Follow-Up: Last week I wrote about Technological Innovation, where I talked about Microsoft’s introduction of the search engine Bing. I was interested in seeing how the world reacted to Bing after the introduction.   Microsoft has chosen to push shopping and decision making as the key aspects of Bing’s success.  The screens are colorful and the sample searches that I completed were fine.  The media has generally been pretty favorable to Bing’s introduction. But you can make your own determination with a visit to a site called Blind Search which will compare your search results through the use of Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Microsoft has also made good on its promise to advertise the heck out of Bing.  There are banner ads, newspaper ads, television ads,  keyword ads, blog post ads and even, dare I say it, Google AdWords. They have increased their influence on buyers with the Bing Cashback program which like a combination of the Google Checkout program and the Discovercard’s Cashback program.

Google is not taking their leading market position for granted. It is interesting to me is that Google has started to ramp up their advertising engine for the first time.  Both adwords and blog ads have become much more prevalent.  For a time, Google even changed their normally sparse home page to include a link to Explore Google Search to help people understand the wealth of options that Google provides for finding stuff.

In the early weeks of June, since the introduction of Bing, Microsoft’s share of the search market has grown a bit.  Much of this can be attributed to searchers taking Bing out for a test ride.  The real question wil be whether people continue to utilize Bing or if the honeymoon ends as people go back to their first loves.