Microsoft’s Bing took a bite off Google, but has room to improve

Microsoft’s ‘Bing’ search engine wants to give Google a run for its money. Bing continues to gain market share against the worldwide search engine leader, Google. Bing officially launched on June 3, initially taking over what was previously the Microsoft ‘Live Search’ market share.

However, after a month, Bing has slightly increased its share from 7.81% of all U.S.based searches to 8.23%. Google, during that same time span, dropped from 78.72 % to 78.48 % of U.S. searches, a decrease of 0.24 %, according to StatCounter’s data. Looking at the two month span, April - June, Google drops to 0.59 %, while Microsoft gained to 1.02%.

Microsoft is not keeping out Bing from the crowd. They are aggressively marketing Bing on television and online. Microsoft has also beat Google to searching “tweets” from Twitter users.

Yet, Microsoft has lot of room to improve. Microsoft was caught off guard when one of the biggest news stories in years took place. The flood of traffic following the reports of the “King of Pop”, Michael Jackson, being rushed to a Los Angeles hospital on June 25^th, where he later died, was a good test for Bing’s stability. Google first thought the surge was an attack on its servers. Mean while, later that day, Microsoft admitted that they could have done a better job delivering relevant stories during the two or so frantic hours in which searches went through the roof.

“By most reports, Bing did not deliver the best experience for our customers soon after TMZ posted the news on their blog,” wrote Jacquelyn Krones, senior product planner for Bing News. “As Search Engine Journal pointed out, we had the story but it was hidden at the bottom of the main page and even deeper in our xRank result.” Bing’s xRank is supposed to track the most popular people surfacing on the Internet on a given day: Karl Malden currently ranks highest in xRank.

Although Microsoft’s Bing took a bite out of Google’s market share in short amount of time, the truth is that the change is not nearly as dramatic as it appears. It will take a lot more from Bing to become the ‘King of Search Engine’. Like Twitter, when it comes to instant news courage, Microsoft Bing’s search result architecture has failed to keep up with the public demands. Microsoft Bing yet, has more room to improve its performance. But one thing is certain, Google needs to start worrying about Bing.