Does Bing Have Enough to Eat Google’s Market Share?
Posted by Daniel Peden on Monday, June 29th, 2009 in Bing, Blogging, Google, Industry News
Like many others, when I first saw all of the blogs and promotional videos displaying Bing’s features, I was rather excited. The search results looked clean and the shopping / travel search systems looked top notch when compared to the likes of Google product search, overall an exciting product. Now that the dust has settled after the launch, is it still an exciting product? Yes, very much so…….if you live in the US!
As a UK search user I was bitterly disappointed to see that virtually none of the features available in the US are available in the UK. The Bing promotional video really caught my eye and shows some cracking features such as the travel and shopping search. However in the UK version these features are either not navigable to or have been replaced by external service. Shopping search is done by ciao, travel section isn’t linked to and even the maps are handled by multimap.com overall disappointing. For the UK they have essentially re-skinned live search and added a related searches feature down the left.
The main question is whether Bing has enough about it to take some of Google’s UK market share. On launch we saw the predictable traffic spike and Bing became the UK’s second most popular search engine, but I would expect this to be a flash in the pan. As it stands, Bing has brought nothing new or exciting to the UK search table.
Microsoft presents…..Bing!!! (a.k.a Live search in a new dress)
With regards to launching the shopping and travel services in the UK, that could understandably be complicated; I’ve always been one for either launching things that will work well, or not launching them at all. But it’s the simpler things, such as the great addition of search history into the left hand column that have been omitted for no apparent reason.
Right now, Bing is riding the crest of an interest wave, this will soon die out and it will slip back behind Yahoo in the UK Search stakes. The most disappointing thing is that (for the US at least) Microsoft have actually created a very good product. Apart from the search, they’ve taken a lot of what Google has and improved upon it. When Microsoft come round to launching the full UK offering “later in the year, I imagine they’ll take some of Google’s market share; Bing certainly has enough about it to take Yahoo’s second position.
To the average searcher, this delay in launch will make no difference what so ever; to people in the digital industry it’s simply a minor annoyance. Once the launch comes around people will be talking about the quality of Bing UK’s results and how it’s improved (or not improved) on Google product search – not how the US got it months before.
