Why is Google Copying Bing So Much?
By Frank Reed. Filed in Search Marketing |Tags: Bing, Google, Microsoft, search, Search Engines, Web search engine
Image by michperu via Flickr
by Frank Reed
If you have been paying attention to what Google has been doing as of late to improve its user experience, you might be noticing something strange. It seems that almost every time that Google makes an improvement in its aesthetic appeal, it looks more and more like Bing. Remember the short-lived attempt to customize the Google home page recently which has since been removed?
Take the latest change to hit the search engine, which is its presentation of image search results. Here is the old look for Google image search results:
Here is the new look:
You also no longer have to click through pages of results as they are now all on one page, although page numbers are assigned to show page breaks.
Now here’s Bing’s image search. A little more white space in Bing, but essentially the same look and feel:
In addition, Google is copying Bing’s use of a mouse-over expansion of each image to give some details about the image.
All in all, I just find it interesting that while Google is the far superior engine in market share AND results, it is playing catch-up with Bing in how it presents itself. It’s not the end of the world, but it does seem like a hat-tip from Google to Microsoft, which is just not natural.
What’s your take?
Saturday, July 24th 2010 at 11:44 am |
hi,
its a nice post !
Google is the far superior engine in market share and results .Thanks for sharing yours ideas.
Saturday, July 24th 2010 at 4:14 pm |
Google sux
Microsoft rules.!!!
Saturday, July 24th 2010 at 7:36 pm |
Slow day or what?
Sunday, July 25th 2010 at 7:31 am |
IT SUCKS! That’s obvious! Just another BING, what i don’t understand is this; why is google so desperate to conform to new standards? I mean for crying out loud, i loved the old one, now it takes me longer to search exactly what im looking for and the results are not nearly the same as they used to be now you just get CRAP! maybe if they could at least create a button to revert to the old one, then maybe I’d consider continuing to use google images. but google, you’ve really blown it this time, AWFUL simply AWFUL upgrade!
Sunday, July 25th 2010 at 1:35 pm |
Well, MS is not exactly a minor player so when they do something, u pay attention. Bing look and feel is an improvement over the ‘only an engineer can make a thing look as bad as Google’ (well, Yahoo tries hard) – so keeping up with competition is the way to go!
My guess, anyway, but you made a nice observatzion!
:)
Hugues
Sunday, July 25th 2010 at 9:22 pm |
Myself I like the old way, where you have more information about the images without having to mouse over them. And oddly enough depending on whether I’m at home or work, I still get he old view.
Sunday, July 25th 2010 at 9:45 pm |
I have been wondering the same thing. I don’t know why google is copying bing and I actually really dislike bing, but I do LOVE the new google images infinity scrolling!
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Monday, July 26th 2010 at 5:44 am |
May be this was not intentionally, co-incidently.
Or may be Google hire the same designer who has design Bing…..:)
Thanks,
Smita
Tuesday, July 27th 2010 at 2:58 pm |
Excellent observation Frank.
I thought the same thing when I saw Google revamp its image search layout, but then again, this is what I love about Google. They are constantly testing new features and layouts in all of their products (Apps, Docs, Adwords, Analytics, etc) to maximize customer satisfaction and efficiency.
Though it does look very close to what Bing offers, I would not be surprised if Google had this (and who knows how many more) layout planned for testing before Bing surfaced.
Thanks for the write up.
Tuesday, July 27th 2010 at 6:52 pm |
Personally I can’t stand BING and I really hate the mouse-over info boxes. They just get in the way. Google has been clean for a long time and actually provides relavent results. I seriously hope they’re not trying to make the user experience “better” (aka more garbage to annoy me)
Wednesday, July 28th 2010 at 5:34 am |
I like both search engine.
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Wednesday, July 28th 2010 at 6:44 am |
May be It will be a coincidence or because of web 2.0 technology everyone will be having same out look.
Thursday, July 29th 2010 at 11:01 am |
ALSO, Google have created a new Local category for it’s mobile search engine. Yes, you’ve guessed it, a copy of Bing’s Window Phone 7 Local search result category, where if you say, search for ‘pizza’, results for pizza premises within your locality are listed, included with address, number and maps/directions.
It just seems like Google are running scared of Bing!
Wednesday, August 4th 2010 at 6:46 am |
I truly HATE the new format for the google image search. it’s not that you have to scroll down now rather than having pages to work through, it’s the fact that everything is all jumbled together.
Not only are the images no longer in neat rows, the relevance to my search term seems to have gone out the window.
Wednesday, August 11th 2010 at 8:57 am |
Are you sure about on the issue that googles copying the details and any upgrade formats on bing? Could you specify some details regarding on it?. Even though the google has almost the same features on the bing, we couldn’t easily judge it that it is copied.
Sunday, November 14th 2010 at 10:54 pm |
to me, this just shows that google is chicken and scared of the power that bing could have in the future. Bing clearly has many good things going for it. Google should simply be itself and stop trying to copy people. Its not good practise ethically and sets up a bad precedent for Google’s mindset in the future.