Kyle Morgan's Daily Deceit » Bing

Apple Selling iPhone Spotlight to Microsoft’s Bing

Kyle Morgan — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:30:43 +0000

It appears that Apple and Microsoft are discussing about the possibility of offering Bing as the iPhone’s default search engine. For those who are familiar with Microsoft’s bribing strategy and the recent News Corp. saga, it isn’t really big news. It is only natural for a company that pretty much paid the whole PC manufacturing industry to ship Windows to try the same thing with other products.

The cloud

With today’s industry focus on the cloud and web-based applications, it is important for big players to have a product-line that offers a whole set of tools for everyday Internet users. In other words, the search engine as a single product will not be enough to give a competitive edge to anybody, let it be Google. For example, Google search engine users have access to Maps, Gmail, Reader, Docs, Calendar and a whole bunch of applications that will answer day-to-day needs. Microsoft is trying something similar with Bing Maps as a competition to Google’s.

Mobile computing platform

Today, a third of Internet users come from mobile phones. This trend will only keep on growing in the future as better products will be released for the mobile market. It is only a matter of time before the mainstream Internet completely switches to the mobile platform. With forecasts showing Android as potentially surpassing iPhone sales by 2012, both Apple and Microsoft have no other choice than to put their efforts together in a fight for their life.

What it means to the iPhone users

Well, this is good news and bad news for the iPhone consumer. On one hand they will be exposed to a potentially worse and less mature product. On the other hand, it will bring more balance to the search engine market, forcing Google to work on it’s competitive edge by releasing better products. Of course, things could balance towards a bipolar market where both Bing and Google will be better of with what they have rather than trying to take away market share from the other player.

What if Microsoft Paid People to Use Bing?

Kyle Morgan — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:14:32 +0000

After bribing Murdoch to get News Corp. content removed from Google, Microsoft should bring the battle to the next level by paying everybody to use Bing instead of Google. I’m pretty sure that by thinking hard enough, Microsoft managers are going to find a way to monetize on this novelty. I can hear Microsoft VP explaining the plan: “First, we pay people to use Bing. Then, we sell keywords in auctions. Those who pay more are on top of search pages. We just gotta make sure we give a fraction of what we collect to our users”.

Google is nothing without the web

I’m going to make an analogy with social media: would anyone use Facebook if it didn’t have any member? I guess the answer is an obvious no. Indeed, the hard reality for any site that has user generated content is that its value is based on the number of users that interact with it. Search engines are also a kind of user-generated websites where the whole World Wide Web is the content. Without any website to crawl and index, search engines would be useless.

The effects of News Corp. blocking Google

Having websites to index a must for search engines, but having quality content to index is also very important. After all, people don’t wanna find trash when they spend their time searching. In this regard, Murdoch’s move to remove its content from Google is very hurtful to the search giant. News Corp. has a very respectable reader-base where only 20% of their readers come from Google. Being backed by the 20/80 rule, News Corp. asked itself a crucial question.

Google can make you lose traffic

It is true that News Corp. gains visitors when they are referred by Google. On the other hand, they will lose all those visitors that are referred to other news sites and that never end-up on News Corp. Let’s say you search for “stock market today” and that the WSJ is not within the first 5 links. Well, if the WSJ has a good article about “stock market today”, then you are not going to read it unless you directly visit the WSJ. Therefore, Murdoch is raising an important question: would News Corp. get more pageviews if it wasn’t indexed on Google?

I don’t think anybody beside News Corp web analystics team could answer the question without speculating. Still, something should be taken in consideration here: if the Wall Street Journal has quality content that is worth reading and that this content doesn’t show up on Google, then people will have to take the habit of going to the WSJ so they don’t miss good articles. Therefore, by blocking Google, Murdoch might actually increase the number of regular readers and maybe overall pageviews.

How much is Microsoft paying?

Why should Microsoft be the one that has the right to index News Corp? Since Murdoch thinks that News Corp. is better off without Google, it is going to think the same about Microsoft. Therefore, Murdoch will let Microsoft crawl its website only if it pays the difference between traffic News Corp loses because of being indexed and the traffic it gains because of being indexed, that is the difference between loyal visitors and occasional visitors. You can bet it is a lot.

What about me?

Well, now that News Corp. gets a piece of the action, Microsoft should step up and pay us to use Bing. I mean Google is definitely a better search engine that Microsoft. Why should Microsoft be the search engine I use? Because they have the WSJ indexed? I don’t think so.

Bing as a Promotion Tool For Microsoft

Kyle Morgan — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 16:20:51 +0000

It appears that Bing prioritizes pro-Microsoft pages, as search on Bing for the phrase, “Why is Windows so expensive?” returned “Why are Macs so expensive”. All would agree to say that this partiality is questionable and that it turns Bing into a platform for promotion more than a search engine.

Now when I first read the above blog post, I remembered right away that the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo was that Yahoo uses Bing search engine. As a result, pro-Microsoft content will be fed to Yahoo search engine users. From my opinion, this is just another way for Microsoft of taking over Yahoo. I don’t know what happens inside Yahoo for letting something like this go, but it all looks like major transformations are coming for the Sunnyvale guys.

So here is the picture: Microsoft wants to take over Yahoo, but it doesn’t happen. After rounds of negotiation, the deal is that Microsoft will license its new search engine to Yahoo. Now, we just find out that Bing is just an advertising platform. So what’s next? Well, Yahoo users should just switch to MSN. Why get exposed to second hand advertising. Let’s all go to the source!