Bing no longer a search-engine blip

REDMOND, Washington (MCT): IN MICROSOFT’S expensive, decade-long battle against Google’s search engine, no detail is too small.

Derrick Connell, Microsoft vice-president in charge of the engineering side of the 4,000-person team that builds the company’s Bing Web search, takes work home with him every weekend.

Connell reviews lists of common queries people type into the search boxes at Google.com and Bing.com. His team has spliced the universe of possible search requests into 40 areas, like nearby places or news. Those categories break up into 152 sub-segments.

In some, Bing displays more helpful results, he says. Others favour Google. Each is a battleground.

“We want to be the best,” Connell says. “We believe in our technology.”

How much the rest of the world believes in Bing is up for debate.

By one measure, the search engine now executes a record one out of every five searches made on desktop computers in the US, a milestone Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella touted last month in a meeting with Wall Street analysts. But Bing’s standing internationally, and in fast-growing mobile search, is a fraction of that.

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Still, executives and outside observers say Bing has gone from the butt of jokes and awkward product placement in movies to a tool comparable to Google’s in terms of its technology. The calls to shelve the business or sell it to a competitor have quieted. Microsoft has integrated Bing’s underlying data-crunching technology into its other software, and plans to tie it closely to its upcoming Windows 10 operating system.

It remains to be seen whether Microsoft can leverage this changing perception into a profit or seriously challenge Google’s status as the Web’s default search engine.