Microsoft Ignored the Long Tail in Search, Bing Boss Says
Microsoft lags so far behind Google in the search engine market because it didn't acknowledge the long tail, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the Online Audience Group for Microsoft Bing, at Search Engine Strategies NYC March 25.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks after Steve Ballmer told The Microsoft Blog that Google leads search because 'they did it right first', his senior vice president for online audience, Yusuf Mehdi, offered Microsoft's own diagnosis at Search Engine Strategies NYC: Bing lags because the company never acknowledged the long tail of rare, niche queries where Google's index depth shows.
The admission matters because it reframes the gap as a product problem Microsoft can attack rather than pure incumbency — notable against Comscore's February 2010 figures showing Google drawing 890 million worldwide visitors, 84% of them outside the US, exactly the international and niche query territory a tail strategy would have to win.
First-order effects
- Bing's roadmap under Mehdi's Online Audience Group now has an explicit mandate: improve relevance on low-volume, long-tail queries, where the engine currently loses most visibly to Google.
- Search marketers and SEOs at SES NYC get an official acknowledgment that Bing underperforms off the head terms, sharpening how they weight optimization effort between the two engines.
Second-order effects
- Chasing the tail means competing where Google's scale advantage compounds — international and niche queries — pushing Microsoft toward deeper crawling and indexing investment rather than marketing spend alone.
- Publishers and sites ranking for rare queries gain incremental bargaining power as Bing needs their content to close a relevance gap Google does not have.
Third-order effects
- If tail relevance, not head-term share, becomes the competitive metric, search rivalry shifts toward answer-quality economics — favoring whichever engine monetizes sparse queries efficiently, a structure that pressures smaller engines as much as Google.
The trend: Search competition is migrating from head-term market share toward long-tail query quality, where index depth and answer economics decide who can realistically challenge Google.