Google versus Microsoft Bing these two have been battling each other for well over a decade now as. The most popular search engines in the United States and the rest of the world. Seriously you're not going to find many rivalries in business on a larger scale than this. In the us alone hundreds of billions of dollars are made each year in the market of digital advertising. Money that both of these companies have been aggressively pursuing and just consider the size of these two companies Google and Microsoft are literally two of the biggest companies in existence. Both valued on the stock market at over one trillion dollars. I am willing to bet that a lot of you are using both of them right now to read this article that was posted on Blogger owned by Google using Windows operating system owned by Microsoft. Clearly, things have been intense though I would not necessarily say they have been close by any means. Despite countless efforts by Microsoft to catch up to Google when it comes to web searches or at the very least remain competitive they have consistently fallen short. Market shared data varies based on the source in the region but currently something like 90 percent of all web searches are done using Google. Many will argue that is an issue considering they have pretty much become a monopoly. I mean it has become the word to mean searching on the internet like how you might say I'm not too sure about that let me Google it. The US Department of Justice has made multiple attempts to sue them for those reasons and in 2018 the European Union find them a record 5 billion dollars for breaking Anti-Trust laws concerning the way they block out competition from other search engines when it comes to their Android phones. They actually disputed that fine and I found it interesting that as part of the trial, Google's lawyers argued that people are using Google not because their forced or tricked into doing it but because they want to. The evidence they cited is the fact that Google is the most searched term on Bing. In this article, I'm going to talk about how Google came to control the industry and how Microsoft has repeatedly fallen short with their efforts to compete against them.
In the late 1990s, the internet was becoming the new big thing People were using it like never before so there was a growing demand for a reliable and efficient way to search through the ridiculous amount of information that was on it. Google was just one of the many companies trying to fill that demand in the market the name itself was derived from a Google which is a very large number one with a hundred zeros following it meant to represent all of the data available on the internet that was being searched, but the Google search engine started to stand out from all the others simply because it was better. It is a great example of how if you make a superior product and put it out there in the right way. It will get attention I don't want to get into the specifics of the technology but it was created by two graduate students from Stanford University and a lot of the success had to do with the algorithm that they created. It was initially called "BackRub", because those algorithms would heavily value backlinks. Basically if a lot of websites had links to your website, they saw your site as more valuable and more likely to be what people were searching for. In the year 2000 they introduced a self-service advertising program called "AdWords" that would evolve to display ads and rank sponsored results in a comparatively user-friendly and non-intrusive way. Since Google was providing a better user experience with more desirable search results. Everyone started gravitating toward it over all of the others and trust me, there were many others. The popularity of Google combined with the bursting of the.com bubble meant that many of the biggest search engines of the 1990s were barely surviving into the next decade.
#googlevsbing #googlevsbingvsyahoo
Alta Vista was briefly the most popular search engine in 1999 they were acquired for over 2 billion dollars but by 2003 they had lost so much of their value that the next sale price was for 140 million.
#googlevsbingsearchengine #googlevsbingads
Ask Jeeves maybe remember that one and they had the great Butler mascot that was all over the commercials they stood out in the 1990s by the way that you were able to use them to search with full sentences instead of just keywords. In 1999 they had a big initial public stock offering were their stock price rose to 190 dollars within the year but by 2002 that price had fallen all the way down to 86 cents.
#googlevsbingai #googlevsbingchatgpt
Lycos was another massive one that was sold for over 12 billion dollars in the year 2000 and then sold again for 95 million in 2004, then a third time in 2010 for even less.
#googlevsbing2023
Infoseek became the default search engine for people using Netscape in 1995 but they were bought by Disney and absorbed and merged into their other properties.
Excite is another one that I have to mention acquired for 6.7 billion dollars in 1999 and then that combined company filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
of course, all of these above stories have their own complexities that I'm simplifying here but what I'm trying to say is that it would have been a bad idea to invest in any search engine in the 1990s that wasn't part of Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. Microsoft was part of all of this as well considering that they were widely known is the biggest most powerful technology company. There was a lot of hype surrounding the introduction of their new search engine that was to be introduced in 1998. It was referred to as Yukon internally but ultimately launched as part of their MSN web portal called MSN Search. Already from the beginning, Microsoft was not meeting expectations here instead of investing to develop their own search engine the results were generated using technology from various other companies, at one point it was Alta Vista but it kept changing over the next seven years MSN search wasn't doing anything revolutionary but it was conveniently part of the popular MSN portal and it was offered by Microsoft, so a lot of people were using it but much like what happened with all of those others, Google was becoming the new standard in attracting away market share by the mid-2000s Google, Yahoo, and MSN were by far the big three. Though MSN was trailing quite a bit behind the other two, that right there is when Microsoft decided that for the first time ever they would build their own search engine that would hopefully gained some traction against the other two, and again there were high expectations behind it. I have to remind you that in 2004 Microsoft was still significantly larger than Google they had 10 times more revenue and 20 times as many employees. Google was like this wild card that no one had even heard of five years earlier while Microsoft was basically the biggest name in the industry depending on how you look at it you might even consider Google to be the underdog in that situation and their first ever annual report from 2004 they identify Microsoft and their new search engine as a major risk factor. There were even people boycotting it because they were afraid that Microsoft was going to take over yet another aspect of the technology industry. They had an online encyclopedia fueling the results and millions of dollars invested into designing it and advertising it at the time Bill Gates hyped It Up by saying input from millions of our customers including me was crucial to our efforts to make MSN search the best it can be. It almost sounds like some kind of a poem there when the new version of it finally came out in 2005 five again it was underwhelming nothing about it was different or significant enough to pull people away from the Google search, that they already knew and trusted simply put it was too little too late and did not help. Microsoft in this area whatsoever over the next year, they fell even further behind and it's almost like Microsoft didn't know how to handle it and just went into panic mode making a series of questionable decisions.
