Can you hear it? A strange maniacal and giddy laughter faintly travels on the wind. I can hear it loud and clear from my office here in Vancouver…it sounds really close. Shhhh. It sounds like it’s coming from Washington State…yes, close to Seattle. Wait, I know that twisted giddy laugh…it’s Microsoft!

A few weeks earlier here in Senses Land we mentioned how Rupert Murdoch had basically lost his mind and was considering banning Google from accessing his many newspaper’s websites- like the blood sucking freeloading leeches they are. I mean really, don’t these guys at Google have any mid 20th century business-sense? Offering a free service that directs millions of people to Rupert Murdoch’s various newspapers and websites without asking anything in return. I mean come on! Where do they get off? It should be a crime to offer such a convenient service that millions of people use. To think that people would do that rather than walk outside in the freezing cold snow or pouring rain to the nearest newspaper stand and buy a physical copy of The Wall Street Journal or sit at home waiting for something interesting and newsworthy to be “reported” on by Fox News is just shocking. And Rupert Murdoch has been shocked long enough! Here’s the plan:

Murdoch blocks Google so that millions of people can no longer see his newspaper articles through that engine, meanwhile he convinces everyone to start using Microsoft’s search engine Bing; clearly it will be the superior search engine now based on the fact that it is the only one where you can get the twisted right-winged drivel produced by Fox News and other Murdoch owned companies. So if you want what the rest of the world considers news you can still use Google and if you want what Rupert Murdoch considers to be news you can use Bing- oh and you can gall dang paying for it too (Or Microsoft can). The details of how that all works will be worked out between Microsoft and News Corp, who I predict will soon become known as News Corpse, as this kind of backwards logic will surely kill this company. Microsoft paying huge sums of money for exclusive access to what many believe is the most slanted and biased news in the world is also, in my opinion, not good for their brand or their pocket book.

I’m not the only one who thinks News Corpse is doomed. The founder of Twitter, Biz Stone, recently spoke about Murdoch’s plans at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) in London England. To use the main sound bytes, Stone said it was a “vain attempt to put the genie back in the bottle” and that it would “fail fast“. When considering how rapidly the technology and software that powers the internet changes, one can clearly see that putting a “paywall” around your content and burying it inside a search engine with a 10% market share is akin to going cyber-Amish. (Yes I am coining that term, you heard it here first. Rupert Murdoch has officially gone cyber-Amish)

That hasn’t stopped the giddy laughter from Redmond Washington though, as Microsoft has been looking for any way possible to chip away at Google’s market share of the online search industry. I’m not sure if making your search engine the only one where users can pay to get right-winged conservative news from an old man who hates the internet is the best way to go about it though.

And so begins Murdoch’s exodus into the online wilderness, welcomed and aided by another global opportunist; it will likely end poorly for the both. They have officially begun to work against the forces of internet-nature and because of this will surely be covered over by the jungle or swept away by the tide. This story is beginning to read like a Greek tragedy, where two heroes are destroyed by their own greed, ego and ambition. Blinded by their own arrogance and sense of invincibility they feel beyond censure of the gods and nature. (in this case Google and internet users)

What a swan song this will be for Rupert Murdoch.

It seems like Microsoft knows just how bored most people are at work. They know that there are thousands and thousands of bored cubicle dwellers, struggling to stay awake, who will do absolutely anything to kill a few minutes, even if that means playing Page Hunt. Don’t get me wrong, when I first heard about it, I played a couple rounds of the crowdsourcing-program-disguised-as-a-game. But then I’ll do just about anything to avoid work.

Page Hunt is a new online game that tests your search skills, while also helping Microsoft improve their search engine Bing. The idea is pretty simple. The player is served up a series of random web pages. The challenge is to look at each page, then determine what you would have to enter in a search box in order to have that page appear in the top 5 rankings in a Bing search. Guess right and you get a bunch of points. Guess wrong and you get nothing. Of course, you still get nothing even if you do get a bunch of points, but no matter.

Of course, the whole thing isn’t designed just to help you have fun while honing your search skills. It’s really designed to help Bing improve the accuracy of its search results. But Microsoft did a decent job of making it at least feel like a game, with high scores, a ticking clock and graphics and all that stuff.

