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?"

Comments

What a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:What a surprise

[iluvcapra]

The story is pretty clear that, even with bing's higher click-thru rate, The Google still gets your ad about 13 times as many impressions. Though, not knowing the pricing structures both companies use for ads, I could not tell you the proper return on advertising for both services.

(Note also that, after the initial bump, Bing has once again fallen behind Yahoo.)

Re:What a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

The use of Bing COULD be boosted by IE 8 choosing that by default. How many users install software defaults?

As for clicking on ads, there are lots of potential reasons, including the ones mentioned here. But of course, since it's a "decision engine" people are more likely to follow that decision. ;-)

Re:What a surprise

[nycguy]

What exactly makes Bing an inferior search engine? I generally use Google, but I've found, for example, in tracking down some old friends from high school and college that I was able to find them on Bing whereas I was not on Google or Yahoo. Also, I like Bing's video search better because the video "thumbnails" start to play when you mouse over them, which makes it easier to find what you're looking for. I know this article gives you a chance to take your daily shit on Microsoft, but maybe when you're done with your two minutes hate you might want to consider that Google hasn't done much to improve their core product lately so a little competition might not be a bad thing.

Re:What a surprise

[basementman]

Why is it inferior? Because it has the Microsoft name attached to it? I would invite you to take the blind search test to see which search engine is really the best for you: http://blindsearch.fejus.com/

Re:What a surprise

[Fnkmaster]

I have tested it on a bunch of target search phrases relevant to my business and the results that Bing produces are plainly inferior. It weights substrings in a URL much more highly than Google does and seems to significantly discount anything that looks like inbound link count/quality.

For certain types of queries that aren't in business areas where search engine traffic is competitive, maybe that will produce better results. But in the areas I looked it, it produces garbage.

Re:What a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, so Google hasn't completely rebranded their "core product", but it's not like they're inactive on that front. See: Suggest, uber Search Options, and - what's this? - Searchology? An event "to update our users, partners, and customers on the progress we have made in search and tell them about new features"?

Re:What a surprise

[Darkness404]

I don't know, but I've found myself pretty happy with Google's search. I've used Bing and can't find any difference other than the fact that Bing randomly decides what it thinks i'm meaning and tries to give me those results. When usually its wrong. With Google I basically get the information I need quickly, with Bing I have to wade through all kinds of "suggestions" that are usually wrong. For example, because it was on its main page as a "featured search" I typed in mosquito bite. I got 5 results on the actual mosquito bite and then other "suggestions" of first aid, symptoms, news, treatments, etc. Google's was a bit better, with actual results (though it did have a few YouTube videos, news and images mixed in) but it didn't try to suggest me what it thought I meant which is nice.

Then I decided to do another search, of SNES to see how well both engines did with acronyms. Bing ended up with a typical first segment, until you got down to suggestions of "SNES games"... However they were all NES related(!) totally different than what I was searching for. Than about half the "suggested" results were of things for the NES(!) which is totally different. For example the suggestions for "SNES Repair" ended up with pages about how to repair the NES. Google's results were typical, mods, ROMs and general history of the SNES with no mention of the NES in the first 3 pages.

Re:What a surprise

[gregorio]

I would invite you to take the blind search test to see which search engine is really the best for you: http://blindsearch.fejus.com/

It's not that blind. Having Yahoo and Google side-to-side really ruins the whole "blind test" experience, as Yahoo's results are just Google's with a slightly different result order.

"Oh, this is not equal to the other two, so it is not Yahoo or Google"

Re:What a surprise

[barncha]

Why is it inferior? Because it has the Microsoft name attached to it?

No, because it has the name of fictional character who is a son of erotic novelist and cross-dressing Vegas burlesque star attached to it.

Re:What a surprise

[Darkness404]

I put in a few search strings, mostly random ones on both Web and Image, (the search strings included USB Flash drive, how to start a fire, iPhone reviews, and a lot of other ones) I ended up for web preferring Google's 5 times, Yahoo! 2 times and Bing 1 time. On images I ended up preferring Google's 6 time, Yahoo! 1 time and Bing 0 times.

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

The use of Bing COULD be boosted by IE 8 choosing that by default. How many users install software defaults?

As for clicking on ads, there are lots of potential reasons, including the ones mentioned here. But of course, since it's a "decision engine" people are more likely to follow that decision. ;-)

I would be very surprised if there were not a strong correlation between users who don't customize their settings and users who more frequently respond to advertising the way that the advertisers want them to.

