I’ve recently switched over from Google to Bing. As far as I can see, it has generally given me just as good a result as I get from Google. I know, I know… ‘But It’s Not Google’! My reason is pretty simple: Google makes too much money. I once knew a guy who would drive across town to save a penny on a gallon of gasoline. His opinion was that it was our duty to ‘keep stores honest’. There was no ‘location, location, location’ in his world. Odd, maybe. Shrewd, perhaps. But it’s an awful lot easier to switch search engines than it is to drive across town to get your gas.
How can you tell when a company is making too much money? Well, when they start to drift too far outside of their sphere of competency. Should Google be developing a substitute for MS Office? You could make that argument. Should they be developing a cell phone operating system? This seems a little bit of a stretch when their stated mission used to be to ‘Organize the World’s Information’, not ‘Operate the World’s Gadgets’. They now are ‘Search, Ads and Apps’. Ok, but is alternative energy an ‘app’? Is it good PR? Or is it a company reading too much of their own press and thinking that because they’ve developed an awesome IT technology and a great business model that generates cash then they must be smart in everything else? This is where companies typically begin to unwind. They make an extraordinary profit because we allow them to. We pay for this profit out of the products we buy from companies that have no alternative but to place ads on Google. And they are throwing our money at a wide range of products and initiatives, none of which even appear to be close to commercial viability.
More worrisome is the now seemingly Orwellian ‘Don’t Be Evil’. Maybe we don’t really want one company to ‘Organize the World’s Information’ after all.
So why the push toward Bing? It’s the first seemingly viable alternative to Google. Microsoft’s search share growth may be less about technology and more about strong marketing and lucky timing. What it does for us as marketers (and our customers as shrewd allocators of their marketing dollars) is to force Google to focus on competing for our ad dollars a bit harder. They make so much money because there has been little alternative for too long. Spreading our attention around will reduce their margins, increase their attention on their core profitable product and reign in the engineers who are seemingly free to wander around a good bit of the time looking for something that can be marketed, so far successfully developing and launching great new products.
When Google leaves the alternative energy business, one which I will be the first to argue is vital, and core to what many of our clients are trying to do, it will create investment room for people who actually know what they are doing and we will have done our job viewing ‘consuming as a political act’.
Galen Dow- President & Founder
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Michael · November 19, 2009 at 4:06 pm
I have long thought that the stats propelling the big G to charge what they do for ads is overinflated and inefficient; on any given day where the trending search is Miley Cyrus’ new hairdo, is the ’search tool’ really the best choice for clients as a viable advertising arena, and by competing in a biased arena, are our bids against each other accurate.
The one thing that has me hooked into the big G is the analytics suite – no matter if the traffic comes from Bing – I still go to Google to track it – so in that way they tie themselves into so much market share – and using the suite of tools always prompts more searching…
Toby · January 14, 2010 at 6:57 pm
Interesting basis for deciding to switch search engines, and I respect your philosophy of being conscientious about where you place your patronage. It surprises me, however, that you chose Microsoft as your antithesis to Google, however, since one of your main points was that Google seemed to be drifting outside of its traditional specialty. It seems to me that Microsoft is doing exactly the same thing; not only with it’s escalating presence in the realm of search, but also products like SilverLight, which take on particular irony considering IE’s lethargy in moving towards complying with HTML 5 standards. You are right that Google does have a knack for drawing headlines with some of its forays into the green economy; but I’m not sure these endeavors are any more serious than projecting corporate image and building socially conscious capital. Perhaps I’m completely naive as to their true intentions, but from my observations the last thing any major corporation wants is for people to stop talking about them!
Personally I have continued supporting Google, because it seems to be the backbone of a decade of innovation which has helped keep traditionally structured companies like Microsoft in check. We are at a very exciting time for traditional business models to be re-evaluated, a time when the next killer piece of software could be a $1.99 app made with a free SDK and driving profits through micro-payments!
Anyway, I’m sure we can all agree that competition between two such giants is healthy for everyone. As Microsoft, Google and Apple duke it out I think I’ll run a quick search on Cuil and see if it has found my site yet.
Norm · July 15, 2010 at 7:07 pm
I had similar thoughts to Toby. Microsoft doesn’t make too much money too? Microsoft doesn’t drift outside it’s specialty? Google doesn’t make to much money because there has been little alternative for too long. They make too much money because they have simply been better then the competition for too long. They understood search early on, and mastered it. It was Microsoft that achieved their fortune because there was no alternative, and once they dominated that market, they leveraged that domination to crush anyone who tried to compete.
There are probably other search engines I would recommend you look into if that is your criteria. All you really need, is just 1 good page of search results. You are probably like most and if you don’t find what your looking for on page 1, you change your search string instead of venturing on to page 2.
Also, Google “virginia beach tax preparation” and look at the 7th sponsored listing. It’s bing.com/local