Doc Searls Weblog

In search, Google has a 90%+ share worldwide. But I’m not sure that makes it a monopoly, as long as it has real competition. With Bing is does.

For example, recently I wanted to find a post Andrew Orlowski wrote for The Register in the early 00s. I remembered that it was about The Cluetrain Manifesto (which he called “Candide without the irony”—a great one-liner I can’t forget), and also mentioned John C. Dvorak, another Cluetrain non-fan. So I did this search on Google:

https://www.google.com/search?q=doc+searls+orlowski+register+cluetrain+candide+dvorak

I got one page of useless results.

So I went to Bing and did the same:

https://www.bing.com/search?q=doc+searls+orlowski+register+cluetrain+candide+dvorak

Bulls eye.

Credit where also due: I can find it as well in The Register‘s own search function. Hats off to all publications that keep their archives intact and searchable.

The difference between Google and Bing in this case is consistent with something I’ve noticed lately, which is that Google seems to be forgetting a lot of old stuff. Maybe it’s because the company is deprecating http in deference to https. Maybe there’s some other reason. I don’t know.

I also prefer Bing’s image search as well. It’s much less complicated than Google’s, and much easier to step through with the > arrow when paging through results. (Google piles up the already-viewed images in row after row above the current image, leaving the current image “below the fold,” and requiring extra work to locate again.)

And I love Bing’s Birds Eye views in Bing Maps. For an example of the latter, look here. That’s the top of the “candelabra” tower in Needham, Mass. It’s the site from which nearly all of Boston’s TV stations radiate. (Over-the-air broadcasting is very old hat, but I still care about it.) The closest Google can comes to that is here, where the 3D view only shows the base of the tower.

I can give lots of other examples, but I think I’ve made my  point:  Google isn’t a monopoly as long as there is a worthy competitor. And in several important ways, Bing is that.