Probably not as much as the New York Post reports. It's just not the best source of unbiased journalism. Neither is Fox News, which carried the story on its site. Fox News' slogan of "Fair and Balanced" is like McDonald's ads trying to convince people that fast food is good for them.
Says the Post:
"Brin, according to sources inside the tech behemoth, is himself leading the team of search-engine specialists in an effort to determine how Bing's crucial search algorithm differs from" Google's.
Also:
"But co-founder Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft's rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service, The Post has learned."
The Post article of Sergey's fear is based on "sources" but it quotes only one (anonymous) source:
"Bing seems to be of particular interest to Sergey," said one insider, who spoke on the condition of anonymity."
That doesn't exactly sound like fear. Sergey's "fear" is more likely the type that Andy Grove always promoted -- always stay ahead of competitors and never ignore them.
The interesting thing about Bing is that it's Microsoft's third attempt at building a seach engine. For some reason, that's the version that Microsoft tends to get right.
Thomas Claburn at Information Week suggests that Google's bigger fear is antitrust investigations from DOJ. Losing a few points in market share to Microsoft could lessen the pressure from DOJ.
Greed isn't good. But a little fear is. One of the guys I follow in Twitter, Raju Vegesna at Zoho, who has always professed to like Google, said in a recent tweet,
"10 Days into using Bing as my default search engine and I happy with it. I guess I am sticking with it."
Will be interesting to see how Bing does. I guess buying Yahoo is out of the equation.
