This year Scroogled is back, pushing people to switch from Gmail to the newly redesigned Outlook.com, the successor to Hotmail because of Google’s privacy policies and e-mail data mining. Full-page ads, Eric Schmidt sound bites and infographics floated around pushing people to switch.
And let’s not forget the side-showy Bing challenges levied at how Bing is just better at search than Google. The results? Bing is up quite a bit in search market share, up to about 16% in February. After a half a percent dip in January, Google is back to its peak at 67%.
Mind the Gap
The question is how could Bing ever regain that massive lead and what could cause users to make the switch if aggressive marketing campaigns aren’t just cutting it? The obvious answer is to do search fundamentally better. After all, that is how Google first rose to power.The question is how do you outdo at search the company that built an empire on its excellence in search? It is almost impossible, especially with Google’s ad dominance, which makes it the go-to engine for every SEO and PPC management company and thus the preferred choice of advertisers.
You can’t beat Google if it has both users and advertisers behind it and the advertisers go where the users go. As long as Google has a loyal user base there is no way in for Bing.
Graphing it Out
Or is there? There is another way to approach this problem, by eschewing traditional search entirely and focusing on drawing your search public from another source altogether. Recently Facebook, another big Google competitor launched its in-app search evolution, Graph search.Graph search isn’t a traditional search engine as it deals with data from within the Facebook ecosystem rather than outside data. Due to the way the data is used you can get extremely relevant results about places visited by your friends or products that they enjoy but if you can’t find what you’re looking for, Graph Search defaults to Bing instead of Google.
This is perhaps Bing’s biggest bet to get out there as a true contender for Google. If Microsoft’s search engine can pick up enough speed to give Google a run for its money it can gather the most of that from Graph. Especially once the social networking tool is in its final stages and can be used to turn a profit as well as facilitate users.
Bing has a chance to gain ground on Google. A slim chance, wholly depending on Microsoft’s search excellence and a helping hand from Facebook. Until both of these will be reality Google still reigns supreme.
Faizan Ahmad About the Author:
This article is posted by Faizan who is the Author and Founder of TechSenser. He is a Professional Blogger from India and a passionate writer about Technology, Gadgets, How-to-Guides, etc. You can connect him on Google+.