Bing Cherries Ripen Slowly
August 18, 2009
Short honk: Dan Frommer (Silicon Valley Insider) reported that “Bing Search Share Rises Modestly in July”. He said, “Bing’s share was 8.9 percent, up from 8.4 percent in June”. Because online is seasonal, any growth in the summer months, is a positive. Mr. Frommer points out that Yahoo’s search share is heading south. He points out that Yahoo has to grow its search share because “Yahoo will only get revenue from Bing searches performed on Yahoo.” Three quick observations: [a] Yahoo continues to struggle to make its services visible. I have to do a lot of clicking to see current email messages. [b] Yahoo’s search technologies may have been also rans to Google’s but I find the different search interfaces and the unpredictable results when searching for computer gear annoying. I had to write one SSD vendor to locate the product on the vendor’s Yahoo store. The outfit was Memory Suppliers. When I located the product on Yahoo, it was priced at more than $1,000. Error or a merchant trying to skim the unknowing? [c] I ran the query “iss weather photos” for an article I had to write yesterday for the International Online Show’s Web log. I did not get “International space station” snaps of weather systems. I got hits to backyard weather stations. Google delivered what I needed. I settled on using images from USA.gov, which uses the Bing.com system. Yahoo’s image search was less useful than Bing’s and Google’s. I have made this statement before: Yahoo is a floundering AOL. Instead of Yahoo buying AOL, maybe AOL should buy Yahoo. AOL is trying to become a content generation company. I still am not sure what the Yahooligans are doing. I don’t think it is search and that is going to prove to be a misstep.
Stephen Arnold, August 18, 2009
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