Who Will Win the War - Bing with Yahoo Vs. Google

Bing-Yahoo-Google has formed the new Bermuda triangle of search engines!

The war has begun among three SE (Search Engine) giants (Google, Yahoo & Bing).
After the deal between yahoo and Microsoft finalised, the news spreads up like hot cake in the search engine arena. The daunting battle started to take on the overwhelming dominance of Google in the online advertising market.

A 10-year deal that gives Microsoft its best shot yet to show its new search technology, Bing, is as good as or better than Google's. Microsoft also hopes to use Yahoo to divert sales from Google, which generates more than $20 billion a year from ads.

Yahoo’s share of the revenue under the agreement can move to 93% in the last five years of the deal, up from 88% in the first five years.

Yahoo will get $50 million a year for the first three years of the contract. Yahoo may use these payments to partially cover transition and implementation costs not otherwise covered under the Search Agreement.

Microsoft also has to maintain certain revenue per search numbers which cannot fall below a specified percentage of Google’s numbers or if the combined Yahoo and Microsoft query market share in the United States falls below a specified level Yahoo can terminate the contract.

Bing strives to provide “Instant Answers”—offering relevant information in the search result description to save the searcher the time of clicking through to a website. Other time-savers include the ability to mouse-over video search results to watch clips from within their thumbnail previews, and the option to see website previews and summaries by hovering over an indicator to the right of each search result.

Let the SE (Search Engine) games begin

As we watch the competition unfold in the search arena, librarians and information pros will want to make note of trends that could help inform and improve our own search practices and interfaces.

Many of these new search engines are using structured data to provide one-stop solution pages as well as include relevant information within results descriptions to reduce additional clicks. Others are providing much-sought after real-time results which enable searchers to follow and participate in online conversations. And still others are accommodating users’ natural language queries, offering time-saving media and website previews, and presenting useful filters through faceted search results and recommendations.

Whether the search engine wars have re-ignited or not, there is plenty to observe right now as each new initiative strives to provide searchers with the best access to information in their area of specialization.

As the content of the Web continues to grow, we are seeing search engines and other similar services competing to serve our retrieval needs. To access the vast content stores of the read/write Web, these search tools make use of structured and linked data, real-time search, personalization, and more focused filtering techniques. If you’re a fan of buzzwords, you might say we’ve entered Web 3.0, a new era that is motivated by the need to more effectively organize, filter, and access information online.

At least in search engine land, those buzzwords have been flying of late—including talk of semantic search engines (Hakia, Wolfram Alpha), real-time search engines (Twitter Search, Topsy), decision engines (Bing), computational knowledge engines (Wolfram Alpha), and the not-so-recent vertical search engines (Indeed, Scirus).

There is no doubt a lot of innovation is happening in the search space right now, and while Google remains the King with over 78% marketshare that no longer means that there isn’t competition. One thing that we learned from Web 2.0 was that upstart applications which tackled singular tasks (i.e. YouTube for videos, Twitter for status updates, Flickr for photos, etc.) and did them well, could stand with—and be acquired by—giants.

Within a matter of weeks three very different and highly publicized search engines have recently emerged including Wolfram Alpha (May 18th), Microsoft Bing (May 28th), and Google Squared (June 3rd), each with their own unique offerings. There have also been rumblings of a Facebook vs. Twitter Search smackdown in the works, and speculation that Google is quietly planning a real-time microblogging search engine. Are we witnessing a resurgence of the old search engine wars?

The Winner? ( ?-?-? )

I don't think Microsoft & Yahoo will wipe out Google; Google will wipe out both Yahoo and Microsoft. Instead, it's more likely you'll see wins and losses between them, but that all will remain giant players in the near-to-medium future.
Google is the king of search. It's good to be king, but it’s often hard to stay king.

Reporters and industry analysts keep ask the same question: "Can Microsoft & Yahoo beat Google, and how would they do it?" I think Microsoft & Yahoo's battle against Google will be waged not with technology or features, but with marketing and product positioning. It is a marketing battle, not a technology showdown.
We all recognize that brand promises must be backed up by performance, but hearts and minds are won through differentiation. That starts in the mind, not in product features.

Similarly, in the mind of Internet users, Google owns the term "search engine." It's the clear leader, and unseating a leader is nearly impossible -- unless you're Microsoft.