Google vs Bing – The social network, real-time search war begins
It was bound to happen, both Google and Bing have been targeting social media and real-time search since the launch of Google caffeine back in August 2009, roughly the same time that Google started to index tweets from Twitter.com.
On October 21st during the Web 2.0 Summit, Yusuf Mehdi of Bing officially confirmed partnerships with Twitter and Facebook to integrate public tweets and Facebook updates into its search results.
A few hours later Marrisa Mayer of Google also announced a partnership with Twitter in her presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit.
Wow, what a day! Two massive partnerships announced in 1 day and only a few hours apart. However, those of you that have been following the two search engines will understand that both Google and Bing have been working on real-time search facilities for quite sometime now and have been trading blow by blow with each other.
Lets take a quick look at the scores
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| Round 1 | Google Search Wiki – Rank and comment on organic results. ( available to Google account holders only ) | |
| Round 2 | Begins to index & display twitter status updates in url format | |
| Round 3 | Google Caffeine which ranks twitter URLs stronger in search results | Bing Wave 2, integrating Twitter and Facebook updates in search results |
| Round 4 | Launches new Google product called SearchWiki SideWiki, a quasi social network which allows users to leave and rank comments on webpages | N/a |
| Round 5 | Partnership Twitter to include personalized tweets in search results. ( no working demo yet ) | Launches Bing Twitter search (beta), a real-time search for tweets. Live beta available |
| Round 6 | Announces new SocialSearch product, to include personalized results from social media websites, not limited Twitter. ( no working demo Beta here ) | Bing Wave 2, which will include integration with facebook & Twitter. ( no working demo ) |
Google v Bing, who is winning?
It is in our opinion that Bing is leading the race with its already functioning aspects of real-time search products. However in it’s rush to push out the new features we feel that it has failed to innovate in real-time search. Bing’s new Twitter search facility is not ground breaking, there are already many real-time twitter search engines in the market, most with better features such as monitter – which allows users to search and display multiple topics in Twitter in real-time displayed on a single page.
Google on the other hand, we believe will win the race by introducing a better and more innovative product than Bing. In its recent demo the new SocialSearch product, SocialSearch can deliver personalized results from within your social network ( via Google Profile ). Which would mean results are from trusted people in your social network and not spammers, paid tweets etc. This we believe is going receive more praise from users than Bing Twitter search.
No clear winner.. Yet
There are no clear winners in the race for domination in real-time social-media search market, yet. Both Google and Bing are still in its infancy when it comes to this topic.
But it is going to be make or break for Bing, as it struggles for more market share; if Bing can deliver totally new innovative products in this field, we will see good growth.
However, Google with its user dominance can afford to spend more time in development, testing and gathering feedback; which would mean a much more polished product.
For search engine marketers and SEO’s, the best thing we can do is keep up to date with the latest developments from these companies, keep an open mind and be receptive of new ideas. Because, real-time search and social-media search is here to stay, can you afford not to be part of it?
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