Google vs. Bing: Search Engine Competition

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Two of the tech world’s giants are locked in a power struggle. They are locked in a struggle to dominate one of the most lucrative business platforms in the world, the internet. These companies are Google’s google.com and Microsoft’s bing.com. This sample research paper articulates how the two search engines have been competing with one another, and why such competition is good, despite Google still being the best.

Google vs. Bing

Currently, Google and Bing are competing to be the most used search engine on the Internet. To hold this title means a great deal of income generated from a successful search engine. The more traffic a search engine generates, the more income it can produce in the forms of endorsements and advertisements. This competition is, in all reality, good for both companies as it forces the two to continually make improvements and strive to develop the best possible product for the public. This competition is one of the driving forces of our free market economy.

Background on Google

According to the company’s history, Google has been around since the 1990’s. Started as a search engine by two Stanford computer science grad students, the company has grown extremely large since its first days in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park (Google, 2012). Today, Google dominates the search engine landscape (and is also one of the world's most valuable companies). According to a market share survey carried out by Search Engine Land in March of 2012, Google controlled some 66.4 percent of the market (Sterling, 2012). Needless to say, this is a huge percentage and Google has used its success to take ventures into many different fields away from purely its search engine base. Some of these include: videos, social media, mapping, and even creating its own operating system.

The software giant - Microsoft

As one of the largest technology companies on the planet, Microsoft is no stranger to adapting to new trends in technology. Gaining the majority of its success and resources with its Windows operation system, Microsoft has made its own search engines that have evolved over the years. Its current incarnation of a search engine website is Bing. This site is a revamped version of “Live Search” which itself came from “Windows Live Search” and trails all the way back to “MSN search,” (Admin, 2011). Bing was launched in May of 2009, and it focuses on having a interactive interface with focus on search, maps, videos, and other interactive media (Admin, 2011). Considering that this search engine is so new to the search world, it is gaining quick moment. According to the same market share survey from Search Engine Land from March 2012, Bing currently controls 15.3 percent of the search engine market (Sterling, 2012). 

These two companies now find themselves in a war of sorts as to who can make the latest development in the battle for market control. Though Google owns a much higher percent of the market currently, Bing is gaining moment and is Google’s greatest competition as of now. For the two parent companies that own these search engines (Microsoft and Google), there are billions of dollars of resources at both the company’s fingertips for improvement, research, and development of their products.

Moreover, the war is not only limited to search engine usage. College students around the world are also choosing Google Docs over Microsoft Word for their file storage and word processing needs.

The help of social media 

The two companies have both attempted to make use of social media in their continuing power struggle, and their results are on a divergent path. Google has made attempts to start its own social media site. Google+ has been linked to Google and the company has adopted a multitude of features so the two sites can run and mesh together effectively. Microsoft, instead, went on to join with an outside social media site. Bing has an exclusive relationship with social media giant Facebook. The reality of this different strategy favors Bing because the popularity of Facebook is far greater than Google+. As a result of this, Bing will likely continue to grow in popularity because of its astute use of an already popular social media site with millions of users (Lardinois, 2012). 

Another area of competition that has effected the operation of the companies is the actual power of the search engines they are promoting. Google’s search algorithm revolutionized the search engine world. It has been the driving force to the company’s success. Bing, adopting a similar search algorithm has to face an opponent with, most likely the best programming in the business. To combat the search engine, Bing launched an advertisement campaign that used the classic “taste test” strategy. The idea of this campaign was for users to blindly use the two websites for a search and then choose which engine produced a better result. Unfortunately for Bing, this strategy backfired. Though they expected to see more users prefer their search engine, the power of the Google algorithm won out. According to International Business Times, Google “came out ahead in both cases, winning 3:2 in the first test and 4:1 in the second,” (Zara, 2012).

Branding and marketing differences

A final area that the two search engines compete is their marketing scheme. Google is a rarity among companies. It has not put lots of resources into its marketing. It spread mostly by word of mouth. Bing, on the other hand, faces a different situation. As a new, emerging search engine, it will not likely gain the popularity Google has by simply word of mouth. One strategy Bing can employ is to market the differences between the two companies. They can market their social media ties instead of just claiming to be a better search engine (Davidov, 2012).

Competition is one of the best parts about businesses in a free market economy. It forces companies to constantly improve their products. The battle currently raging between Google and Bing is another example of this fact. Both these companies are trying to make their websites constantly better than the others. The use of creative improvements to the companies has provided for continuous beneficial growth of both companies. By tapping into social media, user interfacing, videos, maps, and more, the companies are providing the public with two easy and convenient options for their search engine needs. I believe that the future will see a shift in the strategies from the current for both companies. Google will probably ease off the social media push it made and focus more on being a knowledge based search engine that is quick, easy, and reliable. Bing will take the route of expanding on its social media connections and try to show that it is a more user-friendly system that is great for searching within these specific realms.

References

Admin. (2011, August 22). The history of bing. Retrieved from http://www.seoyourwebsite.org/posts/the-history-of-bing/

Davidov, P. (2012, May 14). Bing vs. google: The gap is about to get smaller [Online blog]. Retrieved from http://blog.onyx-os.com/bing-vs-google/

Google. (2012). Our history in depth. Google| Company, Retrieved from http://www.google.com/about/company/history/

Lardinois, F. (2012, October 21). Beyond their 10 blue links, google's and bing's search strategies diverge. Tech Crunch, Retrieved from http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/21/beyond-their-10-blue-links-googles-and-bings-search-strategies-take-different-paths/

Sterling, G. (2012, March 08). Bing and google gain market share while yahoo drops. Search Engine Land, Retrieved from http://searchengineland.com/bing-and-google-gain-market-share-while-yahoo-drops-114140

Zara, C. (2012, September 07). Bing vs. google -- microsoft's pepsi challenge backfires. International Business Times, Retrieved from http://www.ibtimes.com/bing-vs-google-microsoft’s-pepsi-challenge-backfires-780715