If there is one thing that can be said about Microsoft, it is that the software giant never goes into any new venture without plenty of preparation. When Microsoft and Yahoo! parted ways, there were rampant rumors about Microsoft possibly buying Yahoo!. The truth is that Microsoft was setting up its own search engine, Bing, to become a player in the search engine industry. With Yahoo! able to focus on its own endeavors now and Bing prepared to open up new advertising territory, it looks like Google is going to start feeling the squeeze in 2016.
The gap between the number of monthly users on Google and the next four search engines combined is still substantial, so Google is not ready to go running for the hills just yet. But the gap is closing, and the other search engines are making moves that will start to put even more pressure on Google.
Major search engines such as Bing and Yahoo! are starting to promote their own supply of Internet images to try and become an image resource for online marketing companies. Microsoft announced in November 2015 that it will be launching a new advertising initiative for Bing that is designed to make the search engine a focus for the online search industry. Even such ancient search engines as AOL are starting to re-assert themselves in this new environment.
Niche search engines such as Giphy and TinEye are also gaining in popularity, and image search engines such as Creative Commons are also becoming large resources for images on the Internet. These search engines focus on providing results that are custom-made for certain audiences, and people looking for more specific search results are finding these niche engines to be extremely helpful.
It is entirely possible that the same people who use Bing and Giphy are also using Google at the same time. In other words, the growing audiences for these alternative search engines are not really putting much of a dent in Google’s daily traffic. But as the numbers continue to grow for these other search engines, they can no longer be ignored.
Website owners will have to start discussing marketing tactics for these other search engines when they talk to their Internet marketing partners. To ignore these other search engines is ignoring millions of potential customers every day. The search engine methods for all marketing companies are going to have to shift to start offering more focus on these other search engines, and stop focusing only on Google.
Each search engine has its own rules for generating more traffic, and Internet marketing companies are going to have to start incorporating some of the rules from these other search engines into their approaches for increasing client web traffic. A good search engine optimization plan is one that mingles the requirements of Bing and Yahoo! in with the needs of Google. The website owners who start focusing on these other search engines now will be that much further ahead of the game a few years down the road.
Microsoft has a history of putting companies out of business to advance its own profits. While it is hard to imagine Bing replacing Google as the default Internet search engine any time soon, it is important that marketing companies start making Bing happy as a proactive approach to preparing for future changes in the search engine world.
