignored those terms making their VM extensions specific to Windows. They did this so that developers would develop for their VM/implementation thus failing to support the open standards/platform. This training of Developers Developers Developers to the Microsoft way was the extend portion of that business tactic.
Sun saw this and sued Microsoft. Microsoft was ordered to remove the VM from Windows as it was a violation of the terms of the license. Essentially they embraced Java, then extended it, then attempted to extinguish it but Sun go the upper hand. Then end result was close to a multi-billion dollar judgment against Microsoft.
That's embrace, extend, extinguish. You are talking in terms of proprietary vendor lock in.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The paradox with parent is that any new engineer, no matter how qualified, will have to do things "the Microsoft Way". This because of limitations that Microsoft itself created: Patents, licensing and over-marketing all built around a dysfunctional software core immobilised by the same.
It took some real b*lls for apple to scrap their own proprietary core for Unix's - that is what making computers that work better is all about.
Microsoft, on the other hand, owes its fortune to the fact that it managed to "guinea-train" an entire generation of first-time computer users - with an OS core that wasn't even of their own making - by their deal to having it shipped "for free" in every new computer. Turn a computer on, first-time user, and what's the first thing you'll "learn" to use? What you see in front of you.
Even though Microsoft could use their massive profits for researching something better or even new, they've spent so much time on protecting a system based on patents and marketing techniques that they've basically stifled any means for real innovation. Their error is refusing to change from their present path.
Because of Microsoft's history, I can't hide that my first impression was one of doubt (about the efficiency of the Bing algorithm over Google's), but you never know. The thing about search engines is that 99% of what happens in a search isn't visible to the searcher - it is not a function-laden gui - and the chain of operation is simpler, so who knows? If the algorithm *is* better and users get better results, it will be the better product.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
This must be the most transparent desperate try at getting good PR i have seen in a long time. Its pretty obvious Microsoft wants to distribute a picture of Google "putting their best" at finding out what new wonderful things has come from the name change Microsoft did. Everyone knows its just a rebranded Live Search with hand tweaked results.
Bing is just as bad as Live Search unless you stumble upon a very limited set of handmade search results. Bottomline, its still Live Search and the algorithm still sucks. No amount of PR will change that.
The only thing i think Google is afraid of is Microsoft using its monopoly to crush any competition. Like, using an upgrade to change peoples search presets or pushing people towards bing no matter where they really want to go...
HTTP/1.1 400
Google became the best search engine by being better than the rest, which then created an audience for targeted advertising. Google is all about getting clicks on the adverts on its pages.
Now i'm not saying Bing is better at search than google, but if it is then it makes sense for users to use Bing if its bringing better search results, which is bad for google as it reduces the numbers of people clicking on its ads.
Google has a balancing act to perform, if Google is too good at finding what we want , we don't click Ads. Which is probably why google has remained the best search engine available for a long time.
Microsoft is in an interesting position they are not nearly as interested in targeted Ads in the shrort term as they primarily want users to switch from google. This should mean they will be trying to produce better search results than google which is what we want.
Google must respond by producing better search results and there are two obvious area's in which they could improve, location and quality. Google allows advertisers to target ads to users in a particular city but don't allow users to filter results based on location very easily. Google also lets some really bad results float to the top of its search results, parked domains, malware serving domains, wiki pages and price comparison sites which often don't even have the product your interested in to compare.
If i was going to improve search quality at google, i would leverage some of the tools currently used for advertisers, let users choose to search in a particular locale of their choice. secondly clean up the search results maybe semi automated by using bounce back, where users land on a page and then hit the back button almost immediately that should reduce a pages page rank and drop it down the results list.
I'd also give users the option to blacklist sites as preferences. We all have sites we don't find useful or companies we dislike. The tricky thing is our searches are not always the same, when you want to buy something , you dont want the same results returned as when your looking for information about something.
Just as firefox has prompted IE to become a better browser, Bing may well be doing a similar thing to Google. One things for sure better search will reduce ad clicks which will reduce revenue at google or increase advertising cost, or both.
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