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By Michael Eggebrecht
Microsoft this week unveiled a redesigned search engine, called Bing, that it hopes will recast the search business. But will the much-anticipated site, slated to go live June 3, make headway against search leaders Google and Yahoo, who are touting innovations of their own?
About 30 percent of Internet searches fail to turn up the answer a user is looking for, according to a study from research firm comScore, which Microsoft cited in a May 28 statement. Among the successful searches, two-thirds require that users refine their query or enter a different one.
In Microsoft's view, those numbers clearly provide an opening for more effective technology. But the Redmond software giant, which is replacing its Live Search with Bing, currently sits in third place in the search race, with an 8 percent share of the market in April, compared to Google's 64.2 percent, according to comScore.
"Google's fundamental user experience is deeply flawed, but also deeply engrained in company operations and culture," said Hadley Reynolds, Web search analyst with IDC. Bing, added Reynolds, "is the first real rip-and-replace model among the big three."
Bing is based on an understanding of "how people really want to use the Web," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer earlier this week. The new site, he noted, is part of an effort to "deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they've found."
That emphasis is being echoed by Yahoo, whose search engine claimed 20.4 percent of the market last month. Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy, told reporters May 19 that the company is "moving toward surfacing real-world objects rather than documents." Yahoo's new approach to search, which includes increasing structured data and providing context for users' searches through a "Web of objects," is in line with Bing's focus on helping people "make smart decisions."
Everyone is moving to provide more structured data and context, said IDC's Reynolds. "The enhancement flow has been pretty swift over the past six months from all the players." But Google may be falling behind. "The state of the art in suggestive or conversational interfaces passed Google by years ago," he asserted. "Yahoo and MS are both trying to turn that technology gain to their own competitive purposes as they attempt to claw back share."
Microsoft is calling Bing, which breaks down search results into categories, a "decision engine." According to Reynolds, that positioning is based on the company's desire to focus on certain domains—travel, shopping, health and local search—and "gear the presentation UI, the back-end machine learning processing, and the commercial content and ad deals to support those domains."
Microsoft isn't the only company that's avoiding the "search engine" label. Wolfram Alpha, which launched earlier this month to decidedly mixed reviews, refers to itself as a "computational knowledge engine." In contrast to a traditional search engine, both Bing and Wolfram Alpha create original content for certain kinds of queries, rather than merely offering a list of ranked results.
While for Bing that means, for example, providing a graph that predicts when the price of a particular flight will be cheapest, Wolfram Alpha, which was created by Mathematica maker Wolfram Research, tends to have less of a consumer focus. And Wolfram Alpha, which presents all of its data—tables, graphs and raw information—within its interface, doesn't pull data directly from the Internet. The only external links are offered in a "source information" pop-up on the bottom of the screen and a "related links" area.
Alpha is "nothing like what we understand Web search engines to be, in its technology, its operations or its business model," said Reynolds, who noted that the tool is "interesting but very specialized. There is a severe limit to the amount of people's information needs that can be addressed, much less satisfied, by a 'computational engine.'"
Wolfram Research, for its part, is not positioning Alpha as a direct competitor to Google. That seems to be a reasonable stance, given the difficulties that more straight-forward search tools like Cuil have had in breaking into the market.
Despite its current chokehold on the search industry, Google has not been resting on its laurels. At a conference earlier this month—preempting the announcements from Yahoo and Microsoft—the company introduced Search Options, a feature that will allow users to narrow their search to specific categories. And Google will soon launch Google Squared, which like Wolfram Alpha will pull unstructured data into a single location.
Still, said Reynolds, Google, which generally racks up high user-satisfaction scores, may not make any major moves in the short term. "Why fix something that many people feel isn't broken?" he said.
Even if Google moves conservatively, its brand is synonymous with search, which has made it difficult for Microsoft to compete in the sector. But with a new brand, a reported $100 million ad campaign and a focus on innovation, Microsoft is hoping to finally grab a sizable piece of the search pie.
The company should be able to meet its modest share gain targets, said Reynolds, adding that Microsoft will need to justify the advertising spend relatively quickly by "going viral." And if it succeeds? Reynolds said he believes that Google has new navigation and linking functionality ready to roll out in case they lose as much as 15 percent to 20 percent of the market, or are on the receiving end of a negative PR blitz.
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