Survey Confirms: Bing Will Bomb | Hacker News Reader

Survey Confirms: Bing Will Bomb

businessinsider.com

20 pointsfiaz17 comments

In the current state of the web, nobody is going to beat Google at search. Google has been tweaked and squeezed for every last ounce of searchy-goodness over the past decade, and it shows by how they dominate the web. (With that said though, Bing rocks Google at both Image and Video search)

Google is so entrenched into the Internet and the minds of average users that it's going to take a paradigm change on the web to bring up a new level playing field.

It's the same way with Microsoft + the Operating System, Apple + the iPod, and so forth.

For any of these companies to get disturbed from their positions, the landscape and the playing field needs to change. This is best exemplified by how Sony used to dominate the portable music market until MP3 and digital music became possible and Apple eventually took over.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you view it), these broad technological jumps don't happen every year, so companies often stay in a position of domination until the whole game is changed in front of them.

It's an object lesson that in order to create a winning new product, it has to be 100-200% better than the existing ones, not just 10-50% better.

The other thing is to judge your customer base properly. Once customer satisfaction is positive, it is a big hurdle to overcome. To supplant "Good enough", it appears that the new product has to be the 100-200% you stated.

Microsoft has had the same issue with its own upgrade (Windows XP), although that's a bit more debatable. I think it's a similar lesson though.

I've heard the same argument stated as 'must be 3x better' before, but it feels overly simplified. I think how much better you need to be depends on:

- How painful the status quo is for the market; do existing solutions have a perception of being 'good enough' or are folks screaming for something better? (People feel Google is good enough: a -ve for MS.)

- What are the switching costs? (Switching between search engines is relatively easy: a +ve for MS.)

Obviously, any pithy observation is by necessity overly simplified :) However, there's a lot more truth to it than otherwise. E.g, your first point, the painful status quo. My previous company addressed the job search market, in which most people are very unhappy with the status quo solutions; and our particular solution, I feel, was about 40-70% better than existing ones (and also a new paradigm), nonetheless, people weren't really readily jumping ship. With search engines (including a vertical one, like ours) evaluating comparative quality is actually pretty hard, which washes away a bit the easy switching cost (I don't mean expert comparisons; I mean average user looking at average queries).

What an incredibly disingenuous article. Basically the author takes a big pile of data suggesting people like Bing, that Bing is better for some things, and that Bing is drawing users away from the segment of the market that is not already using google.

Armed with that data and a few baseless assumptions, the author churns out this vat of tripe. For example, he says that Google will simply copy anything Bing does better. But will they, really? Google could have bought any of the technology companies Microsoft bought, but they chose not to. Google has the technical acumen to make a much more rich search experience, but they've chosen not to.

I think that Google and Bing are opposed more philosophically than technically. Search results are all close to the same save in a few minority interest domains (e.g., google is demonstrably better for medical research), so it all comes down to integration, experience and philosophy. I think thats how Bing has positioned itself as something different. Their marketing efforts, while some are hamfisted, also stress that Bing is a project with a new philosophy as well as a refresh of the underlying technology.

According to our survey, it seems that most of Bing’s market share gains came at the expense of AOL and Ask

Statcounter's data begs to differ. The google/bing lines are almost exact mirror images:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-daily-20090501-2...

That's the problem with surveys... they are useful for gauging interest, but terrible for predicting behavior. If you had asked people in 1999 if they were going to switch to Google from Altavista, I bet the results would not have predicted reality.

Looking at daily data is pretty worthless for this too.

In order to actually understand what is going on, you need to look at floating averages. If you look at a 7-day floating average of this data, you'll see that the overall changes in Google's traffic aren't very significant. It seems like most of the Bing traffic comes from Windows Live and the 'other' category.

While it's true that Google was trending down the past few days and Bing up the past few days, it is really far too early to make any sort of prediction about their traffic levels in the long term.

But check out the next couple of days:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-daily-20090614-2...

OMG-zorz! Google is back!

I think Bing will gain a respectable share like %10 or %12, but won't grow strong (unless they did something miraculous).

I'm accustomed to google, I don't want to change right now.

But, just a good question: don't you feel that you replace Google in few things: I use more often wolfram.com to get statics or other related things, I use Bing for tourism + image search, I use compete.com instead of google trend... If Google focus on search it would be much better than creating Chrome OS.

In fact Google will still my search engine number 1, but being crappy in image search and numerical calculation will makes me try other search engines, losing Google some shares.

Google would better focus on its search than creating an os.

This is ridiculous - under similar conclusions, everyone should be dumping IE6 and switching.

Not surprisingly, this isn't happening. Too often people expect people to make the most correct, informed decisions. That simply is not the case.

Suvery Predicts: Bing Will Bomb

I agree that it probably will bomb, but you can't confirm something that hasn't happened yet. You can only predict it.

One survey is useless for prediction. Surveys are an instant photo of a particular and defined population. You need several surveys(same population, same sampling method) to find a trend. And even if you find a trend in the data, if the situation change(google start to charge by search, bing gives out kittens and rainbows for each search, etc.) your model/trend isn't any good anymore.

Surveys are a tool, they don't confirm anything and they don't give answers. If you base your decisions only on surveys you're a moron.

A few days ago, I did a subjective comparison of four different search engines' performance on my last ten Google searches. Google, Ask.com, and Yahoo Search were about equal, and Bing was, sad to say, noticeably worse than the other three.

http://canonical.org/~kragen/search-comparison-2009.html

So now I google using Yahoo Search instead of googling with Google.

I wonder how much of Bing's traffic is being generated by Microsoft's Cashback program? I did appreciate the irony of using Bing Cashback to get 8% off my new MacBook.

Starting to hope it doesn't. Bing is sending lots more traffic than Google to one of my sites.

My off-the-cuff experience says Bing and Google are about the same for the searches I run. I see no reason to choose one over the other, yet.

But Microsoft could compete in non-search areas if desired. Specifically (a) fewer ads and (b) better privacy guarantees. Not clear the customer base cares enough about either of those issues to switch, but Microsoft has a lot less to lose so they can at least afford to try.

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