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Has Bing Already Overtaken Yahoo?
nk497 writes "Microsoft's newly revamped search tool Bing has already overtaken Yahoo in the US and globally, according to StatsCounter. The net traffic watcher said Bing has topped Yahoo 16.28% to 10.22% in the US, and 5.62% to 5.13% globally. Though the firm noted Bing's popularity may drop off after the excitement wears off, the firm also said: 'Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo at a cost of $40 billion it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated.' Google, of course, still leads by a considerable margin."
It's hard to see how someone wrote this post today - when the same site shows that Bing surpassing Yahoo! only lasted for a day. TechCrunch already pointed this out yesterday. Bing may or may not have a big impact - but I think it will take some more time before we know whether it will or not. There is certainly a very long way to go before it even begins to approach google.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Not so fast. Same source indicates the bing has already fallen back down to (less than) live.com levels.
TechCrunch: Bing was #2 for a day then Yahoo regained its place as Bing fell.
"As Matt Cutts (who yes, works for Google) points out in the comments, StatCounter updates every few hours, so there is also data for today already. And itâ(TM)s more bad news for Bing. Itâ(TM)s now down to 5.65% in the U.S. â" yes, thatâ(TM)s less than what Live.com was at last month."
Soccer Goal Plans
I'm skeptical of this data--at least worldwide. When I click the gs.statcounter.com link and go to Statistic:Search Engine and Country/Region:Asia I see Baidu at an alarmingly low rate. Barely even recognizable. The CSV sheet shows it at zero until 03/05/2009 which is hilarious and then it bumps up to 1%. Yeah, I think they have some problems with their data collection methods or who is reporting this data anyhow. Maybe their software's only in English? I don't know but that data alarms me and I would take their stats in other realms lightly as that's a vote of no confidence from me--something is skewed horribly and I don't like it. They might be right about Yahoo! compared to Bing but this is certainly not reassuring.
My work here is dung.
Bing Is Not Google
I did a little experiment. I loaded up IE, hit the search button, typed something in, and ran the search. Whaddayaknow, Bing comes up with the search results. So every idiot that has the same Windows installed as the day they brought it home from Walmart with IE as the default browser and the little search button as their only gateway to the world is going to use Bing whether they know it or not. Apparently there are quite a few such idiots. Are we surprised?
mmmm...forbidden donut
This morning, our dear leader Steve Ballmer is unveiling our completely new search service, unrelated to anything we at Microsoft have ever done before: Bob Hope.
We spent lots of time listening to you, except when you told us how much MSN Search^W^W Live Search^W^W Kumo sucked 'cause you're just wrong about that, to learn which buzzwordy Web 2.0 thingies you use search for today. Finding a webpage that has anything to do with the search terms you entered is so passe, dahling.
So today we're introducing a new kind of search, that goes beyond traditional search engines that do tedious things like find stuff, to instead help you make faster, more informed decisions. (Windows 7 is peachy keen, by the way.) We think of Bob Hope as a Decision Engine. We've sued Stephen Wolfram into atomic dust using our patents on FAT and Mono, co-opted the Wolfram Alpha engine and swapped Mathematica for Visual Basic and Wolfram's brain for the exhumed corpse of Bob Hope.
So why did we pick Bob Hope as the new core of our search? We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world.
And just look at these results!
What do we want?
Braaains.
When do we want them?
Braaains.
What do I need to run Windows 7?
Braaains.
What's Bill Gates got that means you should buy everything you can from the company he founded?
Braaains.
What's the final proof of Steve Ballmer's equal genius to Steve Jobs?
Vistaaa.
This is something new, something improved! You need to try it! It'll give so much more betterer results than that other search engine we can't name because Steve will wedge another chair up our butts! Please, come and try our new and improved service! FOR GOD'S SAKE TRY THE DAMN SERVICE. OR THE PUPPY GETS IT. We're Microsoft. We're serious as a heart attack on this one.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
You know the next onslaught of Bing ads will claim:
"More popular than Yahoo!"*
* For one day after weeks of massive advertising, Bing beat out Yahoo in website traffic. Results not typical.
How long before M.S. sends out an update that automatically redirects URL typos to Bing?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
1. Their marketing strategy seems to be to push the name 'Microsoft' as far away as possible. Interesting they view their own name as a liability in this space.
2. 'Bing is not google' abbreviation seems particularly weird. Suggesting that currently google has an oppressive, monopolistic grip on the search industry, leaving little choice but to have to go with them as they are the defacto standard. The company that wants to save a market from an oppressive, de-facto standard monopoly is.... Microsoft?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I saw a Bing commercial. It makes me want to choke someone to death with my bare hands.
