

Survey Confirms: Bing Will Bomb - fiaz
http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-survey-confirms-bing-will-bomb-2009-7

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kirse
In the current state of the web, nobody is going to beat Google at search.
Google has been tweaked and squeezed for every last ounce of searchy-goodness
over the past decade, and it shows by how they dominate the web. (With that
said though, Bing rocks Google at both Image and Video search)

Google is so entrenched into the Internet and the minds of average users that
it's going to take a paradigm change on the web to bring up a new level
playing field.

It's the same way with Microsoft + the Operating System, Apple + the iPod, and
so forth.

For any of these companies to get disturbed from their positions, the
landscape and the playing field needs to change. This is best exemplified by
how Sony used to dominate the portable music market until MP3 and digital
music became possible and Apple eventually took over.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you view it), these broad
technological jumps don't happen every year, so companies often stay in a
position of domination until the whole game is changed in front of them.

~~~
mgenzel
It's an object lesson that in order to create a winning new product, it has to
be 100-200% better than the existing ones, not just 10-50% better.

~~~
zhyder
I've heard the same argument stated as 'must be 3x better' before, but it
feels overly simplified. I think how much better you need to be depends on:

\- How painful the status quo is for the market; do existing solutions have a
perception of being 'good enough' or are folks screaming for something better?
(People feel Google is good enough: a -ve for MS.)

\- What are the switching costs? (Switching between search engines is
relatively easy: a +ve for MS.)

~~~
mgenzel
Obviously, any pithy observation is by necessity overly simplified :) However,
there's a lot more truth to it than otherwise. E.g, your first point, the
painful status quo. My previous company addressed the job search market, in
which most people are very unhappy with the status quo solutions; and our
particular solution, I feel, was about 40-70% better than existing ones (and
also a new paradigm), nonetheless, people weren't really readily jumping ship.
With search engines (including a vertical one, like ours) evaluating
comparative quality is actually pretty hard, which washes away a bit the easy
switching cost (I don't mean expert comparisons; I mean average user looking
at average queries).

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KirinDave
What an incredibly disingenuous article. Basically the author takes a big pile
of data suggesting people like Bing, that Bing is better for some things, and
that Bing is drawing users away from the segment of the market that is not
already using google.

Armed with that data and a few baseless assumptions, the author churns out
this vat of tripe. For example, he says that Google will simply copy anything
Bing does better. But will they, really? Google could have bought any of the
technology companies Microsoft bought, but they chose not to. Google has the
technical acumen to make a much more rich search experience, but they've
chosen not to.

I think that Google and Bing are opposed more philosophically than
technically. Search results are all close to the same save in a few minority
interest domains (e.g., google is demonstrably better for medical research),
so it all comes down to integration, experience and philosophy. I think thats
how Bing has positioned itself as something different. Their marketing
efforts, while some are hamfisted, also stress that Bing is a project with a
new _philosophy_ as well as a refresh of the underlying technology.

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dasil003
_According to our survey, it seems that most of Bing’s market share gains came
at the expense of AOL and Ask_

Statcounter's data begs to differ. The google/bing lines are almost exact
mirror images:

[http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-
daily-20090501-2...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-
daily-20090501-20090709)

That's the problem with surveys... they are useful for gauging interest, but
terrible for predicting behavior. If you had asked people in 1999 if they were
going to switch to Google from Altavista, I bet the results would not have
predicted reality.

~~~
andreyf
But check out the next couple of days:

[http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-
daily-20090614-2...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-
daily-20090614-20090712)

OMG-zorz! Google is back!

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csomar
I think Bing will gain a respectable share like %10 or %12, but won't grow
strong (unless they did something miraculous).

I'm accustomed to google, I don't want to change right now.

But, just a good question: don't you feel that you replace Google in few
things: I use more often wolfram.com to get statics or other related things, I
use Bing for tourism + image search, I use compete.com instead of google
trend... If Google focus on search it would be much better than creating
Chrome OS.

In fact Google will still my search engine number 1, but being crappy in image
search and numerical calculation will makes me try other search engines,
losing Google some shares.

Google would better focus on its search than creating an os.

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aptimpropriety
This is ridiculous - under similar conclusions, everyone should be dumping IE6
and switching.

Not surprisingly, this isn't happening. Too often people expect people to make
the most correct, informed decisions. That simply is not the case.

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scott_s
Suvery _Predicts_ : Bing Will Bomb

I agree that it probably will bomb, but you can't confirm something that
hasn't happened yet. You can only predict it.

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olihb
One survey is useless for prediction. Surveys are an instant photo of a
particular and defined population. You need several surveys(same population,
same sampling method) to find a trend. And even if you find a trend in the
data, if the situation change(google start to charge by search, bing gives out
kittens and rainbows for each search, etc.) your model/trend isn't any good
anymore.

Surveys are a tool, they don't confirm anything and they don't give answers.
If you base your decisions only on surveys you're a moron.

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kragen
A few days ago, I did a subjective comparison of four different search
engines' performance on my last ten Google searches. Google, Ask.com, and
Yahoo Search were about equal, and Bing was, sad to say, noticeably worse than
the other three.

<http://canonical.org/~kragen/search-comparison-2009.html>

So now I google using Yahoo Search instead of googling with Google.

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jsz0
I wonder how much of Bing's traffic is being generated by Microsoft's Cashback
program? I did appreciate the irony of using Bing Cashback to get 8% off my
new MacBook.

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redsymbol
Starting to hope it doesn't. Bing is sending lots more traffic than Google to
one of my sites.

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BearOfNH
My off-the-cuff experience says Bing and Google are about the same for the
searches I run. I see no reason to choose one over the other, yet.

But Microsoft could compete in non-search areas if desired. Specifically (a)
fewer ads and (b) better privacy guarantees. Not clear the customer base cares
enough about either of those issues to switch, but Microsoft has a lot less to
lose so they can at least afford to try.

