Whit Andrews, analyst for Gartner: Google will always feel competitive pressure. Bing seems to have woken Google up a little bit. Google is right to worry about competitive pressures from other search engines because there is no operational cost from switching from one search engine to another.

At the same time, Google also has some advantages that you can't eliminate. If you're using Google, you're one of a billion people using it, which means they have lots of data to help them determine the best results. Google has to take advantage of that in order to continue to grow their business. So that's their biggest challenge. Google is aware that switching costs are not large, so they better stay paranoid and they've done very well at staying paranoid.

NWW: What are Google's concerns going forward in the search market? How are their competitors differentiating themselves?

WA: There are a number of differentiation strategies but they all come down to delivering better approaches to search for different individuals. right now is working hard to suggest that there are issues around the way that Google does business and suggesting that Google's search results aren't as good as you may think they are.

Another way is to differentiate based on your interface so you can tell users that they can find what they want easier with our search results set. You can also utilize different information, such as when Bing incorporated Facebook information into its results before Google could even incorporate Google+.