Microsoft's Bing to take on Google

Microsoft has unveiled a new search engine named Bing, renewing its efforts to challenge the dominance of Google in the Internet search market.

The company said the new service will begin to roll out over the coming days and will be fully deployed worldwide June 3.

"Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the web and find information, but they don't do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find," Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive officer, said in a statement.

"Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they've found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions," he added.

Microsoft said the Bing service, billed by the company as a Decision Engine, will initially focus on shopping, travel, local business and information, and health-related research - areas in which people want more assistance in making key decisions.

The software giant still has a long way to go to increase its share in the search market.

According to latest analysis by market research firm comScore, in April this year, Google led the US search market with 64.2 per cent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo with 20.4 per cent, with Microsoft a distant third with 8.2 per cent.

CXOtoday

Will Google, Yahoo and Microsoft collaborate to clean up web?

In a rare instance of collaboration among otherwise fierce rivals, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft said they would support a new web standard that will allow millions of publishers to remove duplicate pages from their websites. As a result, search engines would be able to make their search results more comprehensive.

"There is a lot of clutter on the web and with this, publishers will be able to clean up a lot of junk," said Matt Cutts, an engineer who heads Google's spam fighting efforts, the New York Times reported.

"I think it is going to gain traction pretty quickly," said Cutts.

The problem is the following: Many web publishers, especially those that have voluminous sites, like e-commerce companies, have multiple URLs that all point to the same page. This confuses search engines, sometimes causing them to index the same page multiple times. As much as 20 percent of URLs on the web may be duplicates, according to some estimates.

Engineers at Google came up with a simple way for web publishers to indicate when a URL is a duplicate, and if so, which is the principal, or "canonical," URL that search engines should be indexing. Yahoo and Microsoft, the no. 2 and no. 3 search engines, have agreed to support the same standard.

"We are happy that everyone is going to support the same implementation," said Nathan Buggia, a lead programme manager at Microsoft. "This is a clear benefit for publishers as it gives them an opportunity to get more exposure through search engines."

All search engines have developed technologies to detect duplicates that are more or less effective. The so-called Canonical Link Tag, as the standard is known, should make it easier for both publishers and search engines to address the problem, NYT reported Thursday.

"It is an important step because all the search engines are coming out with it," said Priyank Garg, director of product management for web search at Yahoo.

Agencies

Guruji to take on Google, Yahoo in the search engines space

Guruji.com, Indian’s Internet search engine, focused on providing better search results to the Indian consumers is eyeing to emerge among the ‘Top 3’ search engines by 2011. The search engine major is presently growing at 20-30 percent per month and is eyeing one million searches in the future.

According to Internet and Mobile Association of India (IMAI), the search engine market in India is presently worth $50 million in 2007 and is expected to grow to $100-$200 in the next 5-6 years time. However, China is far ahead of India and has already touched the $100 million mark.

Anurag Dod, founder and CEO of Guruji says, “we want to emerge as a dominant player in the search engine space and for this we are leveraging on proprietary algorithms and content for the Indian consumers.”

Guruji.com was founded by Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra, two Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi graduates in 2006 by the backing of venture capitalists Sequoia Capital. “It is the first time that India is seeing a "desi" search engine,” he said.

As per the latest Commscope report, the English search engine market is dominated by basically by six players namely – Google, Yahoo, ASK, MSN, and Guruji among others. In fact, Aaidu.com, a search engine in Chinese and Daum and Naver are the dominant search players (Korea) and are more prominant than Yahoo, Google in these countries. So is Yandex in Russia. “We are now focusing on the Indian consumers and so have extensive searches on cricket, music, images, city focussed seaches like movie tickets,” says Dod.

Even though, we are catering to the English speaking market, still 80 percent of the traffic comes from India while the rest 20 percent is spread across US, Middle East, UK etc.Dod says Yahoo was initially a portal site and in December 2003, that bought Inktom followed by three more companies Overture, which has bought Alta vista followed by Fast. So Yahoo’s search engine is a combination of these three companies. MSN is mainly a portal site player and less of search engine, ASK acquired Teoma, while Google that has a 80 percent market share in the search engine space is the only pure search engine player.

We initially started with web search, city search in 2006 and moved to local laungages –Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam in 2007. Later on we added cricket and music that has a large customer base in India. So will be offering live match scores updates and historic cricket database that is good for data mining, says Dod.

. “We are looking at raising funds but are presently adequately funded and will sail through this global recession.” Guruji secured an investment of $7 million from Sequoia Capital that is the same venture capitalist firm that initially funded Google as well.

The company claims that they remain unaffected by this global recession. “Our organization the attrition level is 0 percent for the past two years and will grow from the present employee strenght of 63 to 100 over the next 1.5 years. Besides we have also opened an office in Mumbai.”

The salaries we offer is very competitive to any product design company like Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Sun, Cisco and much above service companies like TCS, Wipro and Infosys, Dod claims.

Earlier search engine companies like khoj.com focused on subscription based unlike Guruji that is focused on news, features, e-commerce, education, music, cricket, technology that are free.

Over the next few years, the company shall focus on entertainment, which is a big category besides music, images tickets by enhancing the capabilities. The company has invested majorly in the web crawlers software that was locally developed,” Dod adds.