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Bing Users' Click-Through Rate 55% Higher Than Google Users'
An anonymous reader writes "Techcrunch is running a story that shows some pretty significant differences in the clicking habits of users of Yahoo, Google, and Bing. As it turns out, folks who arrive at websites via Bing are 55% more likely to click on an ad than if they arrived from Google (data based on the Chitika network). Essentially, people who use Bing are far more susceptible to advertising. Bing has acquired a decent market share in such a short time, but could it just be that they've reaped the low hanging fruit of those particularly persuaded by advertising? When their huge marketing campaign winds down, what kind of staying power will it have?"
Who would have thought that people who would switch to an inferior search engine based on an aggressive marketing campaign would be more susceptible to advertising?
to be able to say our users are sheep
It's because users of Microsoft services are more stupid than the general population. There, I said it!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I make a habit out of checking out the awstats for our domain, and noticed something kinda odd. Bing very quickly became our top referring site. This might just be awstats not treating bing as a search engine (and categorizing hits from them accordingly) or it could be Bing doing something fishy.
Anyone else see something like this?
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Umm? I don't suppose this statistic is anyway affected by the fact that maybe they (Microsoft) give UP TO 35 FREAKING % cashback on items?
I mean... of course you're going to get a higher click through rate when you're offering a 35% discount for clicking through on Bing vs clicking through on Google.
I've gotten close to $1000 back for using Live search aka Bing. Of course I check there first... if I find an ad with the Microsoft cashback option, you better believe I snap it up. Then I go back to Google to do my real searching.
This statistic is completely meaningless since it's blatantly obvious that people are going to use a service that GIVES THEM MONEY vs a service that is just plain free. Gee, imagine that.
Many people who go to Bing have clicked on ads to get there. They're the only people on the internet who don't have ad-blockers.
Would that click through rate include the ads for Cashback? If so, I might consider the results skewed.
Can someone tell me how this higher click-through is some sort of a discovery? Bing integrates the ads into the search results. That is why it is smarter to use google - at least with google you can opt not to click on the ad.
Show me where the ad is. What? You can't tell? Me either - so don't use Bing.
"There's a Bing user born every minute."
With anything that has been marketed/hyped, never rely on the initial numbers.
Ignore the first month of a search engine, and the first week of a new movie.
After the curious and easily manipulated are out of the way, you can get a real result.
As you may know, Bing pays people cashback if they approach a retailer through a Bing link. So it's only natural that if I want to purchase something from, say, newegg, I will go first to Bing and click on a newegg link. That will appear to Microsoft as if their advertising were successful on me, while in reality I have already made my decision, and just take what Microsoft throws at me. There are some retailers, such as ebay, that you have to perform a search before they offer cashback. So why not search for something.
If you can quickly gather a user base of easily influenced people, there is nothing stopping a competitor from doing the same thing and taking those people back. I suspect Google and other engines lost a bunch of these sorts of people due to Bing's ad campaign. And they are now seeing the benefits of there marketing.
What we all want for our businesses are those die hard regular customers that love us so much that they will be with us until the end of time. I think Google has quite a few of those people. And Bing has the potential to build up the same sort of dedicated fan base, especially given that Bing's homepage is absolutely gorgeous.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Bing has pretty much cornered the market of people who use the internet by typing natural language questions into the IE address bar.
Imagine that for a moment... people who use the internet by clicking on the IE address bar and typing "How do I get rich working from home?" So it's really no question why they have the fantastic click-through.
I'd say the data makes perfect sense.
But that's not to say Bing isn't a pretty nice search engine. I use its video search and (occasionally) restrict it to youtube to use it as a cleaner and better youtube than youtube. Wrap your minds around that.
