14 DAY TRIAL // Google's CEO Eric Schmidt isn't concerned about Bing and its apparent popularity rise or at least that's what he said during an interview yesterday with Fox Business Network in which he also shared some thoughts on the online search market in general.
"It's not the first entry for Microsoft. They do this about once a year," Schmidt said during the interview. "I don't think Bing's arrival has changed what we're doing. We are about search, we're about making things enormously successful, by virtue of innovation."
Bing has seen some growth over the past week but it is too early for a clear trend to emerge and most sources vary quite a bit. StatCounter showed a short lived spike with Bing overtaking Yahoo to become the number two search engine but has since gone back to previous levels. Comscore results also show Bing going over the 10 percent mark, a first since 2007. Google's CEO though sees this as just a passing trend and believes Bing doesn't bring enough to the table to make it a real threat.
"And from Bing's perspective, they've got a bunch of new ideas but some things that are missing. And we think that search is really about comprehensive freshness. Scale and size of what we do and it's difficult for them to copy that," he added.
However he does believe that there is a place in the market for Bing and that all the players bring a different experience. "Google is about getting all the information and organising it. Yahoo has a different strategy. We think ultimately Bing will evolve to a different strategy as well," he said.
When asked if he believed Bing's massive advertising campaign, which was estimated to have cost Microsoft from $80 to $100 million, would prove successful he joked that he didn't think so “given the name.” He also insisted that technology and dedication won you market share, not advertising. "We are spending all of our time on exactly what we've always done which is innovation. I don't think Bing's arrival has changed what we're doing, we are about search. We're about making search enormously successful by virtue of innovation."