That's because defaults are intended to be applied to millions of users and therefore cannot be ideal for all users or even very many of them. At least, I'll say that the number of people who use all-default settings is far greater than the number of users for whom this is ideal. The greater the number of options which can be customized, the more true this is. Someone who has an "ideal" in mind for how their setup should be and is willing to undergo at least some minor effort to arrange it is more likely to be a more independent thinker, reducing the susceptibility to external suggestion such as advertising.

Re:What a surprise

[binarylarry]

You should just be thankful bing didn't return:

"You searched for "SNES Game" - Don't you really mean "Xbox 360 Games"?"

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

I don't know, but I've found myself pretty happy with Google's search. I've used Bing and can't find any difference other than the fact that Bing randomly decides what it thinks i'm meaning and tries to give me those results. When usually its wrong. With Google I basically get the information I need quickly, with Bing I have to wade through all kinds of "suggestions" that are usually wrong. For example, because it was on its main page as a "featured search" I typed in mosquito bite. I got 5 results on the actual mosquito bite and then other "suggestions" of first aid, symptoms, news, treatments, etc. Google's was a bit better, with actual results (though it did have a few YouTube videos, news and images mixed in) but it didn't try to suggest me what it thought I meant which is nice. Then I decided to do another search, of SNES to see how well both engines did with acronyms. Bing ended up with a typical first segment, until you got down to suggestions of "SNES games"... However they were all NES related(!) totally different than what I was searching for. Than about half the "suggested" results were of things for the NES(!) which is totally different. For example the suggestions for "SNES Repair" ended up with pages about how to repair the NES. Google's results were typical, mods, ROMs and general history of the SNES with no mention of the NES in the first 3 pages.

That alone would annoy me. I want a machine to do what I told it to do. Depending on what machine it is, the failure to perform this way could be merely annoying (Web search) or rather dangerous (automobiles). When I use a search engine, I want it to search for what I told it to search for, not some other thing that it thinks I really meant. Sorry but the ultimate purpose of "we know what you meant better than you do" is to pander to sheeple. By "sheeple" here I mean "people who want to be taken care of" as opposed to "people who can independently determine what they want."

I will say one thing. This may be a smart business move on Microsoft's part, in that there are many such people, they are likely to respond to advertising as intended, and it's not a stretch to say that they don't enjoy thinking, find independence to be a burden instead of a privilege, and find it desirable when somebody offers to do some thinking for them. That's a formula for quickly building a userbase. Like a lot of Microsoft's business moves, I think it's a pretty shitty way to do things but I must admit that it's effective. Note, I never said that all of Bing's users fit this description, just the ones who flock to it because they saw an ad on TV with a brand name they recognized.

It'll be interesting to see if Bing gains momentum; I think they definitely have a good shot at it. Something to make sure Google doesn't get complacent and enjoy its search dominance too much is probably a good thing.

Re:What a surprise

[binarylarry]

I used "Boobies."

Re:What a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1315571&cid=28828855

Re:What a surprise

[mysidia]

There's a pandemic of Microsoft Hating syndrome, as discovered by Linus Torvalds.

Re:What a surprise

[fullgandoo]

As opposed to Apple zombies using Safari who can't even switch search engines?
Yes, yes, I know you can type the name "bing.com" on the address bar, but it is more intuitive to just use the search box which is forever fixed to Google and can't be changed without using 3rd party tools.
Fuck you Apple.

Re:What a surprise

[fullgandoo]

At least IE allows you to easily change the search engine. It even fucking asks you if you want to do so upon initial use.
Safari on Mac does not allow you to use anything but Google.
But who gives a fuck, this is Slashdot.

Re:What a surprise

[caerwyn]

Just tried this on "differential evolution". The Google result set was the best of the choices.

That said, I would rate Bing higher than Yahoo; the yahoo set was quite poor.

Re:What a surprise

[HiThere]

I don't have any idea whether the current version of Bing is grossly inferior to Google. And I'm not likely to find out.

To put it bluntly, I wouldn't trust MS to deliver an honest answer. Even if they do at first to try to build a reputation, in my eyes they already HAVE a reputation. Since this web site is controlled by MS, I would expect it to use any access made to it in unethical ways. Probably not quite so blatant as downloading a keylogger, but of that ilk.

Note that this doesn't mean that I expect that they are acting that way now, though it wouldn't surprise me. But I certainly don't expect them to give warnings before they DO start.

Re:What a surprise

[morghanphoenix]

Something just bothers me about the "decision engine" thing. I'd like to think people are smart enough to make their own decisions and not follow whatever their search engine tells them to do, but for some reason I doubt that is the case. I think the major reason people click on more adds when using Bing is that those of us who Google already have some idea of what we are looking for, those of us who use Bing are looking for someone or something to make those choices for us. As for me, even if Bing was the best search engine ever invented, it gives me a bloody headache to look at it.