An old PBS special on everybody's favourite organ, the brain, broadcast the finding that gossip is prevalent in language use and that our relatively, outsized brains may have evolved as a response to more convoluted social programmes. The infrequent times I listen to a commercial radio station, (I've not had commercial TV for 3 yrs), I often find google used as a means of acquiring the tidbits of information commonly referred to as cocktail party gossip. Twitter is an example of the same function. ( In fact I would venture a search engine streamlined to twitter would be a winner. ) Bing is to Google what Ralf Lauren is to Beneton and the whole issue is about marketing. The outlier portion of users that don't constitute the gossip crowd aren't going to show in the tally. The primary internet search engines are at least 3 years past being serviceable as anything but marketing tools unless the user has put in the time to tweak their searches or is searching for stuff that isn't worth marketing. Other than that closing the loop will amount to a bluetooth dongle picking up on the wearer's conversation and feeding in just so catchphrases and jokes while demanding in payment the wearer buy a specific product with the necessary exclamatory endorsement.
ideopath @ play
are also to be more likely to be brain-dead Microslop OR
Apple fans willing to fork over about U.S. $ 150 every time there is an OS update.
Sergey Brin of Google is âoedeeply rattledâ by the launch of Microsoft's Bob Hope search engine, whose market share has surged from 9% in its previous incarnation as Live Search to a stunning 9% in its new garb.
"New search engines have come and gone in the past ten years, but Bob Hope really has Sergey just crapping himself," said one anonymous insider, "Steve B." "The ad clickthrough is huge, because we, I mean they, make it so you can't tell ads from results. Innovation!"
"It's clear that Google is headed down, down, down," said another anonymous source, "Rupert M." "Particularly the news operation. Print that or I fire you."
Bob Hope has been warmly greeted by analysts, critics, tech journalists and others on Microsoft and News Corporation's payrolls. Early statistics show Bob Hope increasing Microsoft's market share by two percentage points, to about 11 percent! Before dropping back to statistical noise a few hours after the launch was over.
Google's credibility was shot to pieces by its blatant pro-Obama bias, noted by Fox News analysts when they couldn't find evidence of Obamaâ(TM)s French citizenship and gay marriage on the search engine in the days before the 2008 Presidential election. "Their far-left liberal search algorithms will lead to their utter defeat by the business-friendly Microsoft Bob Hope," said swivel_eyed_loon_643 in the New York Post comments section.
A spokesman for Google, asked about the threat of Microsoft Bob Hope, said "what??", put the phone down and laughed for five minutes before the line cut out, obviously overcome with hysterical horror.
I've noticed a *lot* of Bing referrals in my access stats lately.
Almost all of them have, rather bizzarely, been one-word search strings. Here's my bing searches from the current first screen of my access stats, I swear this is genuine:
- keyboard
- gahhh
- really
- email
- comment
- worked
- image
So of the last 20 referrals to me, 7 have come from bing. That's impressive. All seven have clearly been done by people with zero ability to use search engines effectively.
I've tried bing out and found it to be lousy at finding what I'm looking for. I've also got huge amounts of crud like the above filling up my referral logs. I'm seriously considering blocking referrals from bing.com just to stop it clogging up my stats.
Do I think Google should be worried? Not yet, no..
So.. it has come to this
I'm in a Germany and my browser language preference is set to English (because I prefer it).
Now most sites (including Google) manage to get my geo-location and annoy me with a German start page (ignoring my language preferences). (At least I could set my prefs. at google, but its bothering to do this for every site I visit).
Now visiting Bing gave me something unusual: a hybrid l10n. The controls were partly in English and the search suggestions (random stuff at the button of the screen) came in German. Searching for something gave only German results.
And there I thought it couldn't get worse than it is already.. but this irks the hell out of me.
ps. And the scaling of mostly everything was messed up too.. Way to go if you want to convince technical folks, Microsoft..
/Proceeds to search 'Microsoft' in Google and clicking on random ads.
On that note, can I really trust Bing to give me faithful results for Linux queries? Who knows.....
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
It's the type of story summary used here that shows early signs of the disease Linus was talking about. What kind of lowlife asshole uses a phrase like:
reaped the low hanging fruit of those particularly persuaded by advertising
It's advertising, dickhead. If people like what is being advertised they will click the link, watch the commercial, and buy the product. Why is someone who investigates an advertisement deemed less intelligent? Does not fast forwarding through a commercial make you a moron? Does leafing through the Sunday morning circular make you a fool? Ohh, that's right, they are using a Microsoft service. Tee hee. So witty, so funny.
