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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
How the article paints it (and what sells newspapers):
... but sir, what about the 20% of the time they get to work on their own projects ...
... *ahem* users that left us for Bing. You know some video widget or bell or whistle or some such crap. Those users'll be back anyway.
Google Drone: *bursts through the office doors* Fuhrer Brin, Fuhrer Brin! I've news that Microsoft's Bing service is gaining on us!
Sergey Brin: JesusChristJesusChristJesusChrist what're we gonna do?! Oh god oh god, we are so fucked! *kicks over his desk and gets up to pace wildly about the room* Why is there no coke on this goddamn coffee table when I need it?!
Google Drone: *empties a baggy of cocaine onto the polished marble table and starts cutting lines* We need action now, sir.
Sergey Brin: *inhales a long line and rubs his hands all over his face* Ok, ok, I got it. Get every able bodied person on 24/7 shifts for the next month working to make our service better.
Google Drone: Bu
Sergey Brin: SCREW that, we have an emergency. Get me everyone in the auditorium now, we ain't leavin' until the Google main search page is shitting rainbows and making the users feel like unicorns!
What's really happening:
Google Drone: *walks calmly into Brin's hermetically sealed chamber* Here's the reports for competitors, sir. It looks like Bing may have established itself as a competitor with Yahoo! but it's too early to tell.
Sergey Brin: *steeples his fingers and lets out a long calm calculated sigh* Great, another trivial nuisance to keep an eye on -- well I didn't get this far by ignoring things. Ok.
Google Drone: I'll put them on the big board, sir.
Sergey Brin: Good but be sure not to put them on the buyout dart board, they're not an option.
Google Drone: Yessir, anything else, sir?
Sergey Brin: Yes, round up the boys in the rec room that seem to have so much free time lately and see if they can brainstorm up an optional beta prototype we could throw on our page to win back the morons
My work here is dung.
Your competitor releases a product, you analyse it. That simple.
When I worked at VMware we analysed every VirtualPC release both before and after Microsoft acquired it. There was a checklist of VMware "innovations" which we had metrics to measure how well VirtualPC didn't stack up against.
If you don't do this, you don't know why your product is better than your competitor's, and so you don't know how to compete with them. Unless, of course, you're like Microsoft and think "compete" means "lie".
How we know is more important than what we know.
I've only used Bing twice. Once when i heard about it on slashdot and then again after I saw a commercial... thought i'd give it another try. Other then a decent marketing campaign, Bing just doesn't have any new and exciting features that I like and that Google doesn't already have. Google does what I need so I'll continue using it.
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.
Whether or not the story is true, competition - even from the likes of Microsoft - competition in the search market is a good thing to have. Google has been been without serious competition in the web search market for almost a decade, and there are definitely ways they can improve the quality of their results.
Two things that most people will want avoided are 1) feature-bloat rather than basic s/n improvement as the method of competition, and 2) unfair use by microsoft of its (diminished) OS monopoly. Both these things were seen in the browser wars, and it took 5 years (more or less) for browser software to recover from that fiasco.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
The word "best" does not mean "good", in this context it means "everything else [Microsoft does] is even worse"
Google's algorithm rocks for English results, but blows for Japanese. Use google to search for anything in Japanese and the first page is littered with blog posts instead of real information. There's a reason that Yahoo is still the king in Japan (over 80% usage)
I know this might shock the US crowd, but the rest of the world exists too, and nobody told Microsoft while they were developing Bing's neat features. So what happens is, that all those interesting little local search and filter things are useless to everyone else and winds just winds up being Live Search with new branding.
I like the concept of the filters but they only work for a very small selection of US centric pre-selected results. In fact if it isn't on MSN.com it doesn't seem to exist as far as Bing is concerned.
So bing is meh, it was an interesting demo but just wasn't developed enough to be a real product. Google's unfiltered results are still much better than Live Search.
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
When I first heard about Bing I laughed at the thought of people actually dropping tried and trusted Google for some kind of Microsoft re-branded Windows Live Search, then I started paying closer attention to what I was actually getting when I searched on Google.
Over the last several years I thought it was my imagination or increasing impatience that has caused my increased dissatisfaction with Google's search results but when I think about it more closely pagerank has been around for a long time and it hasn't altogether changed much. With pagerank basically being synonymous with Internet presence there has been a ton of research into gaming the algorithm and finding ways to artificially boost your website's relevance and this has basically resulted in the increasing decline of Google's search results over the last several years.
Just as an actual example I was looking into buying a guitar amp online I had heard about and I wanted to find a website I had been to before on another computer that had a database clips demoing various amps and other guitar gear but I couldn't remember the name. After getting frustrated with several Google searches yielding nothing but trash for the obvious search queries, I turned to Bing because I thought it might be worth a laugh. First result was the website I wanted from the beginning, and that pains me a lot as someone who hates most of Microsoft's products as much as anyone else around here.
I agree.
"Taking notice" might be an apt phrase to describe Google's reaction -- but even "concern" would be seriously overstating it -- never mind something like "panic" or "running scared".
Having said that, it's nice to see some competition in search, just as it's nice to see Macs and Linux keeping Windows honest.
