Go Bing yourself
Posted by Brian Wong on Jun 05, 2009, under AerInterest
What’s next? Wolframalpha, and now Bing.
Maybe it’s the marketing, the press, or the public opinion. But Bing and Wolframalpha have not escaped the often redundant “Google killer?”, “next Google?” questions.
In this case, I think the crucial element missing to the potential success of these new search engines is to explicitly position themselves away from Google – that is radically changing the visual perspective of the consumer away from the traditional “search” interface. What I mean is, rebranding beyond just changing a name, or changing the engine technology. We still type a query, and get a result, right? As long as Google continues to deliver in this way without any overwhelming problems, Google will be fine.
An aside: The “search box” in and of itself is now the unofficial trademark of the search engine, and Google is the owner in that field. Maybe it’s a time for a change? How about a search engine that searches for me before I know I need to search?
At the end of the day, there isn’t a large enough, ground breaking value proposition that Bing and Wolframalpha have provided that will make me switch away from Google or to even use them on a daily basis. What Wolframalpha has done that Bing has not, however, is to distinguish itself as a “computational” search engine. This indicates that it is meant for a specific purpose, and as we all know, even with the massive hoards of money available to Microsoft’s disposal, there is no way to create another catch-all search solution that will be adopted en masse without something fundamentally different.
I like “decision engine”. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a good start. Microsoft just seems hesitant to move radically in a different direction. They had Live Search. They had MSN search. They’ve rebranded their search services for the nth time. It’s time that they truly rebranded: it’s time that they rebranded beyond the logo.
