Apparently Microsoft is making greater strides with Bing than almost anyone thought. Bing is actually up to 11.1% of the search market from the 9.1% it had a week ago, which is not making Google happy. Sergey Brin, co-found of Google, is said to have top engineers working to reverse engineer the algorithm behind Bing. Google’s panicking might be the best thing to happen to search in years.
Since Google achieved dominance, its advancing of search as a technology has been somewhat stagnant. Google has become a tad more accurate in what it finds, but not by all that much. So the fact that money is being spent to figure out how to build a better product is good news for us. After the first few weeks, it became pretty clear that Bing was not just a product of the hype machine. Searching for the genetic disease Cornelia de Lange Syndrome, for example, on Bing returns far more relevant results, such as research that Google does not display until much later in its list of results.
But this first piece of news is a bit annoying as it puts Google at a point where they are trying to figure out how Bing works. What we as consumers want to see is Google’s investing in figuring out how to make Google better. Beating Bing is part of that process, but that should merely be a byproduct of the work that goes into Google. Just figuring out how Bing works retreads old ground.
