Searching matters

There's movement in the search business, and about time.

For a sector so technology driven, it's been remarkably predictable. Yahoo, the number two player, has publicly given up on trying to catch Google.

But that won't stop others from trying.

We've just seen the launch of Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine. It's not in any sense a challenger to Google, but it does quickly crunch large amounts of geeky data.

You can compare life expectancies, New York and Singapore, any two stocks or the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. You can't compare the Beatles and the Stones, and if you ask about "Nirvana" it will tell you about a 1997 movie.

It's a cool technology, but Wolfram has an issue with its business model, i.e., it doesn't have one.

Microsoft's issue is its technology, i.e., it doesn't work anywhere near well enough.

It's spent five years chasing Google's tail. According to ComScore, Microsoft's share of US searches is 8%, close to an all-time low - remember that's with the cashback offer. Even Yahoo is 20%, while Google remains the frontrunner 64%.

The big news is that Microsoft is about to junk its Live Search brand and, presumably, technology in favor of a new brand and technology.

It will rebrand its new search engine as - Bing. It's a name that has already inspired a Twitter competition to reverse-engineer the "acronym" ("But It's Not Google", "Big Investment No Goals").

At time of writing Bing is not yet launched and the story is about the big bucks Microsoft is splashing on promoting it - as much as $80 million, according to the Advertising Age. By comparison, Google's entire ad spend last year was $25 million.

There's something ironic about spending $80 million on advertising a product whose main business will be to attract ads. But as one ex-Googler told Advertising Age, Microsoft's problem is search ain't broke. Punters are pretty happy with the search they're getting.

Google's internal tests show that its brand is an important part of its success; when it puts its own brand on another search engine, users prefer that.

So even if Bing has a mind-blowing new feature, Microsoft will still have to get over the problem that everyone thinks Google is better anyway.

If there's a threat to Google, it's from real-time search.

Google has the static web archived and indexed. But not the conversational streams that take place on Facebook or this year's internet sensation, Twitter.

Their content matters. Maybe not so much at the individual stream level, but in the aggregate they are enormously telling.