14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is pretty much the only company that tried to compete with Google on the search engine market and although it's losing the fight in a pretty obvious manner, the company has no intention to give up on this battle.
Former CEO Steve Ballmer himself has said in a press conference that Microsoft is the only company in the world that is actually challenging Google's domination in the search industry and even though Bing is yet to get a significant share of the market, Redmond has every reason to go on with its efforts.
According to figures provided by comScore for the month of April 2014, Google owns no less than 67.6 percent of the US market, while Bing comes second with 18.7 percent. Both Google and Microsoft increased their shares with 0.1 percent from the month before, stats show.
“Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in April with 67.6 percent market share (up 0.1 percentage points), followed by Microsoft Sites with 18.7 percent (up 0.1 percentage points) and Yahoo Sites with 10 percent. Ask Network accounted for 2.4 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.3 percent,” comScore said in a short description of what happened in the search industry two months ago.
But despite all of this, Microsoft has no intention to kill Bing and said that although most people see it as a web service that allows them to search the Internet using their browsers, it's actually more than that.
First of all, Bing is at the core of the Bing Smart Search option available in Windows 8.1. Thanks to this implementation, users who deploy Microsoft's latest operating system can search for information online and offline straight from the Start screen, with all results displayed in a full screen and touch-optimized interface in Windows 8 Metro.
At the same time, Bing is also powering Cortana, Microsoft's very own personal assistant that's part of Windows Phone 8.1. More, Bing is also the default search engine in OS X Yosemite and iOS 8, so it quickly stepped beyond Microsoft's boundaries and reached products developed by some other companies.
Bing, however, was the service behind several anti-Google campaigns launched by Microsoft, including Bing It On and Scroogled. As far as the latter is concerned, Redmond slowed down its anti-Google efforts, but a company spokesperson told us in a statement that this particular campaign is only in pending mode. This means that the company is waiting for Google to make a wrong move and only then relaunch Scroogled.
“We are always evaluating and evolving our marketing campaigns. There are times when we use our marketing to highlight differences in how we see the world compared to competitors, and the Scroogled campaign is an example of this. Moving forward, we will continue to use all the right approaches and tactics when and where they make sense.”