#IsBingsaferthenGoogle? #Whyisn'tBingaspopularasGoogle? #IsBingmorepopularthanGoogle?
In 2006 they replaced the MSN search that they had been advertising so heavily with Windows Live search as part of a rebranding of their online products. The following year they changed the name again dropping the Windows part and just making it live search, That same year they paid over six billion dollars to buy a company specializing in online advertising Services. Almost certainly a response to an acquisition Google had recently made but around five years later it was almost completely written down essentially meaning it did not bring much value to the company and that the money was mostly wasted Keep in mind that even for Microsoft six billion dollars is a sizable investment it was their big just ever acquisition at the time. In the following year is yet another effort to try and catch Google they attempted to make a significantly bigger one in 2008 they tried to buy Yahoo for 44 billion dollars in an offer that was ultimately rejected because Yahoo felt the amount was too small, imagine that Google had been pulling further and further ahead when it came to search traffic, so I think the idea was that combining forces would make them stronger and more competitive. Though by that time Yahoo and Microsoft had already built their own search engines so it's questionable how efficient the combination would have actually been and even after Yahoo rejected the offer Microsoft tried to buy just their search business in an offer that was also rejected.
#Whichsearchengineisbest? #WhichsearchengineisbetterGoogleorBing? #Googlevsbingreddit
Just a few months later Microsoft introduced a cash-back program where advertisers could offer rebates to customers who bought stuff online that they found using live search it was a program that "TechCrunch" called A Desperate and Brilliant move to trade search revenue for market share. I mean they were doing anything they could to try to gain some traction against Google and none of it was working The online unit of Microsoft had been losing money every year, while they continued to lose market share estimated to be in single digits by 2009 if they were going to have a chance in that market they clearly needed to do something big, so in June of 2009, they introduced a new search engine called Bing, not to be confused with those delicious cherries it is a name that was chosen because it's short simple memorable it works all around the world they called it the sound of phone you know like bing that's the answer that's the search result I was looking for kind of like bingo. Though it really seems like they were hoping people would use the word Bing instead of the word Google when talking about searching for something on the Internet Steve Ballmer the CEO of Microsoft at the time said he liked Bing's potential to verb up they spent an estimated 100 million dollars to advertise it. I remember that there were commercials for being airing on television seemingly all the time They were calling it a decision engine because it would format and generate results in a way that was supposed to better help you make a decision. It would group results use different color categories display your previous searches and relatable searches on the left side of the screen, It was different from Google in many ways they made a 10-year agreement with Yahoo to be the technology behind their search results and quickly brought their market share back up into double digits even surpassing Yahoo for the first time ever to become the second most popular search engine.
#HowmanypeopleuseBingvsGoogle? #googlevsbingmarketshare #Googlevsbingvsmicrosoftbing
A few years later they started this "bing it on" campaign where you can go to "bingiton.com" and take a blind test it would allow you to search for something and then give you the results from Bing and Google five separate times and you can blindly say which one you prefer Microsoft claimed that people preferred Bing for the web's top searches but I guess that was based on a sample of 1 000 people in a conducted study and not the millions of people that went to the website to do it. I don't know there's controversy around those claims but either way, it was yet another attempt to lure people away from Google. In 2013 they made this big deal with Apple where Bing search results would be displayed using Siri but then four years later Apple switched to Google.
#bingvsgoogleafterchatgpt #bingvsgoogleusers
In 2023 Microsoft launched a version of Bing that was integrated with open AI's technology artificial intelligence it received a lot of attention and did some cool stuff but as far as I can tell it hasn't done much to draw people away from Google. They're coming out with their own search generative experience using AI technology so again seemingly underwhelming for Microsoft. That's the pattern isn't it every once in a while it seems like Microsoft might have something up their sleeve to change the game but it never happens. Google just gets bigger and bigger to a point where they are now controlling more of the market than they ever have before. I recognize that it's very possible the government will step in and try to even things out at some point but in the free market when it comes to internet searches. I think Google has proven themselves to be unbeatable Microsoft has tried multiple times and just can't seem to do anything significant and this is Microsoft we're talking about here if they can't do it, I don't know who else would be able to.
Google is on top
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