Dowawado – About Microsoft

So Comscore has released December 2011 search engine rankings.

And, for the first time, Bing has reached second place, with 15.1%, up 0.1% from November. Yahoo is falling sharply from 15.1% down to 14.5%, so minus 0.6%. And Google gains the remaining 0.5%.

What do these numbers tell us? Well it seems that once again, Bing’s “gains” are made at  Yahoo’s expense, while Google’s gains are made as well at Yahoo’s expense.

I’ve seen a lot of comments about these numbers with things like “Bing finally reaches second place”. Indeed, but with that, Bing’s global market share has just lost 0.5%.

And Bing’s gain of 0.1% can only be decently called stabilization.

So what this means is that Bing actually loses market share to Google, but this time is certainly the biggest drop since launch. Hopefully, this will have Microsoft react in some way. I have already expressed my concerns about Bing’s potential for future growth, given the current lack of innovation of Microsoft’s search engine. I will reiterate those concerns. Apart from a few details, Bing is not different from Google. So why switch to Bing then? Well, the answer is simple: there is no reason to do so.

They actually do innovate in some areas. Last example, this new driving directions algorithm, which apparently is a “game changer”. But honestly, beyond some mathematicians, who cares? Ok, the results are now computed twice as fast. So instead of being displayed in 0.3 seconds, they can be displayed in less than 0.2 seconds. Cool….

So what I hope now is that losing some market share will be a good thing for Bing. I hope I am wrong, but I can’t help wondering if Microsoft has not been somehow less inclined to improve (ie change) the search engine while it was gaining share. If it’s the case, which I hope not, then I’ll tell them this: had you improved Bing more, you would have gained more market share.

So now, I hope this drop might come as a trigger for the Bing team to start showing us where all that money is going, what all that cash is beoing burned for. I hope they lose even more share in January, so that they have to show something new!

People are curious, people are eager to see innovation. Just remember the now unfamous  cuill. They had managed to catch people’s attention, and everyone just wanted to try it when it when live. Should Bing come up with some new innovating feature, everyone will want to try it. Things can move very fast in that market.