I dated your sister until you told me not to? BING! Needlenose Ned! BING!
Man, I've seen that movie so many times.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I did a little experiment. I loaded up IE, hit the search button, typed something in, and ran the search. Whaddayaknow, Bing comes up with the search results. So every idiot that has the same Windows installed as the day they brought it home from Walmart with IE as the default browser and the little search button as their only gateway to the world is going to use Bing whether they know it or not. Apparently there are quite a few such idiots. Are we surprised?
People like you are why IT people get a bad rap.
Why is someone an "idiot" who does not care what search engine or browser they use? You are into (or do it professionally) IT, so this sort of thing is important to YOU. I bet in other fields, maybe for example sake investing, people could say "Wow, you're an idiot for not performing a split. Moron!"
Fact is different things are important to different people. It doesn't make them an idiot.
StatCounter confirms it.
Deleted
Around a decade ago, it was enough to have a better search engine to get people to switch. But in the meantime, google has me hooked on mail, sites, and documents. Other people use other apps, but just like Microsoft snagged the desktop OS market based on it being the default on commodity hardware and then maintaining it with applications later, I believe Google will keep it's top spot on the same idea.
Migrating from a search engine simply is a lot of hassle now especially since it's diminishing returns, I have a feeling that "perfect" results and google and maybe even bing won't be that far apart from each other. Also, a decade ago, the internet was more of a wild west in terms of searching for information about some topics far and wide. You just didn't know what sites had relevant information. These days, a great majority of my searches start as "X Y wikipedia" because now there is a centralized spot for info.
I applaud Microsoft's effort though. Competition is always a good thing and might bring something unexpected or at least keep google honest and on its toes. Also, the bing page has learn/copied the good part of google, and that is the minimalization. A far cry from the horrendous "portal"idea that Yahoo, MSN, comcast.net, AOL, and others are still attached too.
Bing may or may not have a big impact
Well a quick straw poll in my building suggests Bing hasn't even surpassed yelling down the corridor so it's got a looong way to go!
Try this for a general Google search, don't know about the Lucky one
Go to about:config (in the Firefox url bar), search for keyword.URL (in the filter input) and double-click the result to change the value there to http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=
Yes, they are also famous for heavily discrediting open source and providing Steve Ballmer with free chairs.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
Not going to happen. Yahoo! is at around 5% of the total market. We all know about it, because we remember when it was at the top, but for most people if you say 'better than Yahoo!' they say 'huh? Better than what? Is Yahoo a thing you Google with?'. All that kind of advert would do is draw people's attention to the existence of Yahoo.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think the fact there's new episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist is more interesting than this news story.
Yahoo might be worried, but I don't think Google cares... at this point it's a race for second place.
I wouldn't be so sure.
I tried Bing and it is quite good. It beats Google in many of my "usual" searches.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
google returned these three first:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_antitrust_case http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/microsoft-antitrust.htmlSo I compared that to Yahoo:
http://www.microsoft-antitrust.gov/ http://www.zdnet.com.au/tag/anti_trust-eu-microsoft.htm http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/0,2000061744,39202361,00.htmBing returned these three first:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/legalnews.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/legal_newsroomarchive.mspx?case=Government%20Anti-Trust%20Case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_antitrust_caseIf you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. - Joseph Goebbels
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Some of the articles in "IT Pro" magazine seem to me to be ads. Here are other articles:
..." Google and Microsoft are not a "pair".
Can Microsoft make a success out of Silverlight? Quote: "... Microsoft's Silverlight weighs in at just a four-megabyte download, and apparently takes just 10 seconds to install." Another quote: "So how has Silverlight fared, and can it really topple Flash?" Silverlight is far, far behind Flash.
Can Google or Microsoft get any bigger? Quote: "... Google, along with Microsoft, is so large and so dominant in its sectors, that both firms are hitting a point where their potential for profitable growth is limited." Another quote: "Certainly the pair of them own their key markets,
This is the article, published today, to which this Slashdot story linked: Has Bing already overtaken yahoo? But that article no longer exists, apparently. Now that link takes visitors to another article: UPDATED: Bing and Yahoo battle it out for second in search. Quote: "One stats firm has said Microsoft's Bing has already caught up to rival Yahoo, just a week after launch - but it's since slipped back to third." Bing hasn't "slipped back to third", Bing has dived in the ratings, and is now far behind Yahoo.
If you don't know what Bing is, you should just Google it.
My webcomic
I just installed Opera-10 beta bc Opera says it is 100% acid3 compliant, and went over to Bing and chose to search for an image. When I tried to modify the search filter settings from the default (moderate) to no filter, the popup that had the checkboxes appeared UNDER the image windows, making a selection impossible.