I used to really like Slashdot, but the quality of the submissions is really taking an ugly tone. Who do we blame? The people writing the submission? Or the person who allows it to be post. This isn't even a Kdawson story so we can't blame him. Slashdot doesn't seem to have any commitment to making sure summaries are well written and free from juvenile bias.
It seems that bing does some referrer spamming, probably while crawling your site. I've just noticed that today, but I'm not the only one it seems: http://www.the-art-of-web.com/system/logs-bing/
This is "News" meant to manipulate the confused and clueless. Mod it down and move on....
President/CEO Pacy World http://www.pacyworld.com
The susceptibility of users is one possibility, of course, but so are
1) better product (see the comments regarding Cashback ads)
2) better placement
3) better advertising clients (ever seen an interesting google ad but hesitated to click because of the shady domain?)
This just in: Users who switch to an inferior search engine based on an aggressive advertising campaign found to be more susceptible to advertising! Details at '11!
To an earlier story, perhaps?
I'm just sayin'... Bein' No.1 pr0n browser has its advantages...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I bet that they do not have the infrastructure to deal with the fraudulent click-throughs in place since they opened their API. Hence, you the news and the logs are showing that users or scripts are clicking through to the advertisers, making people money.
Yeah... mine depends on how many results I get from searching for "April Snow video"
They are dumber, show poorer judgment and click more ads. Is there anything else here I haven't noticed?
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
The people that use Bing are most likely Windows users.
Who uses Windows?
In my experience there are 3 main groups:
1: Those that have to because of company policy or the need to run a Windows only application.
2: Those that are to cheap to by a MAC
3: Those that are to stupid to use Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc.
Microsoft knows how to push the butons of their drones, and the click through rate just proves this.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Well of course they are more likely to click on an ad. They are more likely to be Microsoft users and that in itself effectively filters out anyone with an independent mind.
The automatons who use Bing will undoubtedly do what is expected of them.
If you sign up for Microsoft Live Cashback, you can use Bing search to get discounts on stuff you buy.
In effect, Microsoft is bribing the general public to use their search engine. This is not designed to be profitable or sustainable. Of course, I'm sure Microsoft doesn't care, as long as it hurts Google's biggest revenue stream.
I use Bing to "search" for something that I already know I want to buy, and then click on the Cashback link to get anywhere from 2-30% off on my purchase.
This isn't really "searching" the internet. It's jumping through hoops to get a discount. I'd buy the thing anyway whether it was advertised or not, whether I'd get a discount or not. Since the discount's available, I take advantage of it.
Of course, advertisers don't actually care about people searching the internet the real way. They care about people buying stuff from them. If they believe that Bing users are more likely to buy than Google users, they'll probably put a lot of advertising money up at Bing. I actually block advertising in both search results, but I turn it off temporarily if I want to make a Cashback purchase.
Aside from a few accidental uses, and a few test searches to see how the results compared with I *never* use Bing when searching for any kind of information if I'm just doing a general web search, I use google's search engine. I don't know that Bing search results are any better or worse than Google's, but I'm comfortable using Google and I know that I'll usually find what I'm looking for pretty easily once I find the right query terms to enter.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Google is better at finding porn. Really it is!
I am one of those Microsoft haters that Linus Torvalds thinks is crazy. And I haven't been to Bing yet. But I will say that Google is ripe for replacement as the search engine of choice. When Google first came out it was a wonder. I could put in a search term and the information I wanted came up usually on the first page. But as Google worked to index more and more of the web there were more and more results to look through and I had to scan through more pages to find the information I wanted. Then came search engine optimization, which put more and more garbage in the results. Then Google killed usenet by creating Google Groups (actually they just contributed to it's death). So since the natural information hierarchy in usenet has been destroyed the web has been trying to regain this with "tags", with virtually no success.
