Bing Gains on Yahoo & Google – The TSEG take

According to comscore.com, Bing gained market share on Yahoo and Google. They gained .3% market share on each search engine between June and July. Most columns I have read are spinning this as a positive for Bing, and we can certainly see that angle. However, we do not view Bing as the Google Killer. In fact, we thought the initial bump from all of the hype and advertising behind Bing would lead to higher gains in marketshare.This reminds me a little of cuil.com (the so-called Google Killer), followed by Wolfram Alpha (the other, other Google Killer). A lot of hype and marketing, and then they slowly die off or become an insignificant player with respect to marketshare. We do not think Bing will become insignificant, but we do not see it gaining too much market share.

Although it is nice to see competition in the marketplace, the problem for these other search engines is that Google does a phenomenal job and returns results quickly. We personally think most of the efforts to improve search are pretty futile. When is the last time someone said something to the effect of, “Google search is terrible,” or “I never find what I want?” That is the issue. We understand that everything can and will be improved, but I think that if someone is going to take on Google, they are going to have come up with a different spin on how they compete.

We think what may end up hurting Google is the fact that consumers may start to feel a little leary of the company having too much data on them, and becoming a little too big brother. If I was competing against Google, we would use the angle that we are not mining data from the individual user and that searches are private or deleted within 3 months, something to ease that worry. The battle for search in the future should be interesting and fun to watch.