Microsoft is set to unveil its new multi-billion-dollar search engine thought to be called Bing. Bing will be released as the latest attempt by the Microsoft people to steal some market share from the ever-dominant king of search, Google.

Will this attempt prove futile like previous attempts? Or will it manage to put a dent in Google's 92% (Australian) market share?

I ask to be forgiven for my prediction that Bing will fall smack bang on its face in this attempt.

Recently, Microsoft tried to make this dent into Google by unsuccessfully attempting to buy Yahoo.

Later, it teamed with Yahoo (in Australia at least) for pay per click advertising without making the dent they hoped.

Before both of these attempts, Microsoft had some massive advantages over Google that it was unable to capitalise on because of its inferior product.

With Internet Explorer being the default browser of almost all PCs, the default homepage Internet Explorer sent people to was Microsoft's MSN. This homepage had a big bar at the top with the word SEARCH beside it for people to search from MSN.

This means for people to get to Google, they physically had to type google.com into the URL bar. Stats show they did this despite their first port of call being Microsoft's offering.

Other advantages include the fact that Microsoft's Hotmail free email product and its Messenger live chat product were by far and away global market leaders. And Microsoft made dozens of attempts to lead people to their MSN search offering on many occasions.

But stats show people always left and went to Google. They did so at their own accord.

Of course Google advertised well to get the message out that they are a tremendous search engine. But in the end, people made Google their port of call for search.

The reason this occurred, and has continued to occur despite MSN re-releases, re-brandings, alliances, etc... is because Microsoft search is inferior to Google search.

Coming to Bing... best case scenario will be that Bing is as good as Google. How will Microsoft reclaim their lost audience?

I don't think they can. If they take a slice of the market, it will again prove insignificant against Google's growing empire.

Personally, I'm not a fan of a monopoly and love competition in a marketplace.

But at the end of the day, we're not talking Coles and Woolworths who sell the exact same stuff.

We are talking two search engines, one of which has been highly inferior until now.

Until a like product is introduced to the market, then mass-marketed to searchers, Google will remain in its own league as an internet search monopoly.

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