Microsoft Tunnels into the Google Search Lead
August 24, 2011
We think Bing.com is getting better. Either that or Google’s focus on Oracle, mobile phones, and assimilating the aged Motorola Mobility are distracting the company from its core competency.
It would appear that Microsoft is systematically whittling away at Google’s dominance. It’s bad enough that the veteran tech giant gains royalties from Google’s OS, Android, but now their search engine, Bing, is slowly eating up popularity points that were previously monopolized by Google. According to the article, Microsoft’s Bing Leads Google in Delivering Users to Websites: Report, on eWeek, Bing is still not as popular a search engine as Google, but creaming the big G where it counts – user clicks.
Google has dominated the search engine scene for quite some time now, and while it is popular, other search engines have definite benefits that Google does not provide. A very important number to look at when comparing search engine competencies is the percentage of searches that end with the user visiting a website. As the article reports,
According to analytics firm Experian Hitwise, some 80.04 percent of searches executed on Bing resulted in the user visiting a Website. That’s in contrast to Google, which clocked a 67.56 percent success rate. Yahoo led both companies with 81.36 percent.
On top of Bing and Yahoo beating Google in website clicks, they also are slowly rising in use while Google is slowly losing percentage points. According to ComScore, Google’s share of the search market went down in June 2011 from 65.5 percent to 65.1 percent, a small decrease, but definitely not the direction Google likes or is used to.
Microsoft appears to have a great deal of patience. Their slow-growing gain on the search engine market isn’t going to topple Google today, tomorrow or anytime soon, but in cahoots with other anti-Google operations Microsoft is working, has its impact.
Microsoft led a consortium of tech companies in winning some 6,000 Nortel mobile industry patents in July 2011 – a patent portfolio over which Google was practically salivating.
Windows Phone 7 is not flying off the shelves, but Microsoft is making money via its Android “tax”. Thanks to Redmond’s hefty patent portfolio (around 17,000), Microsoft is apparently receiving royalties from licensing agreements from manufactures of mobile phones using Android. Not too shabby, Microsoft.
How Microsoft’s sly erosion of Google will turn out, no one knows. What is known is that Google’s God-complex needs to be checked at the door if they want a chance at keeping their strong-hold in the markets they saturate.
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 24, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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2 Responses to “Microsoft Tunnels into the Google Search Lead”
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Question: How do these stats reflect the way Chrome conducts a Google search and flings the website into your browser window without the need to visit a search page?
Could the fact that Google has lower click through rate be due to their more developed search results page used by a more educated user base ?
I for one, does a lot of search for FX rate, weather and flights that never leads to a click away from Google.com