So, We will start with Google,I mean Search.

Search : Bing is not Google, and that is the verdict. Even Bing realizes the same. While presenting Visual Search at TechCrunch 50, they did go on to say when the market leader is as far ahead as Google, there is no point competing. Trying to explore niche areas like visual search made more sense. A statement pretty similar in attitude to Google’s releasing their Chrome OS only for netbooks.

I just get to the right result by Googling it. There was a lot of hype when Microsoft struck a deal with Yahoo for providing their search results. The process is still on, but the result hasn’t exactly been the way Microsoft or Yahoo may have hoped it to be. While Google’s market share didn’t take a hit, it has been Yahoo’s market share which has been eaten into by Bing. Both Google and Bing have struck deals with Twitter to crawl status updates. Bing has already launched its Twitter search at http://www.bing.com/twitter but I have not been able to understand why I should use this instead of real time Twitter search at search.twitter.com . Google’s social search is also far from what we all expected it to be showing only the stuff written by your different friends.

Things to look out for in the near future:

• How Google and Bing include Twitter status updates in their search results?
• Bing is said to have stuck a deal with Facebook, and will hence be able to include Facebook status updates in it. There is a lot of information out there on Facebook.
• Once Yahoo search is powered by Bing, the market-share of Bing will take a big leap. Being on the Yahoo homepage will be a huge boost.
• Negative publicity like Rupert Mudroch not giving out news to Google (hilarious) and Microsoft (mentioned at most places as Bing trying to buy News) trying to trigger the same will not help Bing in any way.
• Realtime searches like OneRiot, SocialMention etc are doing a decent job as far as social media is concerned.

Overall, Google has a huge advantage in this sector,not only because of the results they churn out but also because of the goodwill they have earned. Also, innovation through the various Labs feature always keeps the users interested in Google.

EMail Service: It did not take long for Twitter to go overcapacity when Gmail services  went down for an hour this year. That is extent to which Gmail is being used by the casual email users.

All this and more, Gmail remains the fastest growing emailing service but in terms of market-share there is still some distance to cover.

Although, Gmail has some of the most amazing features thanks mainly to their lab features, but emails have been there for ages and Yahoo and AOL are difficult to replace. The fact that most computers run on Windows and Office dominates the document creation space helps Microsoft’s cause further. The fact that Gmail does go down every now and then has also made the corporates jittery about moving to Gmail. Giving out a package of standard google apps with 50 email IDs free is definitely helping Google’s cause.

Email is being challenged by a lot of technologies like Google very wave, the multiple social networks, threadsy and much more. But, I don’t think email is going to die that quickly. Google is trying to innovate its way into this space but the traditional giants still seem to hold strong.

IM Services: IM services have come a long way from IRC chats to the super hyped Google Wave. IM’s have evolves to VOIP’s where Skype leads the pack by a huge margin, owing to its brilliant quality. We couldn’t find any updated report on the market share of IM services, with most mailing services allowing chat within the browsers. There has been a lot of innovation in the IM services with Gmail even allowing a video chat within the browser. However, this traditional IM market seems to be still dominated by Microsoft, AOL etc.

Facebook has also introduced an IM service within the browser (a crappy one at that) and it is to be seen what impact it has on the IM marketshare’s.

Look out for:

• Google Wave takes collaborative chatting to the next level(real time) and hence can have a major impact on the market.
• Services like meebo and imo.im have been doing a brilliant job of combining all the services in one go.
• AOL’s integration of Twitter can have an impact on the IM marketshare too.

IM Services are moving on at a rapid pace from being personal messaging systems to being collaborative tools and innovations will be required to march ahead. As of now, Microsoft seems to hold a slight advantage with its loyal group of MSN users, but I must say Google is coming.

The next post in this series will cover areas like Browsers, Online Collaboration, The Social Space,Photo sharing and Video Sharing space and some other innovations taken up by these tech giants. Keep watching this space for the remaining part of the coverage.

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This has been happening right since the day Bing declared Visual Search, live, during its presentation. I tried it a couple of times before  I finally tweeted to the Bing team about the same. No surprises from Microsoft again.!! It took them over a week to respond, mentioning the problem.  All that I needed to do was  change my country preference in Bing to US. To cut the long story short, Bing Visual Search has been released in the US only. You can change your country preference by clicking on the country name on the Bing Homepage.

It was only so far that I had to go to get the Bing Visual Search to work. However, for me it was one step further. I was on Linux and Bing Visual Search needs Silverlight installed as a pre-requisite. I found a developmental release for the same but couldn’t  get it to work quickly enough. So, I switched to my brother’s machine, to write about Bing. This happened to be a Windows Machine with Silverlight installed.

After successfully crossing all hurdles, I was ready to dissect  Microsoft’s answer to Google. 

Time to check out Bing Visual Search then. So I thought of  visually searching Laptop only to realize that I couldn’t. Right now only, a limited no of featured galleries are provided by Visual Search Galleries Beta. Not allowing this setback to bog me down, I went on to  search for Digital Cameras . Voila! The Bing team gets its first round of applause from the people who were around me for providing a Visual Treat in their Visual Search.

The results were  pretty impressive with a number of links like, “most popular on Bing”, “highest megapixel”  on the left hand side of the page. Filters like “megapixel”, “optical zoom”, brand etc are extremely useful additions to a search engine, atleast usability wise. At the end of it all you do get your  prized camera, with its pricing, reviews and related information, all under one roof.

So Whats the verdict?

First the pros :

• A Visual  treat to say the least. You will get to hear at-least a couple of wows if you check it out in a group of three.
• The concept is brilliant. Microsoft is not attacking Google in its forte, it seems. They are trying to provide a better overall searching experience. And should this be added here – Bing is the fastest growing search engine.
  
• Getting so much information about the camera of your choice stacked together is a nice experience.

Now the cons :

• Available only for the US. You need to change your country of preference to US.
• Limited number of galleries. Bing needs to add up a lot more galleries very soon, else someone like me will consider it a one time visual experience.
• Comparison between two products, which come up in the same search result, didn’t seem possible. A suggestion from my side to the Bing team.
• SilverLight for Linux ( A demand from my side).
• Sometimes Bing Visual Search seems like  the product comparison sites with a few extra features added  and a couple of existing features removed.

Overall, for me Bing Visual Search is a breath of fresh air in a Google dominated search industry. Good competition may mean better search experience for people like us.

Finally, the microreviews team wishes the Bing Team the very best in its future endeavours.  Hope you guys take Visual search to the next level, where, for atleast a certain number of search based tasks Bing is the first name.