Happy Monday, everybody.
CNET picked up on the New York Post story about Microsoft's "new" search engine Bing sending Google co-founder Sergey Brin running back to the Google Labs to get back to work.
Bing's launch gained Microsoft a whopping 2 percentage points of search share week over week, according to ComScore stats, from 9.1 percent to 11.1 percent.
The last time I tried to use Bing was amidst all the buzz before it officially went live.
When I visited there this morning, I arrived at a page that had a picture of what looked like a vertical tram in Switzerland. Apparently the pictures swap out every day.
Nice touch.
I entered the query "cloud computing," and after some paid ads and the Wikipedia entry, IBM's cloud computing lead page came up.
(In related news, The New York Times's Steve Lohr today has a feature on how IBM's helping customers fight cost and complexity via cloud computing.)
In the left-hand margin of the results page, I get a list of related searches relevant to "cloud computing," and just below that, my "Search History."
So far, Bing seems pretty "me, too," so not sure what (if the Post story is true) it is that's turning Sergey's head. (But whatever it is, in my book, it's all good. Competition in any market is good -- for consumers and for market participants.)
I close out the browser session, then fire up another and start a new Bing search session, this time with "scuba diving" (I know I just got back from Grand Cayman, but a guy can dream... er, browse, can't he?)
Just as I suspected, I got a persistent cookie dropped that brought my previous searches along, without my ever having been asked to save them.
But, to Microsoft's credit, they make it very easy to "turn off" the search history (a feature I prefer not to use... Nothing good can ever come from all those stored search queries about boring technology stuff. Heaven forbid, someone might profile me and make me out to be a geek or something!).
The best part of the "scuba diving" returned queries are the "Related searches" that appeared: "scuba diving lessons," "scuba diving equipment," etc... That could be very helpful.
Perhaps this is what has Sergey back in the hunt, the propensity for Bing to actually start to try and map intent in the user query (i.e., if they're looking for this term, what must they really be looking for).
I don't know if I'll be one of the 2 percent market share increase anytime soon, as old habits are hard to break, but I'll definitely be trying to keep an open mind about Bing and other upstart search engines.
Life's too short to only Google.
— Todd "Turbo" Watson, blogger for IBM's On Demand Business Website
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