More Gains For Microsoft's Bing, But Far From 'Big Dog'
So should Microsoft be toasting Google's inevitable demise? Well, no. Microsoft has a long way to go before Bing makes any kind of impact that could be seen as a threat to Google's dominance. Even Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer knows that, as evidenced by comments he made during a conference in Detroit Wednesday in which he referred to Google as "a big dog competitor."
"We have had some very good initial response. I don't want to overset expectations. We are going to have to be tenacious and keep up the pace of innovation over a long period of time," Ballmer remarked, according to Reuters and other reports of his discussion.
According to ComScore, Google claimed about 65 percent of U.S. Web searches in all of May, with Yahoo search collecting 20.1 percent and Microsoft at 8 percent. Seeing as those numbers are pre-Bing -- Microsoft's Bing went live on June 1, two days before its official June 3 release date -- it'll be interesting to see what gains Microsoft sees for search for the whole month.
"It appears that Microsoft Bing has continued to generate interest from the market for the second consecutive week," said ComScore Senior Vice President Mike Hurt in a statement.
Do ComScore's numbers hold water, and even if they do, do Bing's modest gains pose any viable threat to Google's search dominance? Another Web researcher, StatCounter, showed Google gaining in share (an increase of 0.43 percent) in the period of May 24 to June 14.
The two competitors are already having a tense week, thanks to Microsoft on Wednesday accusing Google's Apps Sync function for Microsoft Outlook of disabling a critical Outlook function. Apps Sync allows users a conduit for easy movement of information between Google's online applications and their Microsoft Outlook inbox.
"The installation of the Google Apps Sync plug-in disables Outlook's ability to search any and all of your Outlook data. It is also important to note that uninstalling the plug-in may not fix the issue," wrote Outlook Product Manager Dev Balasubramanian on a Microsoft blog Wednesday.
"We're working with Microsoft and other partners to help fix these issues and support additional Outlook features like multiple calendars. We'll keep you posted on our progress," wrote Google Apps Senior Product Manager Chris Vander Mey in a responding blog post.