Bing, Unrealized - Matt Riskam

Posted by | February 19, 2013 | SEM | No Comments

From Matthew Yglesias, Slate.com (reposted by John Gruber):

The problem with Microsoft’s online service offerings isn’t that their TV campaigns are lame. It’s not even that the products are bad. But they’re not wildly better than Google’s search and email and so forth. Most people are just incredibly lazy. It’s easy to forget, but it took Google Search and Gmail a remarkably long time to rise to dominance during a period when they wiped the floor with the competition on the merits. Now Google has that change-aversion and laziness working in its favor. To beat them, you have to crush them on quality. And Microsoft’s not doing that. No ad campaign can overcome the basic reality of human inertia.

Matthew is spot on here. Bing is a good search engine that delivers decent results for users and drives higher-than-average CTR’s for many advertisers. But in order to capture more marketshare from Google, they have to be at least 10X better in the search space to appeal to more users. They should have taken a fundamentally different view of what search is, why it’s important, and how they can deliver answers to users better. I’d love Bing to be great, so it can challenge the hegemony of Google.

I have yet to use Facebook’s Graph Search (still in beta), which has been getting mixed reviews – but at least Facebook has taken a new approach to an old paradigm.