From recent reports, it seems like Bing is doing pretty well. In July, their percentage of seach traffic rose half a percentage point to 8.9% Google is still the King Kamehameha of search engines, with 64.7% of search engine traffic, but that number dropped a bit, with Bing gobbling up the extra traffic. So if you feel the urge to hitch your wagon to a winner, well, go find a fun game to play on Google. But if you like the idea of helping out the underdog, albeit one that lives in a gold-plated doghouse on Bill Gates’ lawn, then give Page Hunt a try. And I betcha can’t beat 600 points.

Funny isn’t it. It took nearly the same amount of time for Google to become the dominant force that it is today both as a search engine and more, as it took Microsoft and Yahoo to finally hammer out a partnership aimed at dominating the search engine and more market. Microsoft is confident that the release of their new Bing search engine will re-assert their presence online and have partnered with Yahoo, the second largest engine after google, to leverage their product and brand. Interesting that just as Google begins to produce software for personal computers, a market traditionally dominated by Microsoft, then MS turns around and sticks it to Google where they’ve been most dominant.

Oh to be a fly on the wall in these people’s boardrooms. I wonder if they have a Risk board or Axis and Aliies out on the table? My advice to Microsoft/Yahoo as a humble technology and software blogger would be to try something new. Make something new. It’s what’s made Google so dominant. They kept on introducing new products, new features, new apps, and lots of them. Some of them didn’t stick, but some really did. Google Maps is a great example. Even the products that Google is releasing to move into Microsoft territories are more innovative than Microsoft’s. New features, new uses etc.

Microsoft suffers from a lack of imagination, something that Google has embraced as a key pillar in their strategy. There are plenty of search engines, a few of them are popular, one of them is utterly dominant. If I were a business, I wouldn’t try and catch up with Google when I could spend money to innovate and release a product that people instantly gravitated to, people will need to be pulled away from Google. Another search engine, just a search engine, won’t do that. With all that money and all that power one would think that Microsoft wouldn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but here they go. Maybe they have to? These guys aren’t stupid. I can’t be smarter than Microsoft Corporation? Can I?

With the release of Chrome, Google is aggressively moving into Microsoft’s territory. If Google is able to muscle into that market, they put themselves in a strong position for whatever comes down the pipe. What do most people use their computers for? The internet. Google has the internet part down- their brand is the internet. If they can get the platforms for PC down too then their options open up even more to produce more products similar to Wave and Chrome.  Seamlessly integrating the things that people use their computers for both offline and online is where Google appears to be looking ahead to.

Once again if I were Microsoft I’d be digging in a trench around PC platforms and I would’ve been working hard to make an OS that didn’t crash or jam up for the past five years instead of releasing a search engine to challenge Google once they owned 70-80% of global traffic. Focus on your strengths, admit your weaknesses, innovate, innovate, innovate. And above all else, admit that things change fast in this world. A 5 to 10 year head start is all Google needed to put them so far ahead in this category that no one is catching up anytime soon.

I’m curious to see how this plays out. I can’t imagine it being too successful for MS/Yahoo. Maybe in the short run the stocks will go up, but in the long run I think they’ve picked the wrong battle.

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has now been up and working for a bit. It’s still way too early to tell how popular it will eventually be, but so far it seems to getting decent traffic and pretty good reviews. The consensus is that it won’t be really competing with Google any time really soon, but since Microsoft is in it for the long haul, they can afford both the time and money required to eventually compete with the big kahuna.

In the meantime, though, the question arises: what impact will an increasingly popular Bing have on those who’s business relies on search engine optimization? So far, the answer seems to be: not too much. Because search engines keep their algorithims a closely guarded secret, Google and Bing aren’t ripping each other off. So they both search the web differently. But, the evidence so far indicates that, for a user, search results via both engines wind up being pretty similar. Not identical, but not that different either.

Extensive testing by those in the SEO game has uncovered a few differences, though. For example, Bing gives more search value to older websites than Google. Again, it’s not a huge difference, but it is noticeable. Of course, no matter how clever an SEO whiz may be, he or she won’t be able to increase the age of the website they work for, so that particular example won’t affect how someone optimizes their website. And that seems to be how things are shaking down. Where there are differences in how Google and Bing get results, they tend to be for factors that can’t be adjusted anyway. So, for the time being at least, those who practice SEO won’t need to learn a whole new set of rules to optimize for Bing.