I have been using Bing for the last few weeks and comparing with Google by running the same queries on both.
At it's launch, there was considerable difference in the results of the two (Google giving far more relevant results). But Bing has been rapidly improving and now I get pretty much identical results from both.
Bing is a huge improvement over Yahoo at least for general queries.
It's a pity that Safari (at least on Mac) doesn't allow any other search engine except Google. That is just plain mean.
Microsoft does marketing better than everything else they do? I don't buy it. Embrace Extend Extinguish comes to mind for starters. I'd say their ability to control the markets they are in is also more effective than their marketing. I'm sure there's more if i cared to keep going. There's a reason we've seen so many anti-trust lawsuits against them, and it isn't because they are great at marketing. I'd even venture that if what they were "best" at was marketing, they wouldn't be the target of so much hatred and scandalous news we hear of every other day at slashdot.
Maybe because SEOs aren't targeting Bing yet. It's the same reason most viruses are for Windows.
Go to bing.com and click on video search. Then type in "naked women" and hit enter. Hover your mouse over each thumbnail. Now you should understand why google is scared shitless of bing, they are already destroying them where it counts, as a porn search engine.
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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.
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.
Alexa just shows the domain. I will bet you a vast majority of the hits are my.yahoo.com portal traffic, not search.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
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.
Google's algorithm works for certain types of queries quite well. But what you're noticing with Japanese does happen all the time with English for certain types of queries.
The deal they made when they created the algorithms was that the computer wouldn't really understand what it was reading so that it could be fast. Unfortunately, it seems to have severe problems comprehending that most users don't want a page where the search terms appear across the entire page. Most of the time we want them to appear relatively close together.
Searching for bug reports and troubleshooting information tends to be extremely hit or miss with Google.
Which surprisingly enough is similar to the competition with the added bonus of having to sift through a larger portion of link farms and spam on Google.
There, fixed that for you. Now you'll be able to properly find all the tentacle porn you were originally looking for.
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
Compare them yourself, without branding: http://blindsearch.fejus.com/
This site basically outputs search results in three columns, with all formatting uniform, all branding removed and columns permuted on every search. You vote for the best results. I found myself unknowingly "voting" for Bing a surprising number of times.
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.
It is said that Bing is a recursive acronym for "Bing Is Not Google". I think that is something about which we can all agree: Bing is not Google.
When you try the blind search test, the results look very similar. All the mainstream search engines are doing about equally well. There was a period in 2007 when Yahoo was substantially ahead of the others, because they had about fifty special-case recognizers for things like celebrities and movies, but now everybody has that. (And nobody noticed that Yahoo was better for the six months they had a technical edge, anyway.)
Try heavily-spammed searches like "London hotels". All the big guys are still being fooled by ad-heavy redirector sites. It's possible to do better against link spammers, but the big guys aren't trying very hard to do so. Google used to be against "search engine optimization", but some time in 2007 they went over to the dark side and started sponsoring SEO conferences. It's inevitable; Google makes their money from AdWords. Search is just a traffic builder.
I agree with you. 99 times out of 100 when you enter a company's name, you get several hundred hits for web sites selling the company's product, but you won't find the link to the company you are looking for itself. Or if you are interested in trying to do some research on [pick any topic] and do a Google search using that topic as a starting point, you will get thousands of hits trying to sell you anything associated with it. But with the exception of a Wikipedia link usually a few links down, you won't find anything useful helping you to research your topic. And then there is the issue of revenue generating ads. As long as web sites don't throw pulsating, gibbering, and epileptic seizure inducing advertisements in their margins or banners, I don't have an issue with ads. They have to make money and pay for their servers etc. (I do use ad blocker plus, so I guess this makes me somewhat hypocritical about this since I never check to see how many static ads it filters out... my preference would be that it allows 100% of the static ads through... a bit of carrot to counter the whip... but who has time to verify this?). So those static ads with words like 'buy' and 'price' etc. could screw up the search as well (I guess depending on how static the ads get :) )
People wonder why Wikipedia has gotten so popular. It is because it is the only place you can go on the internet, enter a search term, and have a reasonable expectation of getting a hit on the subject you want to learn about; without having to jump through all sorts of filtering hoops to ignore things like 'buy' or 'sale' or 'download'. Sure you can filter like that, but you also may be screwing your search at the same time. What if you are writing a paper on topics from actuators to zebras. You may want to know how much of your search topic items are bought each year, how much of a country's GDP was based on it, etc. while not wanting to buy any. You may end up filtering out sites that are useful to you. I gave a couple of random examples, but this can apply to almost anything.
What I would like to see Google do (and all the other search engines too for that matter), is create an option and associated algorithm to break out web searches into two fundamental/gross search categories:
I would like to see any progress on getting more meaningful results back from a search. I don't think we will ever see this since all the search engines generate their revenue through advertising. Ultimately, this means we are stuck knowing how much everything costs, but never able to find out what they are good for. :-)
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
However, your point is weakened by your lack of attention to the details of reality. IBM sought out Microsoft's help with DOS, it wasn't the other way around. It was a big deal: for the first time in history IBM built the entire computer by subcontractors. This wasn't marketing, it was IBM looking for someone to build an OS for them. Their first choice, Digital, rejected them.