Re:What a surprise

[morghanphoenix]

Yes you can:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030514035516436

It's just Mac & Linux users can, on occasion, manage to do something without a GUI. I'm not saying all Windows users can't, but that huge slice of market share Windows users brag about all the time includes a lot of really dumb people.

Re:What a surprise

[stuboogie]

I conducted the same search on Google and Bing and you are correct that Google clearly returns the FEMA National Level Exercise results first. While Bing did not return reference to FEMA as the first result.

However, what if someone used that same search string to find info about:

New Living Expo
National Latin Exam
Nursing Licensing Examination

Bing returned links to those and a few other minor uses of the acronym on the first page. Google, however, only returned results for the Nursing Licensing Examination.
So, I guess you declared Google the clear winner because somehow they magically knew you wanted info about FEMA and not one of the other uses of that acronym. Someone searching for the National Latin Exam may disagree with you since it doesn't show up on Google until half way down the third page.

While I like the fact that Bing returns more relevant options initially, what would be nice is if Bing then allowed you to select the result that most represents the topic you are actually looking for and then narrow the results to only include those.

Of course, you could just be more specific with your search terms instead of relying on a computer to interpret the true meaning of an acronym you used.

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

At least IE allows you to easily change the search engine. It even fucking asks you if you want to do so upon initial use. Safari on Mac does not allow you to use anything but Google. But who gives a fuck, this is Slashdot.

I guess you are referring to search toolbars that are part of the browser interface, or maybe to the way IE will treat as a search anything input into the Address bar that isn't a valid URL. Personally, I disable all such toolbars, primarily for a less-cluttered browser UI. I also do it because I don't care to make efforts to determine what the toolbars do with search keywords, such as datamining for marketers.

When I want to search, I go to the URL of the search engine I want to use and input my search there. That way it's also easier to use NoScript, Adblock Plus, and my (large) /etc/hosts file to frustrate or at least mitigate attempts to track my browsing. With toolbars I am not certain whether those first two measures would be as effective as expected and since I don't care for them anyway I consider that a moot question. Doing things this way also removes any and all concerns over what my browser will "allow" me to do (a concept I reject).

Could it be just that "this is Slashdot", or is it more likely that Slashdot has an unusually high percentage of users who also take control of their own browsing experience? As my other comments in this discussion would indicate, I don't feel that people who are in charge of their own experience and like it that way are Bing's target audience, if only because they are a minority and Bing is being mass-marketed.

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

Yes you can: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030514035516436 It's just Mac & Linux users can, on occasion, manage to do something without a GUI. I'm not saying all Windows users can't, but that huge slice of market share Windows users brag about all the time includes a lot of really dumb people.

I don't think those users are merely dumb. A truly dumb person can't help it, and so I wouldn't fault them for that any more than I would blame a paraplegic for being unable to walk. What I do blame those "dumb users" for is something I call willful helplessness. That's when the information is out there, freely available, the person in question is literate and has 'Net access, and refuses to educate themselves even for simple configuration issues. It wouldn't be so bad except that these same people often complain that they don't get the results they want, and/or they think it's a terribly unreasonable thing to suggest that they can help themselves, almost like it's some kind of insult. Usually that's followed by something like "I'm not a computer expert" as though changing basic settings makes one an "expert."

Many such users are on Windows. There could probably be debates about whether that's because Windows inherently suits them or if it's merely because that's what the computer came with and this kind of user is quite unlikely to evaluate other options since that would require the learning that they so resent. The easiest way to identify such folks is that they can use the same machine for years and never know much more about it than when they started. That's what amazes me. It seems like it would take a lot more work to make sure you don't pick up some knowledge here and there that would accumulate over the years, but I suppose you could say that they are true to their passive mentality.

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

Something just bothers me about the "decision engine" thing. I'd like to think people are smart enough to make their own decisions and not follow whatever their search engine tells them to do, but for some reason I doubt that is the case. I think the major reason people click on more adds when using Bing is that those of us who Google already have some idea of what we are looking for, those of us who use Bing are looking for someone or something to make those choices for us. As for me, even if Bing was the best search engine ever invented, it gives me a bloody headache to look at it.

Yeah, I don't like it either and it's easy to deconstruct. When you don't really value and cherish freedom, you necessarily also don't value relative independence and self-sufficiency. When you don't have such firm and truly worthy principles, then you must resort to viewing everything in terms of whether or not it is immediately convenient. That means you view any independent problem-solving or decision-making as a burden or a price of admission for getting what you want, instead of viewing it as a way to expand your knowledge or to sharpen your skills. So someone comes along and offers to do some thinking and decision-making for you and then you can't help but view that as very nice of them. It's a naivete that might be cute if so many (so-called) adults didn't subscribe to it.

