Did I wake up in a parallel universe, because suddenly there is a spate of articles declaring that Bing won the search war in 2011 over Google Search? No, seriously, is this a parallel universe, or did I miss something catastrophic for Google in the search market? I don’t recall spending the past year in a coma.
For a period of two months earlier this year, optimistic estimates stated that Bing and Yahoo! increased their search share against Google to one-third of the search market. More realistic estimates, however, would give Google somewhere between 85-95% search share. And those two months that Bing and Yahoo! increased their share? Gone! Completely eroded. In the end Bing only gained market share by stealing it from their Yahoo! partners.
So what hard drugs have people been shooting into their veins that has led them to hallucinate a Bing victory over Google in search for 2011? Let’s look at their own words. Preston Gralla at the ComputerWorld blog gives three reasons he thinks Bing will gain ground on Google in 2012:
First: “Bing partnerships with Facebook and Twitter will pay off.” This is a recurrent theme among the school that gives Bing the victory, i.e. Bing nabbed Facebook and Twitter integration, and this hurts Google. Unfortunately Bing has had Facebook and Twitter integration for some time now and isn’t gaining ground. With nearly a billion active users between the two sites, any payoff should already be evident.
Unfortunately Mister Gralla seems to be under the delusion that people who use Facebook or Twitter will become de facto Bing supporters. Given that even Internet Explorer users prefer Google to Bing, despite native Bing integration and Microsoft’s sneaky move of hiding the Google search plug-in way down on the list of its search plug-ins (instead of at the top where any sane person would place it), it seems unlikely that Facebook users will default to Bing because of this partnership. The fact that Facebook was the one of the most searched Google terms of 2011 suggests that Facebook users prefer Google.
In fact, partnering with Bing was a move of desperation by two companies that knew that Google was about to compete with them in social networking, and if Microsoft isn’t cautious with their so.cl project, they risk losing this advantage as well. If Google were to buy Twitter, as they might, Twitter integration would come back to Google Search. For now it doesn’t seem to be a feature people can’t live without.
Second: “Bing integration with Xbox and Kinect will help”. Maybe, or maybe people will just use Google from their Xbox instead of Bing. Why not? They already prefer Google on Windows devices. At any rate, how many Android smartphones, how many Windows and Mac PC’s, etc… get purchased for every one Xbox? That sounds like a stop gap to slow the bleeding, not stop it entirely.
Third: “Bigger reach in mobile will grow market share”. This is the old wishful-thinking we’ve heard since Windows Phone debuted in 2010, and since then despite improvements to the devices and software, and greater presence on carriers, and superior marketing, Windows Phone actually lost ground in 2011.
The Nokia partnership was supposed to save them, but even in markets where Nokia is strong Windows Phone hasn’t found the hoped-for traction in the market, consistently underwhelming. The author also mentions new Bing apps for Android and iOS, but what does that matter? If you’re not using Bing on the web, you aren’t going to be using a Bing app, either.
Rob Enderle, an analyst at the Enderle Group, had this little nutty nugget to share: “They increasingly appeared as the nicer, more interesting, alternative to Google search.” To which any reasonable person would ask… to whom? To their own existing customers? To Yahoo! users? AOL users?
The numbers don’t lie, they aren’t attracting people away from Google, their growth has come at the expense of Yahoo! and other also-ran search engines, which only proves that no product will ever attract 100% of all potential users. Considering that Google would otherwise be a search monopoly, it’s actually good for them that Yahoo! and Bing control part of the market, but it’s a pitiful share, just enough perhaps to shield Google from excessive attention from regulators, ironically.
The same article goes on to point to a potential Yahoo! buyout. This wouldn’t win them any existing Google customers, for the privilege of picking up the remaining market share. Unfortunately Google can probably engage in a bidding war to make the acquisition even more painful for Microsoft, though they wouldn’t want to win that bidding war, lest they risk becoming a monopoly in search.
Patrick Moorhead, Principal Analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, writes, “Microsoft has won the overall rivalry this year in terms of growth and strategic moves”. Again… in which alternate universe? Again the emphasis is on Twitter and Facebook integration, despite this failing to date to attract Google users to Bing. Some analysts believe this lack of integration could hurt Google, but as yet this is an idle threat, and nothing suggests a mass migration will be coming on this basis alone.
Growth? Well of course Bing grew, Bing had nowhere to go but up or go extinct, and when you control precariously close to 100% of a market as Google Search does, simply sustaining present levels is a triumph. Bing didn’t grow, unfortunately for Microsoft, at Google’s expense, and even if Bing became the greatest search engine in the world, competing with a company whose very name is synonymous with the product isn’t easy. Can anyone name any of the rivals to Velcro, for example?
If you want to know who won search, Google or Bing, this is how it should be broken down:
1) Who stole users from whom? It doesn’t appear at this point that either side really did, but since Google’s the big game in town, failing to steal any of their users is a loss for Bing, and for Yahoo!, which bled many of its own users away to Bing.
2) Who generated more revenue from their product? Google generates tremendous revenue from Search, especially with their advertising presence dominating over 50% of web advertising. Microsoft runs Bing at a loss. Victory – Google by billions!
3) Who expanded their commitment to the product? Bing certainly added features, but the total commitment of resources to Bing by Microsoft is being dialed back, while Google continues to grow their investment in Search all the time.
4) Who released the biggest innovation in search during 2011? This has to go easily to Google for Google Voice, whose future evolution, Majel, will make Google Voice seem primitive by comparison. Google Voice is such a highly developed product that in comparisons with Siri it often outperforms Siri, although of course Google Voice does not presently support natural language like Siri (Majel, however, will). Their Doodles, while not precisely innovative in the classic sense, also helped increase customer engagement and generated more media attention that Bing and Yahoo! combined.
5) Whose name is still synonymous with the very product? Google. No one ever said let’s Bing it.
At least Sheepy at everythingpr showed some sense, poking fun at the absurdity and writing, among other things, “Microsoft could buy Facebook, Twitter, Ask, Yahoo, Baidu, and hakia (the long lost semantic) and still not have a prayer in hell for search dominance. Why? Well, besides Sheepy saying it isn’t so, the engine is just not as good – period. And too, after a certain point, just how refined does your search engine need to be?” Sheepy isn’t the only user loyal to Google Search. Google has earned its reputation.
The answer to his last question is that refinement is also about new ways of searching, and Google Voice and its coming successor Majel prove that Google simply outstrips Bing for search innovation. While the Bing fanboys seem to mention Google Voice in passing and tout Bing social networking integration as a killer feature, I think any reasonable search user would agree that highly accurate voice search is a far greater innovation. What happens when people start using Majel directly with social networks like Facebook? Bing’s big “innovation” will seem rather pale by comparison.
Yes, tech journalism is in a bad state when a failing product line from a company whose entire brand is failing can be hyped as beating a competitor that has far more users, generates more revenue, innovates more, is virtually synonymous with the product itself, and holds onto a near monopoly without losing any of its user base to the competition. Fanboyism is at an all-time high.
Once again 2012 will be The Year of Microsoft, like it was going to be in 2011, and in 2010, and once again their failures and shortcomings will be glossed over by everyone except consumers, who are just about beyond persuading to return to Microsoft in the new markets and are even turning them off in old ones. Drone on, fanboys, you’re the last people shouting in an empty room.