Search War: Microsoft Losing Billions On Bing As Plans Secret Weapon

It’s less Bada Bing and more Zero Bing. Microsoft’s search engine is on a losing streak as reports suggest it is losing $1 billion per quarter – a massive loss for the search engine which kicked off just two years ago.

Click to enlarge

Microsoft who are draining billions on the loss making engine – a jaw dropping $5.5bn in total since its kick off in June 2009, according to CNN Money calculations.

Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft has never made money in its online services division, the report suggests, which has lost $9bn since 2007. Ouch.

However, Bing claims it has gained market share from Google accounting for 14.7% of all online searches currently – almost double the figure it held when starting out.

But it appears, this is far from reality – search king Google has retained its lions share of the search pie – at 64.8% – according to ComScore stats – just 0.2% fall since Bing’s arrival two years ago.

This means Microsoft is eating into other competitors share – Yahoo!, Ask, and AOL.

And as CNN points out, Yahoo’s search is powered by Bing.

And despite Google’s dominance, Microsoft aren’t giving up without a fight, telling analysts last week how it will “reorganise the web” and make the Net more searchable than rivals allow (no cooking a la Google, then).

And its all thanks to a technical secret search weapon, President of Online Services Qi Lu told analysts last week.

And Bing has been busy of late, introducing ‘action buttons’ and ‘deep links’ on web searches meaning users can dive straight into a site’s main functionality from results.

“With Action Buttons, it’s less about searching and more about getting things done. With one click of a button, you can get to what you’re looking for right from your search results,’ it said on its blog this week.

Bing wantd to be able to discipher this by being able to understand natural human speak as opposed to just keywords or what Lu termed ‘caveman speak’.

So, instead of typing ‘Jennifer Aniston” and ‘boyfriend’ you can just type ‘Who is Jens boyfriend at the moment’ and get the same results.

The software ace plans to leverage products and partnerships to gain a better understanding of what web searchers really are looking for when they enter a query, said Lu.

To this end, it has hooked up with Facebook for search operations as well as other companies to sell items like tickets, clothes, flights as well as ‘featured Bing brands’ like LG, Sony and Samsung.

However, it would not seek to “out-Google” its biggest rival rather “change the game fundamentally.”