So I am ready for something that is not Google. I doubt Microsoft could create a suitable replacement. As a corporation they have always focused on what is good for their company, and not what is good for the consumer.
According to this study, it turns out that people who are highly susceptible to browser advertising are also highly susceptible to other advertising.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
A pretty large fraction of people who search are ultimately searching in order to help with a purchasing decision. If Bing is doing a better job of sending them to relevant sites, then we'd expect them to be more likely to click ads on those sites, as those ads are likely to actually be useful to the searcher.
At what point do we give bing attention to start SEO sites for it. We have our hands full with googel local maps and growing fast, but don't want to be behind the 8 ball? Does anyone have real numbers yet?
Microsoft has leveraged its monopoly to shove Bing down the throats of anyone too ignorant or powerless to remove it, by making it the new "default" search engine for all things Microsoft, including Internet Explorer. This captures two classes of people: those that don't know any better, and those browsers held captive by corporate configuration lockdowns (in companies that don't bother to override the new default). Since my observations to date indicate that Bing sucks compared to Google (especially when searching Microsoft MSDN and TechNet!) these should be the only class of people using Bing, apart from deliberate experimentation.
The users of bing are more susceptible to Internet advertising. This generally means they are of lesser intelligence than others. I can only assume that's why they're using bing.
One could posit that only morons use bing.
They're using their grammar skills there.
And I might be out to lunch on this, but...
Bing users are more likely to be using the default solftware that comes with their computers, where as many google users tend to be a bit more tech savvy, and are more likely to have ad blocking software installed along side a different browser?
I wish I was a neutron bomb, for once I could go off...
Remember that about 10% of the Windows machines are no longer under the control of their owners....and "click-through rate" is perhaps the ONE variable that will sell Bing (Bling? Whatever, it's crap) to the world.
30 years of lying to people makes people untrusting...
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
The summary mentions a "large marketing campaign" for Bing... I had never heard of it since the /. article that went up on the day it was released and since then have never used it nor seen an ad for it or read anything about it anywhere.
Am I missing something????
I think Microsoft is inflating statistics, but not by multiplying numbers.
Remember that physics site that Bill put up a week ago, powered by Silverlight?
I noticed that when playback is active, it generates random hits to an obscure URL that redirects to bing (and returns a transparent GIF). It caught my eye in LiveHTTP headers because the URL contained words like Flash, Adobe, Silverlight, Windows Media, DRM, etc. stuff that really shouldn't have been coming from the site. I suspect that when we all went to the site the JS was active and all the slashdotters inadvertently helped Microsoft pump up their Bing search hits. Oh and of course, stopping video playback stopped the search queries immediately.
This probably doesn't factor in Windows update changing the default search to Bing as well.
So divide the click through rate by maybe 3, or 5, and you'll get the true results.
...as microdoft is well known for biasing what they sell.
It shows that they are indeed forst and foremost a marketing company....
You said, "Slashdot doesn't seem to have any commitment to making sure summaries are well written and free from juvenile bias."
That's a bit rich coming from someone who's opening argument in support of their view is, "It's advertising, dickhead"
Who modded you insightful?
It's because users of Microsoft services are more stupid than the general population. There, I said it!
and won another unearned mod-up to +5, Informative. Like I said, big whoop.
Microsoft's customers are the general population.
Google - and the Moz Foundation - are built on revenues from the add-click.
The more impressive the return from Bing the more advertising dollars move to Bing - and to Microsoft's other online services.
Is still less than 2% of something.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
only microsoft users are dumb enough to click on ads.
One of my (newest) customers had a problem with IE opening a .aspx file from his bank's Web site.
Vista offered to look for a program on the Web... it used Bing to seek a solution... and the "sponsored link" he clecked was malware.
Bottom line: Bing gave me a $90 cleanup job.
So, targeting nursing homes and grades schools worked for Microsoft and now it's being shown that MS BING users are more likely to click on ads. What a surprise. For another surprise then, watch how many of MS BING customer's computers are infected and also have key loggers running.
