Skip to main content

Bing

Bing It is the successor to Microsoft's "Live Search" search engine and is considered a decision aid. Since entering the market in 2009, Bing has been trying to catch up with its top competitor Google, but has not been able to gain more market share. Being overshadowed by Google's dominance, Bing's algorithm hasn't been getting much attention.

Bing Logo.png

Bing logo (Source: Bing)

Live Search, the predecessor of Bing

Microsoft enjoyed long-term security when it came to the Internet. This was due to the strong dominance of Internet Explorer, which was the most important web browser for a long time. In consecuense, underestimated other competitors from search engines. This indifference, primarily with regard to Google, resulted in Microsoft being almost completely overtaken and replaced in the field of search engines. Live Search was an attempt to create a search engine of equal rank. Despite everything, he was greeted with little enthusiasm. In this way, 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 Yahoo workers were hired by Microsoft.

Features

Microsoft has changed some aspects of Bing compared to its predecessor, Live Search, with the intention of achieve better results and increase popularity among users. At first glance, Bing is distinguished by a high-resolution wallpaper that changes daily. At the same time, the search function has been improved so that you can easily find photos. Selecting an image and moving your mouse over it will bring up the Bing document preview, which shows an enlarged version of the image and displays information about it, such as size and font. In the video category you can sort the search results, for example, by size, color or design. When you search for videos, you will see a preview of them if you hover the mouse pointer over them. It can also be categorized based on resolution, length, and font.

The incorporation of Ciao! allowed Bing offer online shopping. When choosing the category of purchases, the user is automatically directed to Ciao! where a variety of Internet pages are displayed.

Microsoft provides even more functionality to its users with Google Bing Webmaster Tools.

Search engine market shares in 2012

Market shares in the US: as of August 2012

Google 65.1%
Yahoo 16.3%
Bing 14.7%
Ask.com 3.0%
AOL 1.3%

Search engine market shares in 2014

Market shares in the US: 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, thus reaching a market share of 4.71% in October 2012. Google fell below the 90% mark for the first time. in 5 years. A clear trend in favor of Microsoft's search engine cannot be predicted. Regardless, an increase in popularity in Europe was to be expected in the course of the collaboration with Facebook and the pending launch of Windows 8 tablets.

Bing has seen slight growth in the US since 2011. Market share was able to increase to nearly 20 percent (as of July 2014). With that, Bing outperformed its direct competitor Yahoo. [2]

Quality of search results

While Bing's research department would not admit to downsides in terms of the quality of its search results, fewer results per search cannot be denied. Although this does not say anything directly about the quality of the results, it does constitute a weakness. Because Microsoft was aware that its search engine was considered to be of lower quality with respect to its search results, which prevented them from reaching Google, it tried to correct this deficiency. Until October 18, 2012, interested persons had the possibility to see the relevance of Bing's results for themselves on the web portal. www.bingiton.com. After entering the random search terms, the test subjects had to select the most attractive from two search results (Bing and Google). The subjects were not familiar with the origin. 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 its own search results and Bing results. They confronted their competitor with the accusation that their search results weren't the result of a complicated algorithm, but that they basically copied Google's results. Google workers were working on automatic correction of typographical errors in keywords when they realized that Bing was delivering precisely the same results through arbitrary letter entry as Google's search engine with its AutoCorrect. This could only be a copyAccording to Google, since a common result through the introduction of keywords like "rpxrnty" cannot just be a coincidence. Bing denied this and stated that these identical results were due to anonymous user information, such as the links that were used to power the algorithm (after having obtained the agreement).

Web Links