Bing director Stefan Weitz sat down with eWEEK to talk about how Microsoft's search engine is taking advantage of new Web trends to gain market share.
Bing director Stefan Weitz sat down with eWEEK March 24 to describe how
Microsoft's search engine will try to take advantage of evolutions in social
networking and Web services to gain market share. Toppling Google's dominance
of the search market, however, doesn't seem to be a viable short-term goal.
"We don't have to beat anybody to take share," Weitz said,
essentially reiterating what he told eWEEK in another
wide-ranging interview a year ago: Microsoft's Mountain View rival might
hold the lion's share of the market for traditional keyword-based search, but
Bing remains perfectly happy to exploit verticals such as travel, and leverage
partnerships with companies such as Facebook.
Bing holds around 13.6 percent of the search-engine market, according to
research firm comScore, behind Google at 64.5 percent. Yahoo, whose back-end
search is powered by Bing, owns a 16.1 percent share.
Search is ultimately determined by the underlying structure of the Internet.
Years ago, when Google started using PageRank to dominate the search market,
the Web was primarily a very large set of hyperlinked pages. You could read
information, book a plane ticket through an airline's Website, order a book off
Amazon.com and-if you were willing to wait, and wait, and wait-download some
content via your 56k modem's drip-drip-drip connection. The emphasis on
keywords made the older Internet, in Weitz's words, "a Web of nouns."
But thanks to natural evolution, Weitz said, the "fundamental structure
of the Web seems to be morphing," adding to the traditional web-of-pages a
few new layers: a social one, as represented by Websites such as Twitter and
Facebook; a geospatial element, which essentially seeks to create a digital
representation of the real world; and more powerful services. Bing is seeking
to play on all those layers, in the process sidestepping Google's dominance of
keyword-based search in favor of new and relatively untapped verticals.
Weitz suggested that the Web's social layer is increasingly mimicking, in
search, the same sort of behaviors people exhibit in the real world. For its
own part, Microsoft has moved to leverage that trend via its deepening
relationship with Facebook: Within Bing search, Websites "liked" by
your Facebook friends feature their names and images alongside a "liked
this" notation. (Not every query triggers the Facebook link, however.)
Facebook and Microsoft have also collaborated on Facebook Profile Search,
which leverages a user's Facebook connections to deliver more relevant results
for people searches. Users can also post messages to their Facebook walls via
Bing's pages for specialized content; for example, typing "Limitless"
into Bing search offers a link to the Bing Movies page for the recent film by
the same name-and the ability to input a Facebook message about same.
Microsoft's broader record in social-networking integration is a bit more
mixed. In October, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who had championed the
integration of cloud and social networking into Microsoft's product portfolio,
resigned from the company. The company incubator he started, FUSE Labs,
continues to work on initiatives such as Docs.com, which allows Facebook users
to create and share Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents with .PDF support and
full-text search.
But social networking also comes with privacy concerns. "We have to
separate the social from personal," said Weitz. A good portion of Bing's
social integration is anonymous (for example, the massive reams of Twitter data
used to tailor individual users' searches, as seen in Bing's Matchbox
technology), but Microsoft-he claims-has pulled back from some potential
Bing features capable of more deeply leveraging personal data.
The second layer, geospatial data, represents the Web's attempts to give the
real world what Weitz termed "full representation digitally on the Web."
In theory, that means leveraging the Web's information to create expansively
detailed portraits of a particular place or object: for example, Bing using
data from Yelp and other sources to offer up a specific restaurant when the
user types in the search terms "bar," "Flatiron District," "basement"
and "private room." That layer can help refine and direct user search
in ways not possible-or at least very difficult-in the pages-of-hyperlinks
paradigm.
The third layer is the Web's increased focus on robust services, such as
booking flights or securing local deals. Hence Bing's traditional focus on
verticals such as travel, and newer initiatives such as a "Deals" tab
that lets mobile users access daily discounts in their particular area. That
additional focus on booking and services, said Weitz, helps prod the Internet
from its previous state as a "Web of nouns" to a more active "Web
of verbs," enabling users to more effectively do things in the real world.
"We see the Web going in this direction," he added. "It's a
long game." And, evidently, an evolving one.
Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Playboy, WebMD, AARP the Magazine, AutoWeek, Washington City Paper, Trader Monthly, and Private Air. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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