Okay, okay. That title was a bit theatrical.
But Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing engine did squeeze out a market share gain from December to January, moving up to 11.3% from 10.7%. The almighty Google (GOOG) had a slight decline to 65.4%.
So is this latest Comscore (SCOR) data something to jump up and down about?
No. Here’s why.
Bing is great for searching images, videos, and most of all shopping. Image and video searches don’t convert well in terms of advertising. The important searches are for products and services, which do fall under the shopping category and which do benefit from holiday seasonality.
Bing’s shopping category strength can’t go on forever. Bing attracts shoppers because of Bing Cash Back, which rebates money back to shoppers to connect to shopping sites via Bing. And Bing gets some damn good deals. You’ll see leading web retailers like Sears (SHLD) and Dell (DELL) offering 10% or 15% or even 20% cash back on certain items, which make for a hell of a deal.
This buying of market share just can’t go on forever because it’s just plain expensive, even if retailers share some of the kickbacks to consumers. For example, I’d like to buy this one particularly $1,400 camera lens. Most likely, I’ll pull the trigger on it when the right Bing cash back deal is offered so I can save $100 or even $200 on it. That doesn’t make me a loyal customer – just a temporary opportunist.
So there’s no reason to get excited about Microsoft making some small gains over the holiday time period. If Bing gets up to 15% or 20% by 2011 – then Google will have some very legitimate worries.
Don’t get me wrong, Bing has brought some much-needed competition to the search game, but they’ve got to find organic ways to take market share away from Google if they want to reach new heights in the search game.
Related posts: