‘Search Wars’ – Bing gaining on Google

Traffic coming directly from search engines has moved into the double-digits in the last year. This in itself is reason enough, we believe, to closely follow recent developments on the search engine front, where ‘Goliath’ Google is challenged by the as-of-yet ‘David’ Bing.

The October rankings figures for search engines show Google still firmly on top of the game at 70.60%. But compared to September this means a 1% drop and the same goes for Yahoo, who has slid from 16.38% to 16.14%. In contrast Ask.com and Bing have increased their share with 2.62% (+2%) and 9.57% (+7%) respectively.

Clearly, you can’t exactly call this development a “landslide”, but does it still indicate a trend? Especially regarding the impressive growth of Bing which was only launched in June 2009. Comparing it to its competitors, could it be the fun factor of the background image combined with a more stylish and very clean search interface, that sets Bing apart and explains its recent growth?

Google certainly appears to take Bing’s leap ahead very seriously indeed, or so it would seem considering Google’s announcement to re-design their search interface: To make searching more user-friendly, Google will introduce a side-bar – a feature which Bing already possesses.

So, is this the beginning of a new saga in the ‘search war’? What role will the changes in the search algorithms play? e.g. Google announced that they would include a website’s speed in their algorithm. And can we expect a change in Google’s grip on their integrity of their search results? – regardless of whether this might create controversy and outrage as is happening right now concerning the image results for ‘Michelle Obama’.

What do you think?