Bing No Longer a Money Pit and Google Being Chipped Away
Posted: 2015-12-28 14:10:26
Back in 2011 Bing was Microsoft biggest money hole, which was losing the Redmond company 1 Billion in capital per quarter. Many at the time was suggesting that it would be best to either sell the search engine or to just kill it off. The new CEO over Microsoft, Satya Nadella however made it fairly clear early on that he had no such intentions. Instead he wanted to more tightly integrate Bing into the other company’s offerings.
Jump forward to 2015 and you find that Bing is not just still alive and kicking but as of November it actually turned a profit and Redmond is saying it brought in 1 Billion in revenues. You have probably seen this on large news sites and that they are guessing it is from the release of Windows 10. Back when Bing started, the search engine did not serve up the greatest of results and if you did try it than more than likely you did not like it and went straight back to the giant, Google. Never to give Bing another chance again.
Windows 10 has been installed now on over approximately 150 million devices with Microsoft saying the goal is to have it installed on over a Billion devices.
"Within two to three years of Windows 10's release, there will be 1 billion devices running Windows 10," Terry Myerson, Microsoft's vice president of operating systems, said Wednesday during the keynote presentation at the company's annual Build developer conference in San Francisco.
With Windows 10 spreading the fastest out of all of their previous Operating Systems, Microsoft has a good start. Windows 10 mobile has been delayed until the new year but the company has been creating apps to run on other systems such as android and IOS, something the tech giant has never seen fit to do in the past.
The point here is that many people that did not give Bing a chance or that did give it a chance didn’t like it and never went back are now getting that second chance to try out Bing before they do away with parts of the new Operating System like Cortana. Upon this second experience they are finding that the Bing of new is not the Bing of old. Bing has actually become a viable search engine and many people have left Bing as the core of the OS instead of changing the system default search engine.
Bing has made it so that it is very easy to find what you are looking for by using conversational search. Something they have been looking into for a long time. Google has been trying to compete with this by introducing Google now which is a Cortana counterpart. It too is working on conversational search practices. It is said Google is working on what they call chat bots to be able to do these searches.
As of November the Redmond company snagged a staggering 21% of the search shares with another 12% going to Yahoo which is still powered by the Bing Search engine. Leaving Google with a still respectable share of 64%. This is what we need to keep our eyes on as we go forward because as Windows 10 spreads and gets closer to its 1 Billion device goal (which has a long way to go) we should see Bing’s search shares rise as the search giant Google’s continues to get chipped away at.
It will be exciting to see how the year 2016 plays out in the search industry and what it will mean exactly for those in the SEO industry. SEO is far from dead, instead it is like it is just beginning and it is not sure yet which of the search engines will land on the top of the pile. For now, it is suggested you optimize for both of these great search engines and reap the rewards from both!
-James Trivolette