I have to wonder just how much all these kinds of reports on how great BING is going is costing Microsoft.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
It should be noted that every version of AWStats is "too old" to recognize Bing as a search engine. The latest version as of now is 6.9, released in Dec 2008.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
if i use google to find a site about a topic, and after that i had to click on some other banner it means that google has not bringhed me the right site...
but if i had the good site i do not need to click on other sites (or banners!!)
this mean that bing make a so poor job that 55% more people immediately click on an ad that resemble a more promising site...
good job bing :)
Option 1:
Bing users are more susceptible to advertising and Microsoft gets 55% more click throughs than Google with 1/13th as many impressions (from the article)
Option 2:
Click fraud on Bing is very high compared to Google.
I like your signature. Thanks!
right what a suprise! btw did i mention that there is a great deal for a brand new aspire for ONLY $99, if bought from ebay via bing's cash back? its oh so awesome, all you have to do i search and find product via bing and your account will generate the $300 in cash back, which will mailed to you via a check. for more details goto fatwallet.com or slickdeals.org. looks like the only thing that can beat google is giving away free money....lawlz @ Microdicks
It should be noted that every version of AWStats is "too old" to recognize Bing as a search engine. The latest version as of now is 6.9, released in Dec 2008.
AWShucks.
music lover since 1969
This data appears to be provided from one business only - Chitika, presumably from data that they gathered from their advertizing.
Has it been audited with a view to confirming that the click throughs are indeed actually happening?
Has that data been compared with data from all the many other advertizing businesses that spam websites via Search Engines?
To what extent is Chitika's advertizing only based on Microsoft Bing and not on the other search engines? :o)
Without a moment's hesitation, given Microsoft's heavy push of it's web browser upgrade ahead of/concurrent with Bing, I'm going to call this "the QVC effect," wherein someone makes it oh so easy to purchase something before you even know you need it.
I haven't toyed around with Bing search, but Live/Bing Maps has been comparable or superior to Google for a while. They often have higher-resolution satelite photos, and have photos taken from planes too so you can see a different perspective from "top-down". If I'm going to somewhere I've never been to on business, I usually check Bing to see the area from the air.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
How people shop makes a difference. On Google, I search for a manufacture, product, or service I am looking for and find the manufacture's site. I don't arrive by an advertisement.
Studying traffic based only on clickthrough rate is pretty narrow minded in where to make you online presense.
The truth shall set you free!
This just in...
Bing Users Are 55% More Gullible Than Google Users
Bing has both positives and negatives.
On the positive side:
1. Fast
2. Nifty tabs next to each search result.
3. Image search reads a lot better on a larger monitor then the limits set by Google's image search.
On the negative side:
1. Heavy reliance on domain names for keywords.
2. Heavy reliance on backlinks causing relevancy issues.
3. I've seen websites that had two sets of title metas and descriptions on the main index page. That code should not be tolerated. In my opinion, Bing is not checking for well-formed code.
4. Bing recommends absolute URLs which can make updating a website difficult as well as potentially causing a drop in ranking for other websites.
5. Little to no reliance on domain age.
6. Less reliance on human edited directories such as DMOZ (which in some ways, may be a positive thing.
Bing really has to work on the relevancy issues. In my opinion, it's just serving up stuff like a loose canon at the moment.
Architectural Renderings
The obvious reason why Bing gets so many hits and click-throughs is because there are many headlines on MSN.com linked to Bing. And most computer users have MSN.com as their home page. Hence a lot of clicks will happen.
I'm getting really sick of clicking on what looks like a news headline, but is in fact a link to a Bing search on the topic. Stupid MSN.
A friend of mine hosts web sites and get revenue from adds. What he noticed is that worse articles result in higher levels of add clicking. Presumably if people are bored by a site they either close it or click on an (add) link, possibly to just get away from it. The human brain is an enigma.
Anyway, Bing could be so much worse than Google that visitors are more likely to move along. Also of interest is whether these user come back and/or if they move back to Google after a while.
