Why we all need Microsoft’s new search engine to succeed

Bada Bing: well, that’s the joke many will be making if Microsoft goes ahead and calls its new search engine Bing when in launches at the AllThings:D conference last week. Kumo is the other name that has been circulating for months, and while its the better name, it’s the substance of the service that will ultimately count.

Microsoft doesn’t exactly have a spectacular record in search…well, online in general, but this time is important: we all need need Microsoft’s new search engine to succeed.

The why is simple: Google’s monopoly in search is bad for innovation and bad for users. Before we get into semantics on the monopoly statement, it should be noted that outside of the United States, Google regularly has market share of around 90% or higher in countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom; that they don’t in the United States is a quirk that is slowly changing, and Google’s share went through 70% at the beginning of 2009, and is still climbing.

This isn’t in anyway to slight what Google is doing now: they have market dominance because they offer the best service. Their monopoly isn’t one that is exclusionary in a traditional business sense (think AT&T prior to being broken up, or Telstra in Australia prior to deregulation), but it does share some traits with traditional monopolies: Google in 2009 is bigger, slower and more bloated than it ever has been before. Monopoly markets all share similar traits: without competition, the need to innovate and improve stagnates with time, and in extreme cases comes to a halt. Again, this isn’t to say that Google strictly meets that criteria yet, but it could.

Wolfram at the door

There’s no better example of what competition can do for innovation then what happened this year with the launch of Wolfram Alpha. Ignore that Wolfram turned out to be 2009’s Cuil, and consider what happened in the lead up to its launch, when the expectation was far higher than the end result. Google started launching new tools that took the good fight to what Wolfram was promising. Google Universal Search, Google Squared and Google Public Data all offer new ways to use data, and have been fairly noted by many as being Google’s response to Wolfram. That Google may have eventually offered these services anyway is a moot point: that they offered them when they did, and perhaps earlier than they would otherwise had offered them is a direct response to competition in the market.

The real-time web

The “real-time” web is this years buzz term that’s used to describe live updates. It’s actually a misnomer in many uses: for example, the “real-time” updates on FriendFeed aren’t really real-time, but automatic updating. The difference being is that you can only have real time when the inputs are made directly into the service, where as RSS import for example relies on both a polling capability, and that the source is fresh as well (anyone who uses FeedBurner knows what I’m talking about.) Twitter is more real time because it is primarily direct input, although even there, there’s some reliance on feed sharing that could be delayed.

Surprisingly Google is making noise about Twitter and the real-time web, and is talking about collaborating with Twitter. “People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it,” said Google founder Larry Page. “I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis.”

Twitter isn’t a real threat to Google, but the competition from Twitter is driving Google to further innovate again.

The need, and the likely reality

That reasons we need Microsoft’s new search engine to succeed are clear, and yet the odds of it doing so aren’t great. Microsoft is a company full of very talented people who create great products, but are scattered throughout the organization and rarely run the show. Microsoft has some wonderful web tools that don’t get enough praise. Their 3D modeling was ahead of Google previously, Photosynth, the big coffee table touch computers…there’s also other services, which perhaps I can’t recite because its been so long since I’ve used them, along with most other people, and that’s another problem: breaking through.

The other big problem is one of branding: are we visiting MSN, Live, Windows Live, Windows Star Trek Enterprise, Sumo, Kumo, MSN Live? Google is a brand, Microsoft online is a marketing team who change their name as quickly as they drink the Stolly they use to motivate them to begin with. How the hell can you embrace a brand that doesn’t know what it is every 6-12 months? Worse still, how can you use something called Bing? Even though Kumo has a ring to it, there’s still the branding problem: it’s YET another brand. Google is a one stop destination for nearly everything you could want, Microsoft online is the cheap super-big Chiniese supermarket where half the products aren’t labelled in English, and while it has some amazing treats, most of the time they’re too hard to find, so it’s not worth visiting the supermarket to begin with.

I really really hope that Microsoft may have finally got its shit together and that the new search engine is brilliant, but given the track record so far I wouldn’t bet on it, no matter how much we all need it to succeed.