That's really just the tip of the iceberg. Bing is a rather benign effect of this horrible mentality. The ever-increasing size and power of government is a malign effect that goes with it because these are helpless people who need to be taken care of. So is the lack of independent realization in the average person; that is, the absence of ideas that someone else didn't spent a lot of money to put there. I do not exaggerate when I say that this is unsustainable and a nation which is based on this idea is well on its way to collapsing. Bing's "selling points" and why anyone would find them desirable are just symptoms of much deeper phenomena. Really, Microsoft is just giving those people what they want and probably doesn't care (or even know) about why they want it or whether it's good for them to have.

Re:What a surprise

[morghanphoenix]

Why is it inferior? Because it has the Microsoft name attached to it? I would invite you to take the blind search test to see which search engine is really the best for you: http://blindsearch.fejus.com/

I did quite a few searches on there, about 90% were won by Google, the rest were won by Yahoo, not a single search did I find to be better on Bing.

Re:What a surprise

[BikeHelmet]

That's because defaults are intended to be applied to millions of users and therefore cannot be ideal for all users or even very many of them.

Sure it can. Most people prefer Google, so the default in every browser should be Google.

It's a 100% logical way of satisfying the vast majority of users. You'll just have trouble getting Microsoft onboard with it.

Re:What a surprise

[thetoadwarrior]

For starters its auto suggest brings up "linux microsoft", "linux windows" and "linux vista" as the first 3 suggestions when searching for Linux. There are other auto suggestions that are a bit off and considering the company I think it's probably more than coincidence that it happens.

Re:What a surprise

[thetoadwarrior]

http://effortlesscomputing.co.uk/tag/bing/

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

There's a pandemic of Microsoft Hating syndrome, as discovered by Linus Torvalds.

"Syndrome" sounds like a disease. When you really do engage in anticompetitive, manipulative, underhanded practices, have been convicted in multiple nations of doing so in an illegal fashion, have (in my opinion) resorted to bribery to compromise independent standards bodies, have made Webmasters everywhere bear additional costs because you refuse to fully adhere to open standards, and have abused the meaning of "updates to the OS" to install phone-home software (WGA), perhaps it's understandable that many people won't like you? Just maybe that's not a "syndrome" but a predictable outcome?

Mr. Torvalds made a case for why it is sometimes expedient to work with a company that is important in its industry. He has not made the case that their tactics should be celebrated or that it's unreasonable to dislike them. The only way to make that case is to prove that everyone should enjoy the ill effects of abusive practices and that any and all pushback against them is wrong and unfounded. That would not be the argument of a sane person.

Re:What a surprise

[djdavetrouble]

Happy Apple Zombie here! Just this morning I discovered a tricky way to change search engines.
In the little white spacey thing before the searchy box, you just type bing.com, then press the
return key. Instant non googly search engine! Also works with other search engines I discovered.

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

I don't have any idea whether the current version of Bing is grossly inferior to Google. And I'm not likely to find out.

To put it bluntly, I wouldn't trust MS to deliver an honest answer. Even if they do at first to try to build a reputation, in my eyes they already HAVE a reputation. Since this web site is controlled by MS, I would expect it to use any access made to it in unethical ways. Probably not quite so blatant as downloading a keylogger, but of that ilk.

Note that this doesn't mean that I expect that they are acting that way now, though it wouldn't surprise me. But I certainly don't expect them to give warnings before they DO start.

It does surprise me that so many people seem to have a very short memory when it comes to this company's history. When dealing with entities like corporations, I neither trust them nor distrust them. I wait for them to reveal to me who they are and how they operate. That usually doesn't take very long at all. It certainly does not require the rich 20+ year history of frequent unethical (in my opinion) practices with which anyone who knows much about Microsoft would be familiar. No search engine is so good as to make me forget or disregard any of this because no amount of clever coding is going to fix a trust issue.

Re:What a surprise

[Kalriath]

Seriously? That method is the worst thing I've ever seen. You basically have to hex edit the binary (in fact, you are). If we use that as an example of it being doable, you may as well say that Internet Explorer is easily removable from Windows*

* Requires nLite, a slipstreamed XP CD, and four hours.

Re:What a surprise

[Kalriath]

I agree with you, but there's just one catch: we're not everyone.

There are people who do in fact not only want the computer to try guess what they meant, they expect it, and get their panties in a wad if the computer doesn't. That's who Bing's targeting, I think.

