At the Search Engine Strategies NYC show on March 25, Yusuf Mehdi, Senior VP of the Online Audience Group for Microsoft Bing, said that the reason why Microsoft has lagged behind Google in the search market arena thus far is that it has failed to acknowledge the ‘long tail’ – thereby implying that Microsoft was not able to retrieve appropriate results for a long line of less popular queries.

Noting that the long tail of queries had been yielding significant monetary gains to Google for over a decade, Mehdi said that for Microsoft, the focus on the head rather than the long tail indicated that it queries for popular sites were returned and queries with smaller, lesser known resources online could not be served adequately.

In response to the observation of a keynote host that Microsoft was late to the Internet and search - which is evident from the fact that Google has 65 percent share of the US search market vis-à-vis Microsoft Bing’s 11.5 percent -, Mehdi said: “We missed the boat early on, that the focus was about the long tail. We actually focused a lot on the head of the queries.... It turned out the long tail was much more important.”

Nonetheless, Mehdi also added that with the tide turning back around to the head of popular queries, Microsoft has teamed up with Twitter, Wolfram Alpha, and Foursquare location-sharing service.