Search Battleground Intensifies As Microsoft Stakes 100 Million

Posted Wednesday 27th May 2009 by Tobias in SEM News.

The search market is worth USD 22.12 billion of revenue to Google on an annual basis and is evidently worth fighting for. It is alleged that Microsoft are investing USD 100 million into advertising for their new search engine, interestingly named, Bing; the namesake of revered television character Chandler Bing from the hit US sitcom Friends.

A leaked internal email from Microsoft earlier in the year, requesting that personnel play with the search engine and deliver feedback stated the brand name of the search engine as Kumo, however it seems they might be opting for something more catered toward the US market. After the recent launch of WolframAlpha, Google responded with a Searchology promotion, unveiling mixed media search results that looked remarkably like the ones outlined in the leaked Microsoft Kumo email earlier in the year.

WolframAlpha is not strictly a search engine as it does not search the internet for results and has a limited information source. The internet could be seen as an almost infinite information source, so will throw up search results where WolframAlpha will not recognise the keyword as WolframAlpha is a computational knowledge engine as opposed to a search engine.

Although WolframAlpha is not applicable when looking at an overview of the corporate face of search, it does raise issues regarding why people use search. The results of WolframAlpha are purely informative and not connected to any wider enterprise, therefore creating a niche within the search market which is exclusively informative. However the ’search the web’ option on results pages does run an automated search for the keyword through Google.

By definition this is not something that Google can compete with, as their core business is making revenue from search however impartially they wish to present their service. Google’s billions and foothold as the webs No1 search engine was founded on unique algorithms delivering innovative and relative search results in a market saturated with black hat techniques. This meant that the product was all important and Google’s advertising was done via word of mouth.

The USD 100 million that is rumoured to be the marketing budget for Bing or Kumo is four times Google’s annual marketing budget however there is still some scepticism whether this will make a tangible impact on Google’s current 63.81% market share. Windows Live Search currently demands a 2.43% market share so the 100 million would need to deliver a 26 fold increase in market share in order to be seriously competing with Google.

The mammoth task ahead is not made easier by Microsoft’s lack of innovation in search to date. One thing is for sure, Microsoft does not lack resources with an annual revenue of USD 61.17 billion and over 91,000 employees. With search it is not a question of resources, but innovation and Google has cornered the market for the better part of a decade and the only thing that could really change this would be some sort of monopolies intervention.

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