Since Bing’s launch, the search engine has garnered quite a bit of attention. This is no surprise since Microsoft invested so much money into marketing it. It may still be too early to tell, but it seems to be paying off so far. Bing’s numbers have edged up since its launch.
While Google still dominates the search market share by a very wide margin, the company does appear to view Bing as a legitimate competitor, and while not marketing on the scale that Microsoft is, the company has been quick to highlight some of its own search features that might appeal to those infatuated with Bing’s “decision engine” functionality.
Last month, Google put up a page, highlighting some of the special searches you can perform on Google to get your answers right in the results. These included things like weather, movie times, dictionary, calculator, sports scores, stock quotes, etc. There was even a link to this page right on the Google homepage under the search box (although it no longer appears there now). The move seemed to say, “Hey everybody, Bing’s cool, but you know we already have this stuff right?”
Now Google has quietly added a minor feature to its image search that might look familiar to Bing users. You know how Bing has the little menu under the search box, where you can pick what kind of filter you want on your results? Google is now including a similar feature.
Perhaps Google saw that Bing users liked this feature and added it themselves. It makes you wonder what other ideas Google might get from Bing. I’m not saying that they need to get too many ideas from Bing. Google is clearly the leader of the market right now, and the company got there by doing something right. I am also not suggesting that Google is going to start copying everything Bing does. But, if there is a little feature (such as the above example) here and there that can enhance the usability of Google and its search products, perhaps the entire search industry can benefit.
The concept is nothing new. Search engines have been getting ideas from each other for years. It’s how they stay competitive. Really what the above example illustrates is how competition makes the entire industry better. You can see this illustrated in the social media space as well, as Facebook adopts more Twitter-like features, while maintaining most of what people like about Facebook at the same time.
Google recently acknowledged that it has plenty of competition. The company says it must keep innovating to stay on top. Adjusting products to accommodate less innovative, but popular features is a good way to do it too. That seems to be the way major Internet players think.
The image filter feature is a small thing, but it reflects a bigger picture. The more competitive the industry is, the better it is likely to become for us users.
