If Google’s Not Worried About Bing, Why Is It Talking About It So Much?
by John Paczkowski
Posted on June 10, 2009 at 4:34 AM PT
Microsoft’s recently unveiled search engine, Bing, has piqued Google’s interest, but the search sovereign isn’t losing any sleep over it–or it would like us all to think that, anyway. In an interview with Fox Business Network Tuesday, Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt dismissed Bing as the latest in a string of feeble search efforts at Microsoft (MSFT). “It’s not the first entry for Microsoft,” he said. “They do this about once a year. From Bing’s perspective, they have a bunch of new ideas and there are some things that are missing. We think search is about comprehensiveness, freshness, scale and size for what we do. It’s difficult for them to copy that.”
Not so difficult, apparently. As I noted yesterday, early data from market researcher comScore (SCOR) show Bing boosting Microsoft’s share of the search market to 11.1 percent from 9.1 percent since May 26.
Anyway…
Schmidt’s remarks recall a CNN interview he did earlier this month in the aftermath of Bing’s debut. Then as now, the Google CEO went to great lengths to tar Microsoft and its search products. “Microsoft has announced a Google killer search product about once a year for the past six years,” Schmidt said at the time. “And they need to offer a better product than the one they did last year. I think it’s too early to say with Bing how well it will do. They have some advantages because of the Windows monopoly where they can encourage people–in our view unfairly–to use Bing, but let’s see what the end users choose. We always start from the premise ‘what do the end users want’ and we continue to find in our studies that what Google offers is what they want.”
Comments
I don’t get it. Why is there so much discussion related to Bing? AFAIK it’s just the same junk Microsoft has been trying to sell us for years.
Posted by Michael Wilson at June 10th, 2009 at 7:45 amMichael Wilson: $80-$100 million maybe?
Posted by Mac Beach at June 10th, 2009 at 8:14 amWeather.com uses MSFT Bing for interactive maps and looks pretty good. But the rest of the page says powered by Google.
BTW yahoo pushed an upgrade to Messenger the night of the D7 conference and tried to change the default search to yahoo. A google pop-up alert notified me.
The desktop war is still on.
Bing search looks good to me.
Posted by Jeff Stevens at June 10th, 2009 at 5:38 pmI think Yahoo has a problem.