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It's interesting that a new-ish search engine can even survive, since so many have died. I remember the old days when (say) Apple had a tool on Mac OS 8.5 that

It's interesting that a new-ish search engine can even survive, since so many have died. I remember the old days when (say) Apple had a tool on Mac OS 8.5 that would send a query to many different search engines. There were enough of them, and they were all iffy enough, that you couldn't really just pick one search site to see good results.

ChuckMcM 11y ago
Well the last quarter they broke it out, Google was paying $4B/year to buy traffic for search. That was up from about $400M/year when I started tracking it. (and of course up from 0 when they started). One of the consequences of 'commodityness' of search is that owning the box you type into becomes critical. Through a series of missteps they damaged the growth of Chrome, they lost default search on Firefox to Yahoo, and to a bunch of apps on iOS. Of course they didn't have anything going for them on Windows phone but Microsoft does all of its "internal" search (which is not organically a search box but things like searching the "app store" or "places to eat" within tools to Bing vs the user's browser's search provider. And because its "good enough" people don't force it back to Google. As a former "new-ish search engine" it became pretty clear it was a huge challenge to compete stack for stack. Much simpler to just insert yourself ahead of them in the chain and peel off a fraction of the advertising revenue. A lot of change headed for the Google Plex, a lot of change.
brudgers 11y ago
My gut is that Bing is mainly a byproduct of Microsoft's interest in search. It's a critical technology for integration into a host of products. Building a search engine for the web has always looked like a long term research project that's great if it makes a little money, while things like searching for contet on Xbox Live or files on a disk was always where Microsoft's primary interest was. If they could put pressure on Google, so much the better, but moving forward and away from browsing file system trees and algebraic querying is more important.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Well the last quarter they broke it out, Google was paying $4B/year to buy traffic for search. That was up from about $400M/year when I started tracking it. (and of course up from 0 when they started). One of the consequences of 'commodityness' of search is that owning the box you type into becomes critical. Through a series of missteps they damaged the growth of Chrome, they lost default search on Firefox to Yahoo, and to a bunch of apps on iOS. Of course they didn't have anything going for them on Windows phone but Microsoft does all of its "internal" search (which is not organically a search box but things like searching the "app store" or "places to eat" within tools to Bing vs the user's browser's search provider. And because its "good enough" people don't force it back to Google. As a former "new-ish search engine" it became pretty clear it was a huge challenge to compete stack for stack. Much simpler to just insert yourself ahead of them in the chain and peel off a fraction of the advertising revenue. A lot of change headed for the Google Plex, a lot of change.

brudgers 11y ago

My gut is that Bing is mainly a byproduct of Microsoft's interest in search. It's a critical technology for integration into a host of products. Building a search engine for the web has always looked like a long term research project that's great if it makes a little money, while things like searching for contet on Xbox Live or files on a disk was always where Microsoft's primary interest was. If they could put pressure on Google, so much the better, but moving forward and away from browsing file system trees and algebraic querying is more important.