The internet search engine industry is a huge demand. With Google having its top spot, Bing wants to be close behind if it can't come first.
In November, Microsoft has made a major revision to its Bing for Apple's iOS app by introducing many new and and upgraded features. They include barcode scanner and real-time Uber data, supports for animated GIFs, swiping navigation, better performance and responsiveness, and less bugs. Overall, Bing is improving user-experience to a new margin.
While Bing still can't compete with Google in its league, it's not a big lost for Microsoft since Bing is able to be alongside to Google to some users.
As a compelling alternative to Google, Bing is somehow far behind Alphabet's Google when it comes to search. But its emphasis inside the industry has become bigger as Microsoft further push Windows 10 variants to more people. With the strategy, Microsoft could bring the Bing app to more people, and whether these people are liking it or not, Microsoft is eating away Google's market share bits by bits.
Competing With Google
As a start, Microsoft redesigned Bing app to be more user-friendly. This includes a new interface with a set of icons to correspond to search queries that may be appealing to the user using it. For example, the "Near me" gives a list of nearby shopping places, gas stations and many more, alongside with digital coupons for those local retailers. The same goes to "Restaurants" and "Movies". The next are "Images", "Videos" and "Maps".
Swiping down those buttons, users can see the respected articles.
This way, Bing approaches Google in its own game. With improved searching capability and better in-app linking, Bing's search results for particular restaurants for example, their read reviews are depending on Yelp app Bing users are using. For maps and directions, Bing directs users to either Google Maps or Apple Maps while movies are from MovieTickets and Fandango.
Bing for the first time has achieved profitability. This is because Bing has been included and succeed in getting more users in both the web and mobile. As Microsoft push Windows 10 on more devices, Bing should be available to more people.
While Bing's improvements indeed helped the company in achieving desirable profit, Google is still more handy for mobile users. One of which is because of its automatic voice recognition. The feature allows users to search without touching their devices at all. Bing also supports voice input, but it still lags behind Google in some phrases. Other advantage of Google is its integration with Google Now. People using Android devices can find this helpful because Google also has Gmail, Chrome and many other apps that may come standard on Android devices.
Microsoft has its own digital personal assistant. Called Cortana, it resides within separate and dedicated app. While it can do many things Now can do, it's more useful on Microsoft's mobile devices which apparently has a much lower market share than Google.
"Windows 10 is...driving increased usage of other Microsoft services. Specifically, Bing's share [of the U.S. search market] is up to 20.7 percent...and advertising revenue grew 29 percent worldwide, helped by Windows 10 users asking Cortana more than 1 billion questions," said Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella on the company's 2015's quarterly earnings call.
The Undisputed Dominance. Getting A Competitor
Despite Microsoft has improved Windows, Cortana and Bing, it is still having a long way to go to compete on par with Google in getting mobile users. Google is still a search dominant titan on the internet, and Bing is considerably less popular. While Google holds one of the top spots in almost every app store, Bing is somehow invisible.
But with the many improvements Microsoft did to its products and its search capability, Microsoft is indeed heading towards the right direction. And that is eating away Google's market share a little at a time. If it can continue to push its services and products to more people, and at the same time improve them to benefit its users, Microsoft have the ability to steal a larger portion of what Google is conquering.
By improving its presence, Microsoft is not shy in presenting itself to competing platforms and joining the cross-platform movements. While this is indeed valuable to to other platform users, some may wish that both Google and Apple would do the same about Windows users.