Microsoft Bing’s fight for market share and relevance in the search arena is turning into a feature-for-feature slugfest against industry stalwart Google. Might Microsoft’s engineers be ready to outfox and out-maneuver Google’s famously-brilliant minds?

One place that Microsoft seems to have an edge over Google is in search trends. Google has long remained unchallenged in terms of its reporting capabilities, but is currently lagging on search trends by three days.

While that may not seem like a huge deal for analyzing long term search trends, it puts a serious damper in exploring recent happenings in the news and online. Bing’s xRank shows nearly real-time information on current events such as the Iranian protests and the U.S. Open.

Bing has been generating substantial interest since its launch at the end of May. There’s some question as to the amount of search traffic that Bing is generating, but preliminary reports show Bing boosting Microsoft’s search share by as much as three percent.

With Bing grabbing headlines as of late, both companies are gearing up for a tit-for-tat struggle on features for search market share. While odds are that Google isn’t running scared, the leading search company would be foolish to ignore a company with such deep pockets as Microsoft.

Google is starting to rein in its famous 20 percent time offered to engineers for innovation. Now the company is implementing ‘innovation reviews’ to help apply that energy towards staving off the competition.

What’s especially interesting is how much differently Bing is being considered than long-time rival Yahoo’s search engine. Especially considering the fact that Microsoft hired away Yahoo’s Jan Pederson as its Chief Scientist for Search.

Either way Bing has a long way to go before up-ending Google’s 65 percent share of the search market. If Bing can continue with its current momentum, it could finally put a dent in the runaway train of Google’s market share growth.

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Entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 12:57 pm under Google, Microsoft.

Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
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