Google On Bing Attack Ads: "Others Should Focus On Building Good Products"

Google On Bing Attack Ads: “Others Should Focus On Building Good Products”

Mar 10, 2013 at 1:14pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Scroogled petition Google has largely ignored Bing’s Scroogled campaign, the one attacking it over the pay-for-play change to Google Shoppping & Gmail privacy. But today, Google search chief Amit Singhal pushed back a bit, saying Bing perhaps should focus on making better products rather than attacking Google.

Speaking at the SXSW conference, when taking a question posed via Twitter about how Google views Bing’s attacks, Singhal responded to say “We focus on our users.” Then he continued: “Others should focus on building good products, too” to audience applause.

You can read more of his talk here: Live Blog: Google Search Chief Amit Singhal At #SXSW.

About The Author: Danny Sullivan is a Founding Editor of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also serves as Chief Content Officer for Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He has a personal blog called Daggle (and keeps his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan

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Chris Savage

burn!
David Rothwell

Love it.

Sensible companies never knock the competition.

It’s pretty poor if you have to spend good money on bad publicity.
Durant Imboden

In fairness to Bing, Microsoft’s search engineers aren’t off writing ad copy when they should be writing algorithms. (Maybe Microsoft should be plowing more money into search research and less into advertising, but one could argue that nobody’s going to try Bing–no matter how good it is or isn’t–without an awareness-building campaign.)
http://www.dekh.com/members/profile/13 Harsh Bawa

Amit did very well to answer a question sensibly and Honestly.

Microsoft should definitely put more emphasis and money into search research and algorithms rather then spending energy and resources in attacking Google.

Though thousands of people all over the world may not like Google, there are also millions who still stick to Google for their daily search.

Unless people actually know how effective Bing is or what recent changes they have introduced to bring better search results, no one will go to Bing.
http://www.facebook.com/gotbacon78 TJ Bacon II

PEOPLE, BING JUST SUCKS ASS PERIOD. ALL THE TIME, STOP BEING POLITE FOR MICROSOFT. THEY CAN WIPE THERE OWN ASS.
http://twitter.com/jwdlatif Jawad Latif

Bing can never compete Google.
Tripti Chaturvedi

I have applied for the bing ads for my sites:

http://olxy.in/

http://www.sizlad.com/

http://www.onquery.com/

but still waiting for the ads to activated.. I am getting support from the bing ads but curious to know why is it taking this much time?
http://babypickel.com/vincenzo.html Chenzo

I agree with you Durant – so true!
http://twitter.com/drdan01 Dan Kirsch

Good one Danny! Seem to recall similar discussions back in Meta Editor days!
http://www.v2interactive.net/ Josh

Kind of like all Google supported phones do regarding iPhones? Oh…
http://www.v2interactive.net/ Josh

Ah, you beat me to it. Nice.
http://www.v2interactive.net/ Josh

What a well thought-out, educated and obviously researched response. Kudos, mate!
http://twitter.com/stefanweitz Stefan Weitz

We agree – it’s why people chose Bing over Google two-to-one in blind tests ;). http://bingiton.com
http://twitter.com/emoryrowland Emory Rowland

Please don’t ever stop, Bing!
Vardhman Jain

Lol Stefan weitz, another of made up fact by Microsoft, Give people assurance to get a free XBox and collect their search queries and optimize Bing to work better on those. Problem is people still need to be offered stuff to use Bing.
Mike Taylor

Bing sucks and the results are not as good as Google. Another hurdle that Bing has to go over is the fact that Google doesn’t have to advertise because when people talk about searching something online, they don’t use the word search or search engine. They say “Google It” or “Google”. They are being advertised by word of mouth every second. If Google was down and I had to use something else, I would use Yahoo before Bing.