Our suggestions to Vole
Microsoft will not be happy with the news that its market
share for its Bing search engine has fallen.
The September numbers from Web metrics firm Net Applications
show a slight drop in Bing's global market share. To be fair Google's whopping
share of the pie dipped a bit too. It seems that Redmond has a bit of a problem in that it
has created a credible search engine, punters like it, but they can't be
bothered switching from Google.
People have been using Google for years now and generally
the great unwashed are fairly conservative about changing something
they know. The Google toolbar appears on their browser, it is even
becoming a feature of their mobile phone. No-one says “Bing me”, or
would admit that they “binged
David Hasselhoff and discovered he liked slushy puppies”. Google is the
world
of search.
The biggest problem is that to the great unwashed, a
search is a search. We don't expect it to do anything other than give us a
list of addresses. We don't think, “I wonder what I will get if I try this in
Bing, or Yahoo”. So Microsoft is stuck with having to get people
interested in the site. Really it needs to do something about its Front End. OK
it looks alright, but it does not say “Wow this will reach parts of the
Internet that Google can't reach”. It could also come up with a “now” search so that it can
find pages that have been updated recently rather than those which were written
in hieroglyphic HTML on the inside of the Great Pyramid.
Perhaps however the best trick that Vole can come up with
is bribery. Its cash back promotion for users who click a sponsored
link on a Bing search results page and then make a purchase was the sort of
idea which could drive users to the search engine. Judging by the people who create long queues in the
supermarket check-out by spending hours searching through wads of discount
coupons everyone is a sucker for a 10 percent off deal.