Bing Loses More Money As Microsoft Chases Google

angry tapir writes "Microsoft posted strong results for the third quarter of its 2010 fiscal year, largely thanks to sales of Windows 7. But the company continues to suffer heavy losses in its Online Services Division [warning: obnoxious interstitial] as it tries to match Google in the online search and advertising market. ... The division's quarterly loss grew by 73 percent to $713 million, compared to a loss of $411 million during the same period last year."

Comments

I'm not surprised Bing are losing

[Chelmet]

Google is just better at this game. I find Bing a hinderance to smooth workflow.

Oft-times I'll know exactly what I'm looking for, or even the exact site I want to go to, and going via google is often faster than remembering/typing a URL. I know my search result will be top, as I know what to search for. This is far more hit and miss with Bing.

This does change over time, however. It used to be the case that if I wanted a review on a new pair of speakers or a motherboard or whatnot, I could google the product with the word review in the search, such as "b&w 683 review". Whilst for that particular search you'll find some good reviews do pop up first, for a lot of products its an ordeal trying to find decent reviews. Often it'll be a sales page where you can drop your own review, and more often that not they're blank. Its becoming more and more difficult to search for professional reviews, so for many products I go direct to specialist review sites, such as tomshardware for computer stuff.

I seem to have run a little off topic, but my point is that all of this is far more difficult to accomplish with Bing than it is with google, so I'm not surprised they're losing money - they've entered a marketplace with an inferior product (at least for the casual home user), and that's rarely a profitable move.

Re:Competing Isn't Cheap

[meinhut]

This is the easiest question around. We all know search engines save info on us when we use them. Who do you trust? Micro$oft or Google. Every time I ask this question everybody says "Google." Bing will never get past this question.

Re:Because...

[Trepidity]

Oddly, one feature Bing beats Google on is that its API has a much more generous license, allowing you to use results in non-user-facing apps like scripts; to reorder or filter results or mix them with results from other sources; etc. Google's API only allows you to republish its results, unchanged, within a user-facing app, basically nothing much more complicated than including a "Google results for this term" sidebar.