Having said all that I must remark that I have never even tried Bing and that I'm not planning on doing so in the foreseeable future. I don't care much for the MS bunch and that from the two I'm more likely to sort of trust Google -for the time being.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Cue the elves / orcs analogies. MSFTers appear to hate innovation so much that they cannot even tolerate it in other companies. That could make MSFT eligiable to be classified as hate-group and its minions thus guilty of hate-crimes for their activities.
Micro$haft marketeers saw Wolfram Alpha and revved up the astroturfers to all but drown out discussion of it. It's amazing that a johnny-come-lately can issue a few press releases and scores of minions bury every trace of the original. Wolfram Alpha works from a pool of vetted resources and that is a major difference from Yahoo and Google.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
The summary tells us Bing has acquired a decent market share in a short period of time. This is however completely untrue. Bing has replaced the search engines of both MSN and Live. It doesn't have a lot more market share than what those two used to have combined before Bing arrived. So while Microsoft has succesfully maintained it's user base, it hasn't attracted a lot of new users and thus no market share was won.
You can check the numbers with Net Applications. Both MSN and Live used to have about 2.5% to 3% market share, and now the latest statistic for Bing shows about 5.3% market share.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Well, let's see. As an independent consultant who helps private individuals with IT issues on their home computers, I have some experience with naive users and WIndows-based PCs.
Many of the people I know who still use Internet Explorer do so out of apathy, not out of some misguided belief in the product. Those same people tend to be the ones most likely to click away any prompt without paying too much attention to what it says. And, they also seem to be more likely to click on ads that appear to relate to something that interests them (and then deny it strenuously when they call me because their machines have drastically slowed down).
This is in contrast with those who I have managed to successfully convince to switch to Firefox + Adblock Plus, who in my limited experience, are much less likely to click on ads (since they do not actually see many).
Bing has now become Microsoft's preferred search engine, so it is not unthinkable that a recent Windows Update might have foisted it as a default upon those who chose to upgrade to IE 8. Certainly, if a dialog were to pop up asking whether to switch to Bing from their current search engine, it would not surprise me to learn that those same users chose the default answer, without consciously deciding to make a change (and then not knowing how to revert afterward, even if they wanted to do so).
In any case, I think it far likelier that these same people are now using Bing than the Firefox crowd.
The latter tend to be, as a group, far more aware of what they are doing and more likely to notice when they have been asked to make a choice, and to understand what the potential ramifications of that choice might be.
So I surmise that the lion's share of click-throughs from Bing are the former, use-the-default-browser, click-away-any-popups, just-show-me-what-I-wanted crowd.
Brilliant marketing strategy, on Microsoft's part, IMHO.
"No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up." -- Lily Tomlin
Isn't it slashdot readers that always point out how stupid everyone else is for confusing correlation and causality? Maybe bing users are finding what they are after, instead of drowning in the google results? Slashdot is such a religious organization.
Then again, maybe Google users have become better at tuning out ads over time. I hardly notice them anymore.
Let's apply Occam's Razor here: They offer Bing Cash on selected web sites (especially eBay) that you click though to and buy from when you have signed up for Bing Cash (free, as in beer).
I'm not scared of using Bing and Bing Cash to get 2-8% back on my purchases (even if it takes up to 60 days). I use my other browsers to find out what I want to buy (amongst other things) and use Bing with Bing Cash to buy the item, if possible, and get some money back.
I don't use Bing for general searching or research, just when I am looking to buy something.
I guess this is where their big advertising budget is going towards. My wallet, for a change.
So I'm not surprised that their click-thru rate is higher, and probably their click-n-buy rate; but this will last as long as they have the Bing Cash program. Now if they looked at how much research was being done, I bet that is very low.
Supreme Granter of Doctor of Obviology Letters ("A FIRM Command of the Obvious")
I don't know if anyone else reading this is as old as me... but this reminds me of the days when there was just ONE yellow pages. As a merchant you only had one bill to pay to reach everyone. Then the OTHER yellow page comanies came along, and it become much harder for a srtuggling merchant to advertise to everyone.... I am not crazy about search engine monopolies, BUT, I also would hate to have to work on 2, 3 , 4 or more search engine advertising budgets (especialy for a one man show).
