For all you Mad Magazine fans, Spy vs Spy is alive and well in the Search business with Microsoft Bing vs Google Search. Bing started it off with a fast and snappy background images and a sidebar of menu items. Google responded by matching that sidebar with more easily accessible Google-wide as well as search options. Bing responded with some more sidebar options and special search results for News and Travel queries. To which Google already doing special News and image/media options added “suggest” options as you type search terms. Bing responded by doing the same “suggestions” and added page preview of search results. So Google responded with its page previews, suggested modified searches and previews of the the search results as you type in the search terms. This is the state of the search art at this time [I think]:
But I fully expect Bing to match Google’s dynamic display of search results as you type in the search request fairly soon. After all, Bing is already borrowing search results from Google. But what would really be appreciated is a solution to SEO deception where spam links at hundreds of sites falsely raise the rank of a site as seen here on Google.
In sum, given the presence of Twitter with its searches on hundreds of millions of daily messages and Facebook’s 500 million Likers, it looks like there is lots of heavyweight competition in the Search market.
