There have been many pretenders to the crown that have promised to retrieve more accurate and relevant results than Google and thus far none of these new ‘rivals’ have come close to denting the vast market share Google owns.
This is why when Microsoft rolled out their latest foray into the world of search in the form of the new Search Engine Bing, we in the SEO & SEM community failed to get too excited about the prospect that Google’s reign at the top was over. However according to (very) early figures from market analysts HitWise, Bing is faring far better than most new search engines and have already driven a good amount of traffic to the site. On the 3rd June, Bing was the 8th most popular site on the web and at the time of writing it is 75th in the list of the most popular site on Alexa.
However it is worth taking these figures with a fistful of salt as in the past few days Microsoft has started redirecting all of its traffic coming to Live to the Bing so that would discount any traffic up to the normal amount Bing receives.
Despite this, Microsoft’s latest incarnation has already taken over Yahoo’s market share according to HitWise and keeping people on the site when they get there with the average time spent on the site being 8 minutes.
Looking at Bing and its results, it has more than a striking resemblance to Googles Search Engine Results Page in the sense that they have listed the design almost exactly from them.
However you cannot judge a book by its cover or by how many people of read it and the only way to judge Bing is on the relevance of its results. I carried out a couple of simple searches for fairly well searched clothing products and was surprised to see that the results varied dramatically from Google’s and I found much harder to find to find relevant results with Bing. Also a similar search for SEO Southampton yielded results from Chinese sites on its second page. Bing also lacks some of the features that makes Google unique such as the local business and shopping listings (although variations of these may be added soon).
To summarise, it seems that every new player in the market will always struggle against the mighty lead that Google has built up over the past decade. Every one of their competitors seem to find it impossible to produce a product that brings them parity with Google and with the all the seemingly endless catalogue of new developments and features that Google are rolling out at the moment each it will take something very, very special to surpass them.