Google Concern About Bing? The 'Yes' On Home Page
The stories have been coming fast and furious since Bing went live on June 1: The technology press likes the features; Bing could be a boon to shopaholics and hypochondriacs thanks to its filtered search capabilities; and -- still our favorite -- Google co-founder Sergey Brin is so rattled by Bing he's taken special interest in figuring out Bing's search algorithms.
It all makes for great theater, no question, from the idea of toppling the unabashed Goliath of the search engine world, Google, to the always-exciting backdrop of the Microsoft-Google rivalry. And if you go by numbers from Web researcher ComScore, Bing's first two weeks have seen solid gains for Microsoft's search engine market share in the U.S.
The latest from ComScore saw Microsoft claiming 12.1 percent of Internet searches in the U.S. during the week of June 8-12, which is up from the 11.3 percent Bing had in its first week, June 1-5, and the 9.1 percent Microsoft had the week before that.
"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.
So is Google worried? With about two-thirds of U.S. searches to its name, according to ComScore's numbers for the month of May, it's hard to imagine Google views Bing in any higher regard as a challenger than it does, say, WolframAlpha, or Cuil, the sputtering search engine startup launched last year by former Google employees.
But as Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the news site Search Engine Land, was first to point out, a clue to Google's assessment of Bing might be right in plain site on Google's search homepage.
Below the main Google search bar is a new link, "Discovering the web," which invites users to "explore the world of Google search." No, it isn't a link to anything new from Google -- it just takes you to a search page that demonstrates how Google can find you everything from weather and dictionary words to movie times, package tracking and local businesses. Granted, these are all things that Google could do before, but in the age of Bing -- which Microsoft is touting like crazy for its ability to filter searches into similar categories -- the appearance of the "explore" link is telling.
Maybe Bing isn't a contender (yet); maybe Google isn't worried. But to invite users to "explore the world of Google search" when Google is already so popular and well-known its very name is a verb? Any notion that Google isn't at least concerned about Bing is now off the table.