Microsoft get the jump on Google?

Thursday, 22 October 2009 14:22

Several articles this morning are reporting the impending announcement of deals between Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook to integrate real time status updates into the Bing search engine results.

Bing has been increasing it's share in the search market - at Yahoo's expense - according to Compete. Sitting at 8.8%, it may not currently compete with Google's 72.8%, but the industry commentators, particularly at BNET, are suggesting this will be of serious concern to Google. It could be big enough to change the search market dynamics if Microsoft get the jump on Google who then have to play catchup.

What could be of concern to a lot of people is the potential for privacy intrusions. What goes online could end up being seen by everyone (especially the particularly embarrassing ones). When people spend half their life online blogging, tweeting and messaging it becomes a natural part of how we communicate and people relax any self-moderation they may be doing. Even so, there are already privacy concerns by many Facebook users and we don't think they'll react very well to the potential for their status updates to be showing up in search results.

What we'll all have to wait to see is whether including status updates have any value to the searcher or whether it will fill results up with more junk than can already be the case.

Facebook and Twitter could also become overrun (or should I say more over-run) by marketers desperate to leverage whatever mechanism they can to get their product in front of as many eyeballs as possible, which could bite both Facebook and Twitter in the rear end.

BNET article by Erik Sherman

Techcrunch article by Michael Arrington