Counting the Mobile Costs for Bing

Microsoft's Bing office.Stuart Isett for The New York Times Microsoft’s Bing office.

As search goes mobile, Microsoft could pay heavily for the ride.

More searches these days are made on mobile phones and tablets, and most of them take place through Google. That is because Google is on so many mobile devices — both ones running its own Android operating system, and Apple’s iPhones and iPads. But it’s not just that Google dominates search. It’s what Google gets from those searches — streams of information about location and behavior that is valuable to advertisers and improves the quality of future searches. Bing, the search engine owned by Microsoft, is not getting that information.

In just three years since Bing’s commercial debut, it has results that rival in quality, even sometimes exceed, those of Google, which has been in search since 1997. Microsoft got there by spending billions on  expensive computational studies, particularly a data-intensive variety of artificial intelligence known as machine learning.

Microsoft gets the data partly from desktop searches on Bing, which according to Comscore now has a 16 percent share of the United States market. It gets even more data from the search work it does on behalf of Yahoo, which still has a 13 percent share of searches in the United States, Comscore says.

But neither Bing nor Yahoo is used heavily on mobile devices, a point that pains Microsoft.

“We don’t know what is inside Google, but we might have the biggest machine learning system on Earth,” said Harry Shum, chief technical officer of Microsoft Online Services Division. When it comes to phones, though, he said, “We have a lot of challenges.” He added, “We don’t have enough data yet.”

Mr. Shum is counting partly on getting more data from this fall’s Windows 8 phone, as well as a successful introduction of Microsoft’s Surface tablet. Even if those things are hits, though, it could be years before Microsoft has anything like Google’s data on user behavior.

Bing appears to be attacking its mobile problem the same way it came at Google, by spending money on data and computing. Deals for information from social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, Mr. Shum said, can assist with information about locations.

“Google has more data, more machines, and more years, but we will have more social information,” he said. “We’re cautiously optimistic, but it is going to be a long battle.”

Another hope is to get different Microsoft services, like Skype, used onto lots of phones, and apply that data to Bing. In turn, those search insights can be used to tweak the products, raising the importance of some email items on a consumer’s Inbox, or linking a map to an address in a message.

“Your Skype relationships are even more important than your e-mail relationships,” said Eric Rudder, Microsoft’s chief technical strategy officer.

This kind of indirect approach to improving search, however, is likely to cost a lot of money. When Mr. Shum shows ways that Bing outperforms Google, it tends to be around search queries with long strings of words, or deep catalogs of information (including over 3,600 ways to misspell Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name, for example). His deep neural networks of computation involve thousands of potential pieces of information for each query, and in milliseconds crunch several variants of a search around a single topic.

The best result is what the consumer sees, but it is probably a far more computationally intense than what Google does, since Google knows more about where people have gone before. Costs for both Google and Microsoft are difficult to parse, but given Microsoft’s approach it may be that Yahoo may be paying less than it costs to run Bing searches.

Maybe cost does not matter, though. Microsoft looks out on the future from the top of a huge pile of cash it amassed over dominating the last couple of decades. All that money, some $63 billion in cash last month, could go toward seeing it has a place in that future.

“We’ve been clear that search is critical to our future,” Mr. Shum said. “It’s the way to make all your products more powerful.”