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Microsoft Lost Search War By Ignoring the Long Tail

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-wonder-if-it's-prehensile dept.

Art3x writes "When developing search engine technology, Microsoft focused on returning good results for popular queries but ignored the minor ones. 'It turned out the long tail was much more important,' said Bing's Yusuf Mehdi. 'One-third of queries that show up on Bing, it's the first time we've ever seen that query.' Yet the long tail is what makes most of Google's money. Microsoft is so far behind now that they won't crush Google, but they hope to live side by side, with Bing specializing in transactions like plane tickets, said Bing Director Stefan Weitz."

4 of 267 comments (clear)

  1. Sure by HangingChad · · Score: 5, Funny

    Microsoft is so far behind now that they won't crush Google, but they hope to live side by side...

    The same way the Zune lives side by side with the iPod.

    --
    That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
  2. Re:Same old by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 5, Funny

    I don't know how they could have not figured this out ahead of time. All they needed to do was search for how to build a great search engine and they would have gotten about 280,000,000 results.

  3. Re:Well, duh... by bunratty · · Score: 4, Funny

    I sincerely apologize. I'm a PC and Bing was my idea. Sorry!

    --
    What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
  4. Re:Well, duh... by Sir_Lewk · · Score: 4, Funny

    for years it told us the top queries were "google," "internet explorer" and "yahoo"; it was obvious this was a bug

    Maybe I'm being dense but... why? Those seem like very reasonable top searches for a search engine that something like Windows uses by default.

    --
    "linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)