Google and Bing: The November Horse Race Results
December 21, 2009
Through the complex route of Yahoo, I read Barry Levine’s “Google Is Galloping Way Ahead as Bing Moves Up.” I live in Kentucky, so the horse analogy is interesting. The search market is not a horse race. The search market is an interesting manifestation of information usage.
Guess what you can buy for dinner here. Which search engine logo will be mounted on the wall?
Without substantive change in human behavior, there is little likelihood that Google will lose its lead any time soon. The analogies to horses abound in the Newsfactor story. I like metaphors. I enjoyed “They Shoot Horses Don’t They”, and I like to window shop at the boucheries chevalines.
For me the key point in the write up was:
The competition, said Information Technology Intelligence Corp.’s Laura DiDio, is like “everyone being way behind Secretariat in the 1973 Belmont Stakes,” where the legendary racehorse “looked like he was racing against himself.” In the race for second place, DiDio added, the “momentum goes to Bing.” She noted that Microsoft’s entry into search has gained two percent since May, Yahoo’s has dropped from 20.5 percent, and Google appears to be stabilizing in its way-out-front position. Measured as query volume, Bing had the largest growth of the top search engines in November, with a six percent increase in volume. Yahoo’s dropped two percent, and Google’s edged up one percent. comScore’s stats include partner and cross-channel searches, but not searches for mapping, local directory, or user-generated video sites. The actual number of searches was about 9.5 billion for Google, 2.5 billion for Yahoo, 1.5 billion for Bing, 548 million for Ask, and 401 million for AOL.
The question for me is which of these nags will end up on the grill?
Stephen E. Arnold, December 19, 2009
I wish to disclose a free write up to the USDA, an entity focused on making sure I eat beef, chicken, and the other white meat, not losers of horse races.
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