Google and Microsoft keep up their constant and nearly simultaneous release of innovations, proving that competition between the two search engine rivals is healthy as can be.
Microsoft’s latest is a beta version of ‘visual search’, which transforms a search from a text-based to an image-based experience.They sneakily require you to install Silverlight in order to sue this latest feature, but MSN users don’t seem to mind that any more than Google users mind installing every gadget and widget Google comes up with.
Microsoft is promoting their new feature as particularly useful for product searches and other subjects, both of which are easy to categorize, and are likely to already have images associated with them (sports, for example.)
In addition, Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is still gaining ground – according to the results of a survey released last week, conducted by Comscore and indicating Bing is still growing after earning a 9.3% market share, up from 8.9% in July. Google saw a dip by a marginal 0.1% in August to 64.6 per cent, and Yahoo was able to maintain its market share at 19.3%, but things are in limbo with the proposed deal between Microsoft and Yahoo on the skids.
Microsoft mentioned that they expected Bing to grab enough market share to seriously compete with Yahoo by 2010 – this schedule seems accelerated now, with Yahoo struggling to maintain control of their own search technology.
Tags: Bing, Google, image search, MSN, Silverlight, Yahoo