I'm sat here this morning, listening to some late 80s hip hop music, reading page 52 of today's Times about Bing growing market share against Google in the US. Very interesting.
Microsoft has, in recent months, been working very hard on repositioning their search offering. With a major reskin and a snappy new name, the software giant has gained ground within the search arena, increasing their market share in the US from 9% to 10.7%, according to Nielsen data, a growth of 22% in absolute number of conducted searches. Pat on the back for the Bing crew, well done lads!
At the same time, Google is reported to have grown by only 2.6% in number of searches. In fact, when it comes to share of search, Google lost 0.2% of its share.
Microsoft's PR team would have us believe that this is some sort of turning point in the monopoly of search, that Bing can somehow maintain this momentum and seriously take on Google. Indeed, with the proposed deal with Yahoo, the market share of searches powered by Bing will leap to a rather respectable 25-30%. But is this really as exciting as it sounds?
In my opinion, no. We've heard this banter many times before. "The end of the 10 blue links", "new ways to discover and present information", "competition breeds innovation" - phrases such as this have been used time and time again by all of the main contenders for the search title, and still Google stands out in front. Remember Cuil? No? Not surprising. It hit the headlines as a major Google Killer, an advancement in search technology, superior to Google's own. Used it since the initial rush of PR? I doubt many have, although according to Alexa its traffic numbers are increasing. What about Wolfram Alpha? That was a brilliant idea, although not a search engine as such. After the initial PR run, it's faded somewhat, with traffic dropping off 39% over the last 3 months.
The point I'm making is that many of these peaks in usage are directly attributable to PR activity, not necessarily to a prolonged switch by a newly acquired loyal user-base. All the tools and gadgets in the world won't cover up a lack in result quality. If Bing, Ask, Cuil, etc, invested more time in ensuring that result quality was better than Google, and then looked at gadgets and gizmos, they'd stand a much better chance of grabbing permanent market share. In the UK, on the release of the new Bing, Microsoft's share of search jumped to 10%. It's now back to 6%. How do you lose that amount of market share? The results did nothing to take advantage of the boost in traffic. Those extra users decided not to come back. Why? Quality of results.
I'm all for competition in search, and I'd love to see another engine out there in addition to Google. From a professional perspective it gives me 20 positions to aim at for search rankings instead of just 10 from one engine. Websites need additional competition, as Google's results pages are currently getting very crowded as more companies are looking at search as an alternative to other forms of marketing or advertising. But if these contenders really want to make a lasting impression, their quality of results needs to be brought up to scratch. And seeing as Google is defining users' expectations for what makes "good" results, they need to think about getting result arrays close to those Google is returning. With customer inertia a particularly high factor within search, having different results to Google equals having poorer results in many minds.
We've seen time and time again that search engines will release a nifty new gadget and Google, with its army of PhDs, engineers and a strong programmer fanbase, will have the same feature or better within weeks. Placing the future of your search market share solely in gadgets and gizmos is naive. People want results. Tools promote us to try engines again, but the novelty of new tools wears off, and we come back to the quality of the results in the end. As the famous saying goes: you can't polish a turd.
Public Enemy famously sang "Don't Believe the Hype".When it comes to search news and statistics, this is a good rule to follow. Use the engines and judge the quality for yourself.
