Microsoft Takes on Google with New Bing Search Engine

Microsoft unveiled an early look at it’s new search engine Bing, which they hope to use in order to increase their share of the search engine market – a market decidedly dominated by Google.

But will they be able to even ruffle the feathers of  the most commonly used search engine? They seem to think so as they’re set to invest $100 million on an ad campaign.

Microsoft believes that Bing can compete primarily on the merit of a range of new features, namely the sorting of search results. Rather than return results based on popularity alone, you’ll be able to sort the results by the category they fall into, such as shopping and health, so that you’re not sold something when you’re just looking for information, for example.

Bing also has a number of integrated types of searches, such as airfare searches and price comparison searches. But will this be enough to take the market from Google? It’s still too soon to tell, but there is precedent.

It was only recently that the Firefox browser truly made it’s mark on the browser scene. In the early 2000s Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer held more than 90% of the share of internet browser usage. Mozilla’s Firefox arrived with a range of new features such as tabbed browsing and a more complex password manager and now they tote over 20% of the market share and are the second most popular browser.

If Internet Explorer had not later incorporated some of Firefox’s innovations, namely tabbed browsing, the newer browser might have taken an even larger piece of the market. Only a few years ago nobody knew what Firefox was and now the browser can be found at numerous public terminals right next to Internet Explorer.

Might the same occur with Bing? That all depends on whether or not Microsoft’s claims of innovations are accurate. If they are, Bing might be able to take a fair amount of users from Google, but Google didn’t get to the top without knowing what it’s doing. You can probably expect new features from the search titan as well.