Microsoft's New Search Engine Bing Is A Threat To Google?

Microsoft has released a new web search engine called Bing

. With a short and catchy name Microsoft hopes that it becomes a verb like Google. They are spending 100 million dollars in marketing and calling it a decision engine, rather than a search engine.

The latest June, 2009 data from the web analytic company Compete indicates that Bing is now 13th most visited web site in the world. Bing is now more popular than Twitter, the fastest growing social media and micro-blogging site.

Is Bing better than Google? Can it challenge Google's domination in the web search technology? The verdict is still out there. Google commands more than 70% search engine market. And Microsoft was unsuccessful in challenging Google in the search engine market in the past when they launched Live search in 2006.

However, this time Microsoft believes that it has a better technology. The technology behind Microsoft's Bing is acquired in 2008 when they purchased Powerset. Powerset is based on semantic search technology as opposed to keyword search technology used by other search engines, including Google.

The Semantic search technology is based on natural language processing capability of computers. It provides targeted answers to search queries.

For example, when you type the question "Who is the president of the USA?" in a keyword based search engine, it will break down the question into important keywords, like "president" and "USA". It will then try to find authoritative web pages that have those keywords.

A semantic search engine attempts to provide an answer to the user's query by understanding the users' intent of the query. To the query "Who is the president of the USA?", Google returns whitehouse.gov as the top search result, whereas Bing provides a direct answer, "Barack Obama is the 44th president of the United States ..."

That being said, users often use two or more keywords and fragmented sentences while performing web searches using a search engine like Google. And most of the time, there is no one absolute answer to every search query.

For example to a query like "what is the best digital camera?", there is no absolute answer. A semantic search engine falls back to keyword search technology in these scenarios. Google is also using semantic technology behind the scene to lots of users' queries.

There is another aspect of Bing that is more attractive to software and web application developers. Bing offers a superior search API (application programming interface) as compared to Google's search API.

The terms of usage of the Bing API is more flexible. You can mix and rearrange the search results and there is no daily quota on the number queries to the API you can send.

Bing is still not a challenge to Google's domination in the web search market. However, Bing will definitely give some challenges to Google and they will respond to those challenges by improving their search engine. As usual, users will definitely benefit in the long run from this intense competition to dominate the web search market.

by: Ryan Round

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