No Binging. In India, It’s Only Googling!
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The honeymoon period is over and it’s time for some serious business for Bing. It has been close to three months since Bing was launched by Microsoft on the back of a huge $100 million promotion budget. This was supposed to be the “decision engine“, not one of those silly search engines like Google. So has Bing delivered its promise, or is it still too early to tell?
Let’s take worldwide figures first. Since its launch in the last week of May, Microsoft’s search engine market share has increased by one whole percentage point (from 8% in May to 8.9% in July). You can call it pretty commendable since, though not terrific, it is still something in the right direction and anything that can eat into Google’s search engine share is called the Google killer. Remember Cuil?.
But inspite of the growth, there are two points to contend here – How much of it is from the new searchers. The search engine market, as a whole has grown, and if only a part of the NEW searchers have taken to Bing, then the increase in search engine market share due to this aspect does not take anything away from Google. The second point to contend is the promotional budget. Well, how much could have Microsoft leveraged out of the budget had it promoted one of the existing brands. $100 is huge, and if it were to promote an existing brand like Live.com, probably the results could have been better.
Turning around to India, well, has anything changed as yet? A recently released report from Vizisense concludes that Bing has simply not been able to penetrate the search engine market in India. In fact, Microsoft’s market share has recorded a drop during July, while Google has increased its share to 91.19%.
What could be the reason? It is not clear how much of the promotional budget was earmarked for emerging countries like India. Also, India is a predominantly Google country. Unlike USA, we do not have an Ask or AOL nibbling away at the market share. But, I reckon it is still not the end. Yahoo is one another popular name here and when the Yahoo-MS deal does finalize, Google can expect a strong competitor for the search engine market in India!
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Why hasn’t Bing worked in India?
1) How many places did you see Bing getting advertised in India? Forget anything else, not even digital medium was used to exploit this market.
2) Ask yourself what are the most popular search queries on Google in India.(Google trends give a partial indicator of the moderated filtered queries) If you happen to run a entertainment site(which happens to be one among the portfolio i run) we all know the diverse prefixes that would accompany a “Katrina Kaif” search on google(which happens to be on of the top 10 queries). Now google has no problems with those prefixes or standalone terms of those types too, but Bing certainly has. “Binging” with Censorship won’t help Bing, especially when its chief rival has no such qualms.
One more and very important reason for Indians to stay away.
And finally, i don’t think anyone even in MS thought that they would wrest back market share in this short a time. MS will have to market aggressively in order to take on Google and that would mean increasing addon offerings. (look at the plethora of developer tools google offers along with related web suites, then look at what MS has on offer.) Yahoo deal is a good start. That should take the share of Bing to 25%.
Bing will probably have to leverage on Yahoo’s presence in India to gain the new search market share in india.
I hope that Microsoft does not ruin Yahoo with Bing, but when they have it in their pointy heads to do a thing they surely have deep enough pockets to do it with. I do not think many will follow Yahoo to Bing, they will more likely take it as a sign to switch to Google’s portal iGoogle and to Gmail with Google Docs instead of MS Office, not to mention Google Chrome. The tighter Microsoft tightens its fist the more will slip out from its fingers.