Competition is good

June 16th, 2009  |  Justin Hope

For those of us who like to draw a line in the sand between such companies as Microsoft and Google, here is something to keep in mind: competition is good. Since Microsoft released its new search engine Bing, there has been a deluge of reviews. Most say that even though Bing is not a breakthrough in terms of technology, it is a solid product with value of its own. And that fact has Google’s attention.

I decided to try two simple searches on each to compare what I found. I searched for “Google” on Bing, and then “Bing” on Google. The results are slightly different in tone. Whereas Bing brought up news about google as the first result, Google brought up the Bing home page. The Bing result was a little more personal by showing me what news about Google is available via some quick links, followed by short descriptions of news items. The Google result just gave the nitty gritty.

Both search engines are good choices. What I find important is that competition has potentially put a small fire under Google to start adding further improvements to its own product, perhaps even further than it may have if Bing never existed.