Bing prompts Google to 'urgently upgrade'

Brin V Bing - but who will come out on top?
Brin V Bing - but who will come out on top?

Google co-founder Sergey Brin is taking the arrival of Microsoft's Bing seriously and has ordered that upgrades are made to the search engine.

The New York Post is reporting that an anonymous source at Google has revealed that Brin has assembled a team of "top engineers to work on urgent upgrades".

The main mission the engineers have is to figure out how Bing's algorithms differ from Google's and what improvements, if any, can be made with Google.

Working on improving search

"New search engines have come and gone in the past 10 years, but Bing seems to be of particular interest to Sergey," explained the unnamed insider.

Google, however, isn't admitting that the upgrades are because of Bing's arrival, rather something the company does on a regular basis.

"We always have a team working on improving search," insists the spokesperson. "We dedicate more time and energy to search than anything else in our company. Our algorithm is constantly evolving."

Bing has already been around for a fortnight, but its mooted $100 million advertising campaign has already pushed the 'decision engine' into the public consciousness in what is a rather short space of time.

Still, Microsoft has a long way to go to overthrow Google as the search engine of choice – it currently holds 11 per cent of the search market to Google's 60 per cent. Nestled between both of them is Yahoo with 20 per cent.

Via New York Post

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.