4 ms·

Good point. Good question. Confidential answer ;)

• munk-a 6y ago
  In detail perhaps - but vaguely the answer is that it's not that much money. Microsoft pretty much willed Bing out of thin air and while adoption has been quite an issue it does have pretty reliable results. Microsoft has a ton of money to throw at things but I think - from the ancillary manner in which Bing was launched - that it honestly isn't that expensive on a day-by-day basis to run that sort of large scale search. I do suspect there is a lot of economy to be saved by already having a wide coverage of the globe with computing resources though so I'd guess at the market being hard to enter and easy to sustain costs once you're in. I suspect Google works hard to keep from letting out how severable and independent their search business is in a large part to keep monopoly breakup calls from getting too much momentum.