Google vs. Bing – a PR mistake

Last week we had to hear about how Google accused Bing of stealing their search results. The story went back and forth between the two companies for several days and in short, Bing was tracking search patterns of other users and used those results in their search engine. For the full story you can read this excellent article on The Next Web: http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/02/04/the-great-google-v-bing-slap-fight-explained-piece-by-piece/

Now all technical information aside, from a PR standpoint this was a big mistake by Bing. It’s a old PR datum that, that which people pay attention to becomes more popular. And what Google has just done is make Bing more popular.

I always thought that Google didn’t care about Bing since Google’s market share is hardly affected by the arrival of Bing. But Google has just admitted that they consider Bing “dangerous” and they’ve just told the world that Bing exists and is a competitor.

I work with lots of SEO guys at WIHP and I’ve been telling them for a while now to start paying attention to Bing and start doing work on that search engine. They just laugh at it, but Google has just done me a great favor since they’re all wondering what is this company that can scare Google like this.

A great example of a PR mistake and how a little “attack” can play against you. Similar to hotels spending lots of time answering bad reviews, it just tells people that they are afraid of bad reviews. Well that’s for another day.