The New Search Wars: Google, Bing, and Yahoo! - GOOG, MSFT, YHOO - Foolish Blogging Network:
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The New Search Wars: Google, Bing, and Yahoo!
Casey is a member of The Motley Fool Blog Network -- entries represent the personal opinion of the blogger and are not formally edited.
Back in September 2012, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) unveiled a television ad campaign showing passers-by being accosted on a sidewalk and invited to compare two anonymous search engines. All of the volunteers—at least, all of the ones they showed us—professed to being Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) users prior to the test, only to pick what turned out to be Bing as their preference. The campaign’s tagline? “Bing It On.”
If anything, Microsoft has since only become more aggressive in its attacks on Google. First was its “Scroogled” campaign, complete with its own eponymous website. In response Microsoft howled about how Google shares extensive purchaser information with anyone who buys an Android OS app from its app store, without telling those users.
Then, in early February, it released a video campaign berating Google for scanning the contents of Gmail users’ emails, although Google has never concealed the fact that it does so. Besides, if you aren’t attentive enough to notice how the ads on your Gmail page often have something to do with content of your current or recent emails, you’re probably doomed privacy-wise on the Internet already.
World of search
Meanwhile Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) has a new CEO in Marissa Mayer, who was hailed as a potential savior (though most new CEOs are), at least until her ending of the company’s telecommuting policy created a tempest and diverted attention. No one seems to be hailing Yahoo!'s fortunes against Google; if bets are being placed they’re more likely on the company’s survival.
Proof of just where Microsoft stands in the world of search—despite its integration of Bing into the newest version of Office—came in mid-February in the form of global search rankings. Google was on top of the heap, not surprisingly, with 228.9 billion search queries in November and December of 2012.
A couple of things are surprising about the second-, third-, and fourth-place search providers in the rankings. One is that the number-two search engine, China’s Baidu, made second place with only 29.1 billion searches—yes, less than 13 percent of Google’s count. Another is that both second and fourth places went to non-English-language search engines—more on that in a moment.
Despite its age and being written off by many observers, Yahoo! came in third with 17.2 billion searches. Fourth place went to a newcomer to the top rankings: Yandex, the Cyrillic-alphabet, Russian-language search engine that makes its home in Moscow. Yandex was responsible for approximately 9.5 billion queries.
As it happens, in achieving this mark Yandex pushed poor Microsoft out of the way—and “Microsoft” is appropriate rather than “Bing” because the rankings combine searches from all Microsoft sites. That means Windows Live and MSN contributed some of those queries; the specific number is 8%. So Bing on its own only generated about 8.2 billion searches.
In case it escaped your attention, the second through fourth-place search engines combined achieved less than 29% of Google’s search volume. Earlier in 2012, Bing was gaining market share (albeit modestly), but evidence suggests most of the users it gained were coming from Yahoo!, not Google. So Google appears safely enthroned for now.
Rapid Change
Of course, conditions change rapidly in the modern marketplace, and in the tech marketplace even more so. While no one at Google is likely resting on the company’s collective laurels, there are a couple of small rain clouds on the horizon.
First, as the aforementioned search rankings demonstrate, Google has had a tough time penetrating non-Western markets. Its closest competitors were providers who offer searches of languages that use something other than the Roman letters found throughout North, Central, and South America and Europe. That does not necessarily threaten Google’s standing in its home markets, of course, but it does pose a roadblock (well, at least a hurdle) for any plans of global domination.
Second, in January, Facebook premiered its own search application: Graph Search. Graph Search is a search engine that is, as one observer put it, “not for the web, but for your entire life.”
In its current incarnation, Graph Search essentially crawls Facebook data. Rather than providing a traditional search experience, it brings you contextual information—things that matter to you in your life. Rather than sampling the searches of millions of anonymous strangers, it looks at your online friends. The rationale is that your chance of finding a restaurant or musician or movie that you’ll like is greater if it’s something people with whom you have things in common also like.
Second, at the moment any search that goes beyond data on Facebook is handled by Bing. That may or may not remain the case as Graph Search develops; after all, if you’re trying to develop something new, why not outsource the conventional stuff to someone who already does it and focus your time, energy, and money on the cool stuff? But at least for the time being, Facebook might be the popular friend that boosts Bing out of third place among the also-rans against Google.
Conclusion
In the end, Google, while still a very strong buy right now, does need some evaluation if these technologies pick up and they don’t have a competing answer. It’ll be fun for us consumers though, as in the end we win either way.
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