Re:What a surprise

[Kalriath]

So it couldn't possibly be because on a Microsoft search engine, the terms people search for are more Microsoft-centric, thereby resulting in a biased pool of suggestions?

It couldn't possibly be because most people with a genuine interest in Linux are Microsoft-hating sheep who wouldn't dare go near a Microsoft search engine, resulting in a dearth of Linux-but-not-Microsoft related search terms?

Please.

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

That's because defaults are intended to be applied to millions of users and therefore cannot be ideal for all users or even very many of them.

Sure it can. Most people prefer Google, so the default in every browser should be Google.

It's a 100% logical way of satisfying the vast majority of users. You'll just have trouble getting Microsoft onboard with it.

Context is important and you're responding to that out of context. That's kind of important when you are seeking to refute what I was saying :-). The discussion was about IE 8 and its default settings. This pertains to the idea of default settings in general (that is, every user-configurable option in IE) and why someone would not customize or at least review them. The search engine it is configured to use is only one such configurable option among many. So, you may have a point about the use of Google but not about the dozens of other options about which I was also speaking; my use of the plural clearly indicates I was talking about more than one setting.

Personally I don't think there should be a default search engine. If Microsoft's approach means that IE 8's first use asks you to choose one from a list, which I've heard it does (unconfirmed), I think that's the best way to handle it. I say this as someone who uses Google almost exclusively because I recognize that while it's my own preference, it may not suit everyone else. Besides, I find "easily customized because it asks you what you want" to be far superior to "one size fits all."

Re:What a surprise

[morghanphoenix]

It's a simple edit, nothing altogether that difficult about it, and much less time consuming than removing IE from XP.

Re:What a surprise

[cmacb]

"Syndrome" sounds like a disease. When you really do engage in anticompetitive, manipulative, underhanded practices, have been convicted in multiple nations of doing so in an illegal fashion, have (in my opinion) resorted to bribery to compromise independent standards bodies, have made Webmasters everywhere bear additional costs because you refuse to fully adhere to open standards, and have abused the meaning of "updates to the OS" to install phone-home software (WGA), perhaps it's understandable that many people won't like you? Just maybe that's not a "syndrome" but a predictable outcome?

Sounds like informed and healthy behavior to me. "Syndrome" sounds more like continue doing things against your own self interest when an alternative approach is readily available.

Re:What a surprise

[countertrolling]

...willful helplessness...

I think the "correct" term is learned helplessness, and it is not entirely a matter of free will as much as it is of conditioning. And it really shows itself in our dealings with authority and why more people don't rebel against it.

Re:What a surprise

[mikiN]

I think in this case it's much more about whether a user likes to tinker or not.
Like there are people who cannot resist popping the lid on any electronic gadget they buy and start modding it as soon as they get home from the store, there are people who will start fiddling with the 'preferences' of their browser or OS even before it has finished loading.
It's not always about the ability to change something, it's about the desire to do so outweighing the effort required.

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

I agree with you, but there's just one catch: we're not everyone.

Eh, I suppose it won't be productive to ask what purpose it serves to point out the obvious as I suspect I already know the answer. Additionally, nothing I have said depends in any way on the number of people who agree, so I don't understand the concern about popularity. Two plus two equals four and thankfully people recognize this, but it would be equally true even if the vast majority of people mistakenly think it equals five.

So, I'll be content with pointing out that you say that like all preferences are equally valid. In this case, they are not. The approach of learning how to tell the search engine what you want without needless second-guessing recognizes the reality of using something that, however sophisticated, is still a machine. The other approach fails to do so, placing it at a disadvantage when it comes to delivering useful results. Whether that disadvantage can be overcome so that Bing ends up as useful as Google is an interesting question, the answer to which remains to be seen.

Now if we invent artificial intelligence that is absolutely indistinguishable from a person, including the flawless use of natural language, then those two approaches would be on equal footing. They would then be legitimate preferences, just like you might enjoy ice cream and another person can't stand it. Meanwhile, they are not; one is objectively superior, full stop. If users want to use an inferior solution for the sake of convenience, then let them do so, but that doesn't change the nature of the comparison. The only thing I wish were different is that most people do not seem to be aware of a trade-off when they are making one, and I recognize the value of informed decision-making.

There are people who do in fact not only want the computer to try guess what they meant, they expect it, and get their panties in a wad if the computer doesn't. That's who Bing's targeting, I think.

That too was already evident. I agree with you about Bing's target audience, but you already knew that because I have already described them. I detailed why someone would enjoy that sort of second-guessing in the post to which you are responding. They are the "people who want to be taken care of" and they find it desirable when "somebody offers to do some thinking for them." I wonder what you thought I was talking about if not that. If anything, you have only summarized my reasoning with less focus on the "why" component - was this your intention?

