Why is Google so dominating? Apart from the fact that it mostly returns relevant search results, people like Google because it always loads fast. I see Google make the layout as simple as possible so that it performs best on most browsers. It means Google gives the priority to performance rather than appearance.

They are also not as obtrusive with their advertising, there is a lot less of the nastiest and most annoying of the ads. But quite simply they have been, till now, been by far the best.

Well, I'm a performance and appearance guy, so I always compare search results between Google and Bing.

I have always considered Google to be an engineering company that cannot market anything properly. So in my books, they might always have the best performing software or hardware, too bad nobody will ever know about it.

Gmail was their probably best success story, and even so it was marketed mostly through word of mouth. Take Google Wave. It might just be an incredible new step in communication, yet nobody understands how to use it.

As an opposite, take Apple, a marketing company that knows little about engineering. When an iPod came out, it did one thing - play music but it looked super hot and they made sure everyone knew it looked hit. Then an iPad comes out that does things that were done better and before by others, yet they spend money on ads and publicity - and everyone will go and get one, even against the higher price than competition.

I agree that Wave is failing because of its poor advertising. Gmail was just incredible, it was ground breaking and by making it invite only it had an air of exclusivity. Now that was good advertising-its just a shame that they can't repeat that.

I see it a different way. Google takes the route of letting their product speak for itself. They don't have to hold press conferences to unveil new ideas. Off topic, does anyone remember that Google commercial that aired about a month ago?

They hold a press conference for everything, most recently for Wave, Chrome OS and Nexus One.
A love story through search? It was a genius commercial, made me all emotional and stuff.

Simplicity wins overall.

Google is so large it will be hard for any other search company to overtake them. When you create a website, are you optimizing for Bing or Google? Do you want to be more relevant with searches on Yahoo or Google? See where this is going.

Mark

Having said that, I wanted to bring to everyone's attention that since launch, Bing has gained over 3% in search market share, which is a big deal. I had a graph of it on my PC to show the market share trend/growth but I cannot find it!

On top of it, Microsoft and Yahoo have just gotten approval from the U.S. and the E.U. for their long-term partnership, in which case Bing will power Yahoo search and Yahoo will sell search advertising for both companies. That might add at least a couple of more points to Bing overnight and over long-term as well.

With more positive reviews of Bing recently, nowadays you kind of have to consider Bing in your SEO efforts. I know that Google is still undisputed leader, but the more people making a habit to use both search engines to find stuff like Bing, the higher the chances they will use it more often in the the future as well.

Take us for example. HostingDiscussion.com is very well ranked in Google, but I wish we were positioned equally well in both Yahoo and Bing as well. I am starting to investigate what could make us rank there better as I never liked placing all eggs in one basket. And that's exactly the common mistake (I assume it is common) people do when they focus on Google performance alone.