In a very crowded market Google has taken over every day life. Everywhere you go you hear the phrase ‘just Google it’ . It may not have all the answers but it is pretty dam good.
Microsoft has played second fiddle to Google for too long in the search engine arena and, they also tried to use their bullish tactics to buy Yahoo! and failed miserably. Therefore, Microsoft has more or less abandoned its previous ‘Live search’ efforts in order to concentrate development on its new search engine, Bing. Microsoft, you can’t buy your way to the top anymore.
As far as the actual search engine goes, we have been using it since its UK launch in early June and so far it looks quite promising. Microsoft hasn’t reinvented the wheel, it’s fast and it’s easy on the eye, the related search section is clear and simple. The image search has cut out the need to cycle through pages and the video search gives you a mini previews from within the search window when you hover over it with the mouse.
Hitwise early results indicate Bing is doing well, and after just 73 hours of going live in the UK, Bing climbed to 11 per cent of UK internet visits. This 11 percent is 3 times more than Ask and Yahoo’s combined internet visits. Microsoft will find it challenging to maintain the 11 per cent..
So who’s going to win the search engine wars? ‘just Google it’ or ‘just Bing it ’
Other recent launch: ‘Wolfram Alpha ’, computational knowledge engine that draws on multiple sources to answer user queries directly.