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

No, he's referring to the browser's search box.

Have you even fucking seen the browser?

... Yeah, it's typically located to the right of the "Address" bar. Are you losing your cool because I called it a toolbar and not a box? Because that's what it looks like to me.

Tell ya what, cut+paste my post into a word processor. Do a search-and-replace to replace every occurrence of "toolbar" with "box". Note that none of the points I was making changes in any way. I have a feeling you aren't sharing my amusement at this. Too bad, that's your loss.

If you don't know that you wrote a troll post, now you do. If you did know that, you should know I've dealt with trolls far, far more effective and convincing than you. The best of them manage to be humorous instead of bitching about semantics. Ah well, to each his own.

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

So it couldn't possibly be because on a Microsoft search engine, the terms people search for are more Microsoft-centric, thereby resulting in a biased pool of suggestions?

That would make sense if this were a search of the Microsoft Knowledge Base or something else that inherently involves Microsoft. This does not hold water when you're talking about a Web search. Additionally, there is no need to speculate about the search terms and whether they are biased. The search terms were PROVIDED in that example -- he specifically said he searched for "Linux." Reading comprehension is important. That is not a Microsoft-centric search and should not produce Microsoft-centric results. It's really that simple, even if you can't stand it.

It couldn't possibly be because most people with a genuine interest in Linux are Microsoft-hating sheep who wouldn't dare go near a Microsoft search engine, resulting in a dearth of Linux-but-not-Microsoft related search terms?

Please.

That's some incredibly advanced AI if the search engine can read your emotional state (interface unspecified, perhaps electrodes on your head?) and tailor the search results according to whether or not you are a "Microsoft-hating sheep." That would be some amazing technology! How about we just say that it's a little more likely that Bing is a lower-quality search?

"Please" indeed. This is the third trivially-corrected post of yours I've seen in this discussion. Out of three total.

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

I think in this case it's much more about whether a user likes to tinker or not. Like there are people who cannot resist popping the lid on any electronic gadget they buy and start modding it as soon as they get home from the store, there are people who will start fiddling with the 'preferences' of their browser or OS even before it has finished loading. It's not always about the ability to change something, it's about the desire to do so outweighing the effort required.

I do see your point and I agree that whether a user likes to tinker is definitely a factor. I just think that point is a little less applicable when you're talking about user-configurable settings that are intended to be mutable and have an interface (the "Options" or "Preferences" menus) for the specific purpose of modifying them. Just my opinion but I think your point would be much stronger if you were talking about folks who get Linux running on their Xbox or something like that.

I would speculate that those who like to tinker are more versed in the kind of independent problem-solving and abstract reasoning that lends itself to that task. I imagine that their relationship to authority figures involves a lot more questioning than someone who does not value those skills and avoids opportunities to exercise them.

Re:What a surprise

[countertrolling]

I would venture to say that most humans are born curious, but then have it beaten out of them, both figuratively through the demands of societal conformity(specifically through the education system, church, etc.), and literally by the parents. It all happens at a very early age usually beyond conscious memory of the adult. Either way, it's usually our environment that kills the urge. Genetics plays a comparatively small part.

Re:What a surprise

[ssintercept]

so..i am not the only one.
i thought of that stupid 'chandler bing' character from that insufferable 'friends' show...
ughhh....

Re:What a surprise

[michaelhood]

Ads placed on Google and Bing's search result pages are, at the present, wholly billed on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis.

So one could conject that ROI may be a lot higher at Bing right now because of lack of competition (CPC is generally a loosely auction-driven model), but the volume to sustain your business is still at Google.

Re:What a surprise

[ssintercept]

i tried "boobs"- not only did bing show me more boobs, but there was a greater variety.
i just scrolled down and they just kept coming...

big ones
little ones
flapjack style
silicone sweater meats
brown
white
even mocha swirl jugs...
it was a multi-ethnic soiree of bazoombas
and a couple of acts of fellatio for good measure.

bing wins tits up!
of course this was purely scientific and should not be tried at home.

Re:What a surprise

[TheRaven64]

Wait, you're seriously suggesting the fact that you can hand-edit the binary to change a hard-coded constant string (and have it reset every time you update the binary) counts as the ability to change it? By that token, I can run Linux executables on OS X; I just need to edit the kernel binary to add system call handlers for all of the Linux system calls...

Re:What a surprise

[Blakey Rat]

Bing isn't an inferior search engine. It's worse in some ways, but significantly better in others. It's certainly better than Yahoo's (the number 2 in search.)

