There are a few companies out there with such an amassed popularity that, unless you lived in the Brazilian rain forest with nothing but a loin cloth to cover your unmentionables, you can’t help but recognise them. Google is perhaps the biggest. But could Microsoft Bing – the big M’s own search engine – be about to challenge Google’s authority? Recent figures released suggest the answer could be yes.
Google’s share of the search space has fallen from 78.72 per cent in May to 78.48 per cent in June according to internet data firm StatCounter. That might not sound like a lot, but Microsoft’s share of the market, meanwhile, has grown to 8.23 per cent – that’s a rise of one per cent since Bing’s launch.
Those might seem like tiny fluctuations, but when you consider we’re talking percentages of the four billion pageloads a month that StatCounter analyses, those tiny percentages become massive figures. Yes Bing has a lot of catching up to do, but the underlying trend is positive. And that can only be a good thing for Microsoft considering the fact that it’s spent close to $100 million dollars rebranding its search engine.
Elsewhere in the world of social media this week, I read on The Telegraph’s website that the future of social networking and online companies trying to turn a profit (according to Kate Burns, vice-president of Bebo) rests on peer-to-peer recommendation rather than search.
Speaking at the Future of Broadcasting conference in London, Kate Burns, a former managing director at the aforementioned Google, said: “I know and understand the power of search. However, social recommendations are the future. They will not only open us up as individuals to the web, but to publishers and social networks, it will offer a relevant and open engagement we didn’t have before.” An interesting insight. Let’s see if her predictions come true. If they do, then that’s two bits of bad news for Google in a week.
When all’s said and done, though, Google’s still one of (if not the) largest companies in the world. And as long as it continues to develop (Google just introduced a website translation tool update that automatically translates the website you’re reading into one of 41 languages), then proclamations of a demise would be seriously misplaced. It’s the competition from little upstarts like, ahem, Microsoft, that pushes Google to bigger and better things. And if Search succumbs to social recommendation sites then you can bet Google won’t be resting on its laurels. So, here’s to the competition. May it continue to push the big boys to bigger and better things. And all the better if they remain free.