Posts Tagged ‘bing’
The Guardian reports that several small outfits are suing Microsoft over the name of its Bing! search engine, claiming trademark infringement.
Bing! Information Design, based in St Louis, Missouri, launched a legal action last week in a local court – alleging that the multibillion-dollar software corporation “had knowledge of the mark” and “intentionally interfered” when it relaunched its search engine with a new name earlier this year.
(snip)
In addition, two other companies are also taking action against Microsoft over what they say are trademark infringements: a web-based shopping service called BongoBing and software company Terabyte, which has a product called BootIt Next Generation, or Bing for short.
(Bing! Information Design appears to be a graphics design outfit. I guess “information design” is “graphics design” with a good press agent.)
The story also states, in the portion that I snipped, that Bing! Information Design did not actually file for a trademark until May of this year, when rumors of Microsoft’s Bing! were already spreading wildly, although they have been using the name for a decade or so.
Though I am not a big fan of Microsoft’s business practices, I think they are on solid ground here and that the suits have little chance of success if the case goes to trial–and Microsoft has the resources to take it to trial. To quote an article from Harvard University’s website on trademark law:
No Comments »This is the first show from the new set called the “Geek Bar”. I’ll be adding more to it as we go – Check out the Geek Bar post for more info.
- Bing on iPhone
- Yahoo is loosing out to Bing and Google
- Toyota Hybrid – Two year plan
- RIM goes down. Blackberry outtage
- Consumer Reports says “Wait on Kindle”
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (344.9MB)
No Comments »The New York TImes reports that Google’s real time search beats out all the others:
There is a demo here.
According to the story, real-time search in Bing! presents a tag cloud from Twitter (a big help to those of us who do not tweet), while Yahoo, well, Yahoo is lost in the wilderness calling “Yoo-hoo.”
Microsoft is teaming Bing! up with Wolfram Alpha, according to the BBC.
Wolfram Alpha aims to answer questions directly, rather than display a list of links like a search engine.
The “computational knowledge engine” is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram.
It will be used to bolster Bing’s results in areas such as nutrition, health and mathematics.
The partnership will initially be rolled out in the US.
Bing has been gradually grabbing market share from other search engines since its launch in May.
Figures from Experian Hitwise suggest its market share in the US rose from 8.96% in September to 9.57% in October.
The same story points out that Google is over 70% of market share in the US.
I don’t think this is going to help Microsoft conquer Google. Jeffrey reported on Wolfram Alpha when it hit the news a few months ago and I played with it a bit, then I went back to Google. I suspect I’m not atypical.
No Comments »Sometime during the night, the bit in the story that I mentioned yesterday referring to the reported $100,000,000.00 that Microsoft spent to promote Bing! resurfaced. Here’s the quote:
But after spending a reported $100 million to market Bing, Microsoft may now need to find new ways to pump up interest in its search engine.
Then I remembered Microsoft’s advertising theme: that Bing! was a decison engine, whatever that is (warning: the site at the link starts playing a multimedia advertisement without asking permission.)
And I thought back over my searches the past week.
Not a single one had to do with making a decision.
Which led me to wonder: Is it that Microsoft’s Marketing Department doesn’t understand how persons use search engines or is it that Microsoft as a whole doesn’t understand how persons use search engines? Or did they just waste a lot of money on a lousy ad campaign?
This is what I remembered last night:
Reteurs reports that both Twitter and Bing! plateaued in September. What growth Bing! has continues to be at the expense of Yahoo, rather than of Google.
According to the Guardian, Twitter growth has stalled before, only to recover the next month. (See the second paragraph of this story, which also reports that Twitter has made reporting spam easier by adding a “spam” button to tweets.)
But I suspect the novelty has worn off Bing! An excerpt from the Reuters story:
After picking up decent market share every month since its June launch, Bing grew its share by a meagre 10 basis points last month. According to comScore, Bing’s share of the U.S. search market grew to 9.4 percent, versus 9.3 percent the month before.
Google widened its lead to 64.9 percent share, from 64.6 percent in August, while Yahoo fell to 18.8 percent from 19.3 percent the month before.
An interesting juxtaposition of opinions this weekend, showing how two persons can look at the same stats and draw almost-opposite conclusions:
At the New York Times (link here), Miguel Helft claims that Bing! really doesn’t have far to go to catch Google, now that Microsoft has inked a deal for Bing! to be the engine for Yahoo searches, if Bing! and Yahool stats are viewed as a single entity. A nugget:
ComScore found that for the combined Yahoo-Microsoft, “searcher penetration,” or the percentage of the online population in the United States that uses one of those search engines, is 73 percent. Google’s searcher penetration is higher, but not by that much: at 84 percent.
Meanwhile, Reuters (link here), using the same report as the Times, reports that Google users are exceptionally loyal:
Yet Google searchers conduct an average of 54.5 searches a month — about double the number of searches that Yahoo! and Microsoft users conduct combined. They search on average 26.9 times a month, comScore reported.
ComScore also found that Google searchers have the most loyalty, making nearly 70 percent of their searches on Google sites. People who use Yahoo! and Microsoft sites combined search there about 33 percent of the time and also use Google heavily.
(More about comScore–that’s how they spell it–here.)
No Comments »And, after the hoop-la dies down, things will just settle back down. Story here.
Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81 percent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter.
Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48 percent from 78.72 percent before Bing. Yahoo Inc, the perennial No. 2 in the market, rose to 11.04 percent from 10.99 percent.
My guess, based on entirely on complete and total ignorance: They’re taking market share from Cuil.
Two assessments of Microsoft’s Bing search engine hit the news this morning.
The Guardian reports that a small study of 25 computer users showed that Bing’s search results were not that great, but that Bing users were more likely to look at some of the advertisements. The full story is here.
Bloomberg reports that Microsoft’s share of searches has risen about two percentage points during the two weeks since unveiling Bing, from single to double digits. Story here.
Frankly, I suspect that, once the novelty wears off, Bing will go the way of Microsoft’s previous attempts to penetrate the search engine market–that is, following a trail first blazed by Bob.
It’s almost impossible to look at any news site without seeing another puff piece for Microsoft’s newest attempt to become a player in internet search, Bing, which, according to the link, is coming soon.
I unhesitatingly predict that it will be the Cuil of 2009.
Remember Cuil?
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