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

I would venture to say that most humans are born curious, but then have it beaten out of them, both figuratively through the demands of societal conformity(specifically through the education system, church, etc.), and literally by the parents. It all happens at a very early age usually beyond conscious memory of the adult. Either way, it's usually our environment that kills the urge. Genetics plays a comparatively small part.

This is absolutely the truth! Any thorough investigation into the matter will convince you that this has been both deliberate and systematically executed, for the purpose of creating a society of people who are easier to control because they do not have strong minds that are willing to question. The public schools are essential to this effort and it could not have been so successful without them.

Albert Einstein once said "it's a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."

Also, you are not really venturing with that one. You are exercising the natural intuitive brightness and discernment that is your birthright as a human being. I say this because you may not be aware of how profound your insight actually is or of the real means by which you understood it. Let's say it was more direct than ordinary deductive processes. It only feels like a venture because people who do not possess that brightness may ask you to prove it to them logically or mathematically which is quite difficult compared to being able to see it on your own and know that it is the truth. The challenge is learning to trust that intuition.

It's a delight for me whenever I see an example of this. It makes me believe that there is still some hope, that maybe this unsustainable society doesn't need to collapse under the weight of its own excesses, or that if it does that it will be replaced by something much better. You won't see them promoted in the media because the media is heavily invested in the status quo, but I am encountering more and more people who have real understanding to some degree or another.

If I may, I'd like to recommend something to you. Another man has explored the same realization you have shared here, and for the subject of public schools he is quite exceptional because he was a schoolteacher for decades who was very good at what he did. He had to resign after he realized the damage that was being done in the name of education. His name is John Taylor Gatto. I'd highly recommend to you his essay and also his free online book. There is no better reference for this subject anywhere. Both are enlightening reads that I think you will truly enjoy.

Re:What a surprise

[bennomatic]

My only problem with it is the presentation. With the default page being some random beautiful image, with links suggesting all sorts of things to explore, it feels like Bing's telling me what I should be looking for. Google's simple, clean interface means that my search isn't at all distracted by what Bing throws in front of me.

It's a subtle difference, but a real one. Of course, they have to differentiate from Google somehow; I just don't like the differentiation.

Re:What a surprise

[bennomatic]

Wish I had mod points. While I'm not sure I would put this in the same argumentative words, you make a very, very good point.

Re:What a surprise

[amRadioHed]

The search terms were PROVIDED in that example -- he specifically said he searched for "Linux." Reading comprehension is important. That is not a Microsoft-centric search and should not produce Microsoft-centric results. It's really that simple, even if you can't stand it.

What he says makes some sense, although I don't know if it's correct or not. The suggested search terms are generated (presumably) based on what users of the site have searched for in the past. All he was saying is that there may be a selection bias due to the fact that users who exclusively use Linux are less likely to use an MS search engine.

Re:What a surprise

[Mrwirez]

Adblock plus and host files... What are ads?

Re:What a surprise

[dudpixel]

Is it a long shot to assume that most people use bing ONLY after google fails to give them good results?

Its very difficult to compare search engines as apples and apples. The results can always be skewed one way or the other. They assume people only use 1 but not the other, but many people will use both, they just might use them for different amounts of time or for different things.

Re:What a surprise

[shutdown -p now]

The use of Bing COULD be boosted by IE 8 choosing that by default.

Not really. Older IE versions default to Live Search, and even older ones to MSN Search - and all those automatically redirect the query to Bing now.

Re:What a surprise

[brandontran]

Some use bing not even knowing how it became their default search engine. I would have to put those users in a bracket of click the flashy thing, it will make you feel better.

Re:What a surprise

[countertrolling]

then why is it that since the beginning of the history of homo sapiens we have been a deeply religious/theistic species?

Well, considering that written history hardly goes 20,000 years back, that really doesn't mean much, does it? The fact that it was written might indicate a system of formal education already existed. And within the realm of psychology(funny that you brought that up, because it was on my mind), especially social(mass) psychology, the 1930s were exciting times, and they got a pretty good handle on the nature of religion, authoritarianism, and natural phobias. And I would bet that even 6,000 years ago they knew what they were doing with the tools they had. In those "olden" days people were very inquisitive, and fearful of the things they didn't understand, and the people who figured things out had the opportunity to teach and guide them, but instead they took advantage of the situation and enslaved them by exploiting those fears and killing off any critical thought. Tin hats? Don't think so. Just people doing "like they do on the Discovery Channel".

