Just over a week ago Verizon Blackberry users discovered a slight change in their default search browser, losing the quick buttons for Google, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, and others for the singular, shiny and new (to them) “Bing” option. It remains to be seen whether the rumored exchange of a cool $500 mill. from Microsoft to Verizon is worth the customer outrage, but hey, that’s… business?
Further rumored details are that this is part of a five-year exclusivity plan, so Verizon smart-phone users may not be seeing the end of this anytime soon. The question for us cool SEO kids is, as always, “How does this affect me?” Though this isn’t the point of my question, if you’re a Verizon user, then you have to actually type in Google to get there, losing seconds of precious time EVERY time. Oh noes! Personally, I use T-Mobile, primarily because I was led to believe Catherine Zeta-Jones visits your house… *ahem* and I’m still waiting. But I digress…
The thing is, this is still too new to see what impact it will have on the search engine arms race. Verizon’s the big dog here in the U.S., but will Bing gain much market share with this move – will we start to see it in our Pay Per Click budgets? Is Bing looking ahead to try and bully into the future smart phone search market? Or, what seems to be most likely at the moment, will “google” remain the most searched term in Bing’s search engine?
I use both Bing and Google search engine and i dont see much difference in their search results. I use google for searching hard to find academic topics and Bing for general search.