How Bing tries to compete with Google

“We do not make choices, just suggestions,” Friday defended Stefan Weitz, Director at Microsoft in charge of promoting Bing, at a conference organized by the company Munich, Germany. Has replaced Live Search in 2009, the search engine Bing has created the “page zero” of the early response and access links from the search form. With this new concept, Bing intends to enhance and personalize the suggestions when the user types the search, but never choose for him. “We believe that the time saved by users with Page zero is significant,” said Lawrence Ripsher, director of user experience at Microsoft.

In the United States, Bing had about 27% of research, including research on the Yahoo! portal (which uses technology from Microsoft), against 69% for Google. This slow but steady progress is only true on the other side of the Atlantic: in France, the share of visits Bing is less than 3%, while Google is over 90%. The supremacy of Google for many years can not be questioned, says Stefan Weitz, but their business model based on advertising would prevent innovation. Change the layout of the search page could significantly lower advertising revenue. Bing welcomes unlike its independence in the field: only 3% of its revenue comes from advertising. If Bing points to the supposed paralysis of Google in terms of innovation, this is obviously not trivial: Microsoft wants to put innovation at the heart of its strategy.

Distance Running against Google

The new version of Bing seeks to avoid reformulation of the user query. A “big step in the world of search,” according to the American company which nevertheless admits that the overhaul of the presentation of the results of its “zero page” prejudice to the CTR, and thus its advertising revenue per user. Microsoft is willing to make this sacrifice for greater efficiency and achieve its goal of making either a simple Bing search engine, but a “platform” built into the company’s products, such as Windows Phone, Windows 8.1 and Xbox.

The strategy is to impose Bing the user without one noticing. Naturally, the results depend on the success of new Microsoft products. However, the Windows Phone is struggling to enter the market, users are reluctant to Microsoft Windows 8 operating system, and the initial reactions of players in May with the release of Xbox One were very negative.

The Redmond company is aware of having engaged in a long-distance race against Google, but she believes hold the key to the revolution of the Internet search. Insurance-like autosuggestion at a time when the company is facing a quarterly charge of $ 900 million, and an uncertain future after the announcement of the departure of its CEO Steve Ballmer in 2014, who confessed have “missed the turn of mobile.”