As usual MS seems to be ignoring standards.
I second this. If you check my posts, I don't think I ever written something positive about MS, but for the last few days I've been playing with Bing side by side with Google.
My findings so far:
- Bing's index is noticeably smaller than Google's; searching for very specific keywords simply do not show some results (I wasn't searching for porn)
- In 90% of the cases, Bing's results were similar to Google's, basically same results with small differences in ordering (#4 becomes #2, #3 is #6, etc.)
- The remaining 10% - sometimes Bing produces a very good result in the first 1-2 results, some other times it "thinks" you were looking for something else.
- Like Google, it favors results from Wikipedia.
Summarized PDF
Of course Bing has overtaken Yahoo. They just flipped the Live search over to Bing, and the media hype machine filled in the rest.
At work, where our security settings prevent changing the homepage or default search engine, any mistyped URL automatically rolls over to Bing now, without any prompting from our IT staff.
I think it may have been less "advertising" and more leveraging Windows Live Search redirections and newly-installed IE8 defaults.
Good for one day's bragging rights, I guess.
Time was, that would have resulted in a new monopoly. Guess you can't go back again.
Kythe
Sorry.
They'd just game them separately with twinned sites & such.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
In hype, perhaps... I thought that "search overload" commercial was clever the first time I saw it. Then, when I saw it 3 more times in the same hour, I wanted to hurt someone. It's about twice as long as it should be, and it gets unbelievably tedious. It annoys me so badly that I've already sworn off ever using it.
So "Bing" is another name for MS search but we are supposed to believe they jumped Yahoo by changing the name? That would mean not only would have all the previous MS search lemmings basically stayed put and people jumped from Google and/or Yahoo. That's just dumb and I have no doubt this is just another Microsoft marketing gimmick so more lemmings might get a warm and fuzzy feeling thinking there weren't the only ones using MS Bing. But, knowing Microsoft, maybe they did an OS patch which "fixed" the default search field for everyone using Windows and now they all use Bing. Or they only did that to the ones naive enough to still be using MS Vista. IMO.
What made me laugh when I tried MS Bing was when the search returned something like 6 pages but from page 3 onward all it did was reshowed the same last page of search results.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
StatCounter is a global service with members from every country in the world but it is more popular in certain countries. Therefore we collect more data from these countries. This means reports for Worldwide/Asia/Europe/North America/Oceania/South America can be skewed towards the countries where StatCounter is more popular. However, you can view each stat on a country level which negates any potential for a bias.
We could compensate for this bias in our reports for Worldwide/Asia/Europe/North America/Oceania/South America based on the total internet population size from each country. But this would mean manipulating the data, and we prefer to leave the data untouched. If other people want to build upon this data and manipulate it to account for any regional bias then they are very welcome to do so per our licensing agreement http://gs.statcounter.com/about.
Didn't even know they were still around.
The search thingy on slashdot gets more hits than the two of them combined.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Bing, the search engine that'll return more links than you can throw a chair at!
No, it's not a hijack, it's a fuck up. Microsoft's search people seem to have forgotten about "auto.search.msn.com" (which is the URL hit when you type random garbage into the address bar) and forwarded that to Bing. Now with the old MSN Search, it'd catch that "&PROV=GOOG" on the end of the URL and establish that meant you wanted to use Google. Bing doesn't yet recognise "&PROV" (stands for Provider) query strings, which they intend to fix.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Good - Easy to use, decent results, refreshing look.
Bad - Poor related links.
Ugly - Can't try out everything because I don't have silverlight on my laptop and cell phone.
I'm wondering if bing is more about Silverlight than it is about being better than MSN Search or Live.
-- $G
-metric
I tried it out a couple of times, and it insists on offering me Finland-related search results. This made it completely useless for me. I guess it does the same for users from other countries - gives search results specific to the searcher's geographic location. Well, that's bullshit.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I wonder if we're just getting older.
You see, back in the day, we had to learn assembler to write programs. Then they made C and other higher-level languages. And then interpreted languages. but even when writing VB.NET or C#, in my head I'm doing the equivalent of the original C++ to C translator, adding C to ASM on one side and OOP to C++ on the other side.
I sometimes wonder that, back when search sucked (right around the time of Northern lights / AltaVista) I could find anything. It wasn't persistence - it was putting the right terms in. Think of what you want to see on the page, and let it do a simple look-up.
google is not processing data that way any more. We have to re-learn how to do our specific searches. I don't have an answer for you tho, still figuring it out. Meantime, try just asking a question like the idiot users do. It works more often than I expect.