To Bing or not to Bing?

03-06-2009

by Ralph Averbuch

Microsoft's new search may be good but will that cut it with hardened Googlers?

If you were to be asked whether the word 'Google' would be used to generically refer to the act of searching online some nine years ago, you'd probably have wondered what the hell that person was on about. Yet today, to 'Google' has become just that. It's a verb. We don't talk of yahooing for something. We say we 'googled it'. So that begs the question, can Microsoft ever hope for the day that we'll say we 'binged it'... or would it be 'bunged it'? Bing is Microsoft's latest attempt to prove that it's a player in the search engine stakes and, by early tentative accounts, what it lacks in the service's name, it makes up for in actual search performance. But here's the conundrum facing what may be a technically superior search engine to Google's current offering. Nine years ago the field was still open with everything to be gained. But now there's a very large online audience with established searching habits. Even if Bing is a better search engine, will hordes of users migrate to it? It seems unlikely. It's not to say that it won't gain more traction. It starts from a poor third in both the US and Europe, thus has little to lose and a lot to potentially gain. But Google isn't about to sit on its past successes and take any chances with what it clearly considers its USP. One thing we can be sure of is that Google will respond in kind. Meanwhile it's anyone's guess whether Yahoo even has the will to join the fight.

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