Let's look at Netscape: it wasn't the 'extra features' that made the difference (I assume this is what you mean by making files that competitors couldn't read), if that were all Netscape would have won because they were doing it too. Also, I don't remember any websites having trouble rendering in Netscape during the 90s, so Microsoft's attempts weren't very effective. In the end, it was Netscape creating a bloated, inefficient browser that killed them. IE WAS better, so there was no reason to switch to Netscape anymore. It wasn't Microsoft who killed them, it was Netscape who killed themselves. Microsoft kept trying until finally Netscape tripped and fell.
You're also making a stretch to consider vendor lock-in strategies to be marketing. Marketing is finding out what your customers need, and letting your customers know that you can provide something they want. Vendor lock-in doesn't really fall into that category.
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.
I don't know if I would consider this marketing either. It's once again a trap that wouldn't work except Microsoft has enough power in the market to bully OEMs. It only works because their 'customers' lack any sort of choice. It's more like strong-armed-negotiation-tactics, and potentially abuse of a monopoly.
Qxe4
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
...the evidence: http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/1696/bing2.jpg
throw new NoSignatureException();
Commercials are "important" to marketing, but commercials are not marketing. I'm not aware of any major corporation that does its own commercials. They generally hire an outside ad agency, that then does the commercials, and whatever research defined by the marketing director. I wouldn't judge a marketing director solely by its failed commercial campaigns. (But failure to capture/gain a market is reason to fire one, and crappy commercials would be a culprit.)
Marketing is figuring out what the status quo is, then figuring what nature of product can be introduced that makes money, then defining the strategy to maximize market share/profits. When you think of marketing, think Steve Jobs and Apple, and how they got their overpriced products sold to a rabid minority. Yes, Microsoft does not have a genius marketing department, but breaking legs hasn't been what got Microsoft on top of the software world (even though MS excels at it and are quite eager to break legs).
Windows was a strategic decision. The advantages of a GUI interface to the ungeek masses was pretty obvious after Apple came out with the Mac. Microsoft saw that IBM did not want to drive OS/2 into the consumer market, or was too inept to do so, and then decided they had to eat IBM's dinner. IBM whines about being backstabbed, because they're losers who never saw the importance of the consumer market to their market share. They had a technically superior product, talk about being bad marketers.
It was WYSIWYG and the Office application suite that killed Wordperfect, and that was marketing's kill. Wordperfect sat clueless, then fell behind on what their customer base wanted. Late on WYSIWYG, then late on bundling a robust spreadsheet, presentation, and database apps to the wordprocessor. Why buy 2nd best or the oddball, when Microsoft sold you everything you needed, AND EVERYONE else used MS products (compatibility)?
Finally, killing Netscape was a coup for BillyG, if you believe the Businessweek article. Bill groks that the Internet is the new market, Netscape already "owned" it, and Microsoft had to make a presence from NOTHING. He quickly figures out that Netscape makes all their money from the browser. So MS offers a free browser, and sucks all the financial oxygen from Netscape. Add an email client, and support for every internet gadget, and the only competitor to Microsoft is the amorphous internet giving away a free OS (until Google). THAT is marketing.
Business tactics is creating a pricing scheme that puts only your OS on every computer built by a large manufacturer, and use it to threaten any manufacturer that tries to put on linux as an alternative.
Microsoft does not wait for their competitors make a mistake. NO successful business waits for their competitor. Microsoft treats each competitor's product like a marathon. They're so rich (and somewhat talented), they'll just fall behind and pace the leader, letting him/her break the air while they draft. Eventually, Microsoft figures out when to make their move. It takes exceptional marketing to redefine the competition in a way that the end result is making more money.
Bing is Microsoft's marketing answer to Google. The race isn't who puts out the best links to queries; the race is which search engine leads to the most sales. Bing may not generate superior search results to Google, but if you're looking to buy something, Microsoft is all over the experience. And its a simpler, more automated experience, because the unwashed masses are stupid, and appreciate people who make things easier for them without pointing out they are stupid. Advertisers will eventually want to throw money at Bing, because that's where they'll make more sales.
The NY Post story is a planted POS story, because Ballmer is the dumbest CEO with a job. Sergey Brin is not a money guy, an ego guy, or a BillyG paranoia "I must always win" guy. Google management whistled Sergey in, because they're not technical enough to determine the response. Google management took a look at Bing, figured out what's MS's game, and will make their adjustments. Meanwhile, Google's working on its game changer, which will probably be some form of semantic web environment; the Holy Grail of Internet search.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
You do know that Microsoft wrote OS/2 for IBM? And basically sabotaged it when they started working on Windows 3.0. IBM basically had to rewrite OS/2 themselves because it was so crappy. And Microsoft was first out the door with Windows 95 apps by months compared to Lotus and Wordperfect. Why? They were using secret API's the others had no access to. Believe me, the Microsoft of the 90's cheated at every opportunity to get where they were. They were cool in the 80's. Cheaters in the 90's and just plain old incompetent this decade. Maybe they are turning the corner with Bing and Windows 7. Who knows?