Eideard

Do you spell Ballmer with one or two “l’s”?
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Microsoft has had talks with News Corp about a tie up, which would involve News Corp getting paid to take its news websites off Google. News Corp, which owns such papers as the Wall Street Journal and the Sun, started the discussions, which were at an early stage, the source said.

News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch has said he wants to make people pay for access to his news websites. Other publishers including The New York Times are also searching for ways to charge for news online, convinced that they must not give news through search engines such as Google and Yahoo…

Microsoft, which relaunched its search engine as Bing this year, has been looking for ways to challenge market leader Google.

Earlier this year, it signed a 10-year global web search partnership with Yahoo, a deal that U.S. and European antitrust regulators are evaluating.

This not only sounds like an anti-trust violation, seems to me it would be restraint of trade under the Robinson-Patman Act. Not that either Murdoch or Ballmer really gives a hoot about ethics.

Then, there are reasonable considerations of the reception this cabal might receive among ordinary users of the Web and search engines. Yes, I might be concerned that Google wasn’t offering me 100% of what’s extant. No, I wouldn’t touch Bing with a 10-foot pole if they were skewing search results to offer up their business partners.

Microsoft’s Bing has seen slow but steady month over month growth since it launched this past summer. However, September saw Bing’s share of the U.S. search market fall to 8.5 percent.

New numbers from StatCounter show that rather than continuing its trend of acquiring more market share at the expense of competitors Google and Yahoo!, Bing fell by 1.1 percent (bringing the decision making engine down from 9.64 percent to 8.51 percent) while Google rose two full percentage points, moving to 80.08 percent, up from the 77.83 percent it had in August. Yahoo! also declined, moving to 9.40 percent from 10.50 percent.

This is rough news in itself, however the fact that its Bing’s first decline since it launched in May.

“The trend has been downwards for Bing since mid August,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “The wheels haven’t fallen off but the underlying trend must be a little worrying for Microsoft.”

You can find more details than Microsoft wants to see over at statcounter.

Interplanetary marketing by Microoft
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Comscore’s June search engine numbers are out, and Microsoft’s Bing has moved the needle only slightly.

The totals:

* Google: 65% (unchanged)
* Yahoo: 19.6% (down from 20.1%)
* Bing: 8.4% (up from 8.0% for Live Search in May; Bing went live June 3)

Is that enough, with an initial blitz of free press and an expensive ad campaign — especially if your goal isn’t just to supplant Yahoo as a distant second-place runner to Google?

Citi analyst Mark Mahaney says in a research note we’ll need “three to four months” of data to see if we are witnessing a trend. But even if this is trend at this rate Bing won’t eclipse even Yahoo until August 2010 — another 14 months — assuming Google holds steady.

Send me a penny postcard if anything exciting happens [at Microsoft] in the meantime.

We consumers seem to becoming pawns in the power struggle between internet behemoths Google and Microsoft. To Google, we are “products” to be sold to highest bidding advertiser and to Microsoft we have been reduced largely to a software license. The battle these two corporate superpowers are undergoing leaves me feeling awed, and puny.

So when I read the plethora of opinions the experts are spinning about whether Bing is better than Google, I wonder what “Judy Consumer” thinks. I suspect the subtleties of the technology are probably lost on her.

What the “Judy Consumers” of the world do know is that the new Bing advertising campaign promises that Bing is not only a search engine but a decision engine. I can imagine the agency/client meetings assessing this positioning vs. that one. I can hear the focus group comments that came from the testing that no doubt went into the creation of this campaign. And I can certainly feel the excitement (maybe even a little tension) as the agency reported on the research results in support of the recommended campaign. Been there, done that…

So then I went to look at how Bing does deliver in its decision-making promise. I did the first search that came to mind: I searched my name. And Google did much better and was more accurate than Bing by far. In fact, I could compare results very efficiently via a site called bing-vs-google.com that David Pogue of the New York Times introduced to readers.

Try it yourself!

Maybe I am not looking hard enough and I certainly did not put it through its paces as David Pogue did. Or just maybe the differences are too subtle for “Judy Consumer” to notice. Or maybe most people don’t care enough about search to look for these extra features. And this is where Bing is at a distinct disadvantage: It takes a lot to overcome inertia.

I don’t proclaim to know how this war will end but I hope “Judy Consumer” makes up her own mind and doesn’t rely on either Microsoft or Google to make her decisions. Or the pundits either for that matter. They know too much.

I pretty much agree with Judy. I thought back to the days of AltaVista and Yahoo and starting up with Google – and why I changed gradually to the latter. It had to do with more than search.

Not a solution I ever got from Microsoft.

That’s the noise it makes? “Bing”

Microsoft’s expected unveiling of a new search engine next week will be accompanied by a massive ad campaign that won’t mention Google and Yahoo by name but will ask if you’re happy with the results you get from competing services, AdAge reports.

The search engine will be named “Bing” which raises an obvious question: will an ad campaign said to be upwards of $100 million ever get anybody to say “Just ‘Bing’ it?”

Google has about 65% of the search market share, and Yahoo about 20%. Microsoft in in the single digits. But so strategic is search, and so tied is it to ad-supported services that will only grow in importance with the increased use of cloud-computing — where your data is readily available to the people whose services you are using — and so deep are Microsoft’s pockets that even $100 million to move the needle a bit would seem to be worth the effort. Indeed, the Redmond, Washington software giant was willing to spend more than $30 billion to acquire Yahoo mainly to acquire its relatively better search prowess.

I know Microsoft has jillions of dollars. You have to wonder how long they will bumble along burning up these enormous pyres of money – as an alternative to designing and marketing truly useful products?