Infotech: was Bing a stalking horse?

Microsoft's Bing is not rubbish - it's just not the best of breed. Despite all of its faults - and there are many including its dominance of the web-advertising business that has turned it into a de facto must have for web site owners and an automatic channel for advertisers - that honour still belongs to Google.

Microsoft's MSN and LIVE! search engines, despite the push to include them with all desktop systems, set as default, has done little to dull Google's dominance.

Bing promised much, but delivered little. The core search engine is quite good but the much promoted ancillary services are too US centric - even on its Australian launch site. And its News service is extremely basic - however, it does avoid the rash of identical stories that plagues Google News and that is a good thing.

Bing is also slow to find new sites and it is a long way from effective cross-referencing one site to another: this spidering was at the heart of early search engine development and remains the best way to find sites. However, the upside of this is that Bing does not appear to be bulging with ad-farm sites which plague Google searches. And its algorithm does not, thankfully, seemingly put Wikipedia and its multiple clones as automatic first entries in search results.

But what Bing really needs is Yahoo's vast numbers of visitors. And what Yahoo needs is more up to date tech. So there is a synergy.

However, where Google scores and Yahoo fails is in its interface. Even the new version is rubbish. It's a major headache to find anything in Yahoo.Com which persists in trying to be a portal when what the world really needs is a great search engine. In fact, Yahoo Finance is an excellent product: if you can find it.

Bing has followed the Google lead (although it does have a graphical background to its search box page). Not that Google started the simple box-in-the-middle-of-the-page idea: that was developed by several "meta search" engines in the 1990s.

So will the tie-up bring new revenue to those that are currently second best?

Probably. But they need to sort out wider media coverage, a more rapid and more comprehensive indexing of sites and find a way to produce a rival to Google AdSense.

So the answer to the question at the top of this piece is this: Microsoft could afford to develop a better search engine; Yahoo could not. Yahoo could market a search engine, Microsoft could not. Yahoo News is basically RSS feeds from a minute selection of agencies and media; Microsoft has media savvy and muscle. So Bing was not a spoiler, designed to attract business by novelty if nothing else.

The biggest challenge for Yahoo which will take 88% of revenue derived from searches undertaken via its platform under the 10 year deal, is to maximise the use of its search engine.

To do that, it needs to do one thing: remember that people can only use it if the can find it. A big white space with a search box in it is the best way to make that happen.