Bing.... go away.... just sayin'
i question this phrase: far more susceptible to advertising. It might mean instead that Bing is BETTER at getting users to the information they (think) they want. If a 100 users search for frozen pizza, and Bing users are clicking through to stores and frozen pizza brand names, that doesn't mean they're chumps. It means the service is connecting them to what they want. It means they want a fucking frozen pizza. Advertising is how you get people to know you exist. Testing something is how you determine if you like something. i think it could be just as bad to use only one search engine forever... you wouldn't know what you were missing. Maybe ads are exactly what people are trying to find. Not all searches end at .orgs. Sometimes people want products.
Did you go to yagoogoo.com today? No. Because you didn't know it existed because they don't have the advertising budget to reach you, nor have they established enough word of mouth traffic because they have only 5 users. But those 5 users must be brilliant because they never clicked on the AdSense links!
It might also mean that users are curious about something new. Bing is new. "Hey, let's see what Bing has to offer". That's not necessarily gullibility. Bing will have a period growth as people figure out if they like it or not. How do we know they've switched at all? They might go back to Google in a week, or they might not. Bing will have some growth for a while and then they'll reach some sort of saturation. As novelty wears off, they might lose some of that growth. That's all very natural. Growth can't be unlimited, they can only take some share of the existing market. However, it might not cost Google and Yahoo much of their market anyway, as people might bounce between the various engines. i might use Bing when i'm on someone else's computer and go back to Google on my own. Maybe i'll want to compare results and use Google and Bing. /hasn't used Bing
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Bing = newest form of mind control! Finally a way to take over the world one click at a time!
~Ami
Chicago Web Design
You would think, given the teams of Microserfs required to click-through many, many times on a daily basis, the numbers would be much higher... that's only 25 impressions per Microsoft employee during that week, and the best click-through they could get was just over 1/3 of all MS employees doing it once that week?
Then you have the fact that most Bing users who are not MS shills are people who went out of their way to "click-though".. they followed the advice given in an MS television ad, after all. And, sure, Bing users who are essentially paid to click-through (that whole Bing Cash thing). MS is looking on this as warfare, striking Google where they live. The curious thing will be if advertisers are able to figure out the small bit of this that's reality, and ignore the temporary hype and hacking of the system.
-Dave Haynie
No really.. spent the weekend in Las Vegas, as a Commodore show. About as small as you might imagine, with C64, C128, and Amiga users... all "retrocomputing" folks.
But there's a perspective I can offer from this. Back in 1977 or 1982 or 1985, many if not most of the people who bought computers, outside of a specific business task, got them because they wanted to "do computers". The computer itself was the goal; the apps it ran, if they existed, were gravy at best... the machines just didn't do that much, yet.
Because of that, the OS actually mattered a great deal.. because you spent much time with it, developed for it, etc. It was a central focus.
These days, most people, in or out of business, are looking for a specific application. Maybe several. But the OS simply doesn't matter.. the best it can do for you is not mess things up. And while MS has been messing things up far more than Linux or even MacOS, despite this, the applications have been delivered. And that's all most people actually care about.
Certainly, if you're a software developer, that may not be true. But aside from that, much of the non-marketing-driven decision should be "what I do with this"... the OS particulars really shouldn't matter anymore.
Apple ripping you off on hardware just to get their OS (my HP laptop cost $1280 in 2007; the exact same spec laptop from Apple ran $2999) may work for them, but they're largely becoming a workstation-style company anyway... unless you're a fool, you're only buying a Mac to access Apple's proprietary software (eg, Final Cut Pro, Shake, etc... not that there aren't 20 different alternatives on Windows, and even some decent ones on Linux). The rest of it's Apple's excellent marketing working on people who simply don't have a clue about computers.
-Dave Haynie
Bing Users also have 55% Less of a brain.