“I don’t know – Let’s Bing it….?”
September 26, 2012
Have you ever questioned who the search engine giant is? Is it Google, Bing or is it Yahoo? It should be obvious, but Yahoo was once the biggest name in the world of search. Comscore released some info earlier this year stating that for the first time ever, Bing overtook Yahoo in it’s search. Of course we know that Bing provides Yahoo with its results but what could this be down to? Bing heavily invests in advertising its engine and runs many sponsorship opportunities. Yahoo has become more of a news hub making quirky and categorized news stories a priority on its page. But still, Google stands to dominate.
Engines are changing and have to offer the user something different. Bing promises more of a visually stunning offering. Visit its page and you get something visually appealing each time. Artists, creatives and photographers probably love this one. Yahoo as mentioned offers a massive news hub, from showbiz to sports – pulling in a massive amount of content from various journalists across the globe, they integrated their platform socially and it’s blown up. You’ll no doubt see some of your friends on Facebook ‘reading trending stories’ from Yahoo, it’s actually quite brilliant.
Over the past decade however, Google has accelerated search like no other brand alive and it’s done it by not offering a lot, but simplicity. The name has become synonymous with daily life, from questions on how to get red wine out of a carpet, to where the best restaurant is, all in the space of 15 years. I remember when I first found out about Google. Before I was using it, ‘Ask’ was very popular, but their marketing seemed to downplay what the product was. It stated you could ‘ask’ anything and it would give you the answer. What it meant was, ask a question and we’ll return the best match, we won’t actually answer your query directly. I remember getting a little frustrated with it. Then a friend replied the following words to a question one day,
“Just Google it.”
“What?” I asked.
“Just Google it, look it up – G O O G L E dot com.”
I typed the words in my browser and a simple page came up. A page that just seemed to offer something different, results with no fluff. The ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button also seemed to offer something stupidly unique that we all had fun testing for a while.
Since then, I haven’t gone back. I purely believe that simplicity is what’s helped it grow. Over the years, its engine has developed into something spectacular, from the Knowledge graph to its own Adwords platform, it truly is marvelous. Controlling around 65% of the U.S. search market and it’s growing at a crazy rate, the competition for the top 10 spots is at its most fierce – the search engine market industry is now valued at approximately $20 billion dollars, growing $2 billion every year and for Google, that’s a good thing as at the moment, it really is the search engine giant.
Think about it, have you ever heard anyone say “I don’t know, let’s Bing it…?”
