Bing
Bing is the successor of Microsoft’s “Live Search” search engine and considers itself to be a decision aid. Since its market entry in 2009, Bing has been trying to catch up with its superior competitor Google, but has not been able to gain a larger share of the market. Being overshadowed by Google’s dominance, Bing’s algorithm has not been getting a lot of attention.
Bing Logo (Source: Bing)
Live Search, Bing’s Predecessor
Microsoft enjoyed long-term safety as far as the Internet was concerned. This was due to the strong dominance of the Internet Explorer which was the most important web browser for a long time. Consequently, they underestimated other search engine competitors. This disregard, especially with respect to Google, resulted in Microsoft getting overtaken and being almost entirely replaced in the field of search engines. Live Search was an attempt to create a search engine of equal rank. However, it was met with little enthusiasm. Therefore, a new search engine, Bing, was developed, which was to lead to an improved image and a greater market share through many new features. To ensure success, some former employees of Yahoo were hired by Microsoft.
Functions
Microsoft has changed some aspects of Bing as compared to its predecessor, Live Search, with the intent of achieving better results and increasing the popularity amongst users. At first glance, Bing distinguishes itself with a high-resolution wallpaper which changes daily. Additionally, the search function has been improved so you can easily find photos. If you select an image and move the mouse over it, you will get the Bing document preview, which shows a magnified version of the image and displays data about it, such as size and source. Under the videos category you can sort the search results, for example, by size, color, or layout. When searching for videos you will get a preview of it if you hover your mouse over it. It can also be sorted based on resolution, length, and source.
The integration of Ciao! enabled Bing to offer Internet shopping. By selecting the shopping category, the user is automatically directed to Ciao! where a variety of Internet pages are displayed.
Microsoft provides even more functions to its users with the Bing Webmaster Tools.
Market shares in the U.S.A.: as of August 2012
Google 65.1% Yahoo 16.3% Bing 14.7% Ask.com 3.0% AOL 1.3%
Market shares in the U.S.A.: as of July [1]
Google 67.4% Yahoo 19.3% Bing 10.0% Ask.com 2.0% AOL 1.3%
Market trend
In England, Bing was able to gain an increase of 0.72 percentage points compared to the previous month and thus reached a market share of 4.71% in October 2012. Google slipped under the 90% mark for the first time in 5 years. A clear trend in favor of the Microsoft search engine cannot be predicted. However, an increase in popularity was to be expected in Europe in the course of collaboration with Facebook and the pending release of Windows 8 tablets.
Bing has recorded a slight growth in the US since 2011. The market share was able to be increased to almost 20 percent (as of July 2014). With that, Bing overtook its direct competitor Yahoo. [2]
Quality of search results
Although the research department of Bing would not admit disadvantages in terms of the quality of its search results, a lower number of hits per search cannot be denied. While this does not say anything directly about the quality of the results, it does constitute at weaknesses. Since Microsoft was aware of the fact that their search engine was considered to be of lower quality in terms of its search results which prevented them from catching up with Google, it tried clean up this deficiency. Until October 18, 2012 interested people had the opportunity to see the relevance of Bing results for themselves on the website www.bingiton.com. After typing random search terms, the test subjects were to choose between two search results the more appealing one (Bing and Google). The subjects were not familiar with the origin of the hit. The test persons were confronted with the partially surprising results. Bing wanted to improve its image with this action and also illustrate that there are alternatives to Google on the market.
Conflicts between Bing and Google
In February 2011, Google detected inexplicable parallels between their own search results and the results of Bing. They confronted their competitor with the accusation that its search results were not the result of a complicated algorithm, but simply copied results from Google. Google employees were working on the automated correction of typos in the keywords when they realized that Bing delivered exactly the same results by arbitrary input of letters as the Google search engine did with its AutoCorrect. This could only be a copy, according to Google, since a common result by inputting keywords such as “rpxrnty” cannot just be a coincidence. Bing denied this and declared these identical results were due to anonymous user information, such as clicked links that were used to improve the algorithm (after having obtained agreement).