Re:What a surprise

[slash.duncan]

I believe I disagree with part of your post rather strongly, it would appear to be due to definitional issues:

Two plus two equals four and thankfully people recognize this, but it would be equally true even if the vast majority of people mistakenly think it equals five.

Not really. Because we define "four" to be the name given to what two plus two equals, which is simply stating that it's the sequential unitary count coming after one two three...

By that definition, if the majority of people suddenly decided to call what we now call "four", "five" instead, well, then the new definition of what two plus two equals WOULD be five, because after all, that's simply what the majority of people have decided to label that number, and if the majority decided to label it differently, then by definition of language, they'd have the new correct usage, and everyone else using the old definition would be wrong, at least in the new context.

Of course the same idea applies if the language being spoken isn't English, or the base is changed. In Spanish (according to babelfish), dos (2) mas (+) dos (2) iguales (=) cuatro (4), it doesn't "iguales" either four /or/ five. In English but base two aka binary, 10+10=100, and how that's actually pronounced may depend on context (normal English description of the principle or discussion among mathematicians or computer professionals or...).

So it /does/ depend on the number of people who agree, because it wouldn't be the nature of the numbers that had changed, but simply what people agreed to call those numbers.

So, I'll be content with pointing out that you say that like all preferences are equally valid. In this case, they are not. The approach of learning how to tell the search engine what you want without needless second-guessing recognizes the reality of using something that, however sophisticated, is still a machine. The other approach fails to do so, placing it at a disadvantage when it comes to delivering useful results. Whether that disadvantage can be overcome so that Bing ends up as useful as Google is an interesting question, the answer to which remains to be seen.

It could be argued that the second-guessing, as you put it, is /always/ necessary, it's simply a matter of where it is done. As machines get more (direct programmed or programmed machine based learning) effective at deducing what a person "really" means, the level of "pre-processing" that needs to be done manually by the human before querying the machine, or the number of successive rounds of post-initial-query modification, will likely go down.

To use an analogy from personal experience, I once learned the process of extracting a root by manual calculation. That was decades ago (grade school, in the late 70s or early 80s), and occasionally I try half-heartedly to look it up, as on some level it /bothers/ me that I lost that ability, as I think I /should/ have it.

Never-the-less, with a square root button now having been on dollar-store calculators for approaching a decade now, and sub-20-buck calculators since the 80s at least (that being when I first needed it, I've no idea when it would have been introduced on "scientific" calculators at say the $100 level, or how common it might have been on $20 calculators earlier), and Nth root extractions possible on computers and $20 calculators everywhere now, there's little real practical value in actually knowing how to do that manually, for the average person or even thru intermediate level geek, today.

Similarly, command line computing is really not absolutely necessary today, as millions and millions get by with icon based interfaces all the way down to the cellphone level.

There's not that many folks around skilled in the art of using a buggy whip any more, either.

In the same way, the automatic "second-guessing" and preprocessing that we geek types t

Re:What a surprise

[ErroneousBee]

That could be it. If you type "bash c" into bing, it suggests the only practical programming a windows fan is likely to understand.

Re:What a surprise

[tubeguy]

"Willful helplessness" is about as good a description of stupidity as I have heard. Might also call it laziness.

Re:What a surprise

[dmmiller2k]

I would be very surprised if there were not a strong correlation between users who don't customize their settings and users who more frequently respond to advertising the way that the advertisers want them to.

My thoughts, exactly.

Re:What a surprise

[Jedi Alec]

What I do blame those "dumb users" for is something I call willful helplessness.

I tend to call it willful ignorance myself, but the basic idea is the same.

What was it that set Muad'Dib aside from his contemporaries again? Something about having acquired to ability to learn...strangely enough that part of Dune made more of an impression on me than anything else, simply because it made me realize just how many people are out there who've somehow managed to convince themselves they're not able to learn certain things.

Re:What a surprise

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I find that Bing is better than Google 1/3 of the time. So, I tend to go to Bing after checking the first page of Google sites.

If Bing was more consistent (it's quality seems to oscilate as it fine-tunes the algorithm/corpus) I may have switched already. I was contemplating it after looking at a series of searches it won* at, but then the results went to crap for some reason. Since then, it's been iffy.

* Search engines win if the site I happen to want appears earlier in their list than their competitors. Especially if I didn't know about the site ahead of time.

Re:What a surprise

[selven]

"You are searching using Firefox on Ubuntu" - Did you mean to install Windows and Internet Explorer, destroying all existing data on this partition in the process? []Yes []Next time my browser starts

Re:What a surprise

[trenton]

You should try the same searches in a blind experiment http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ and see which result set you prefer, to eliminate observer bias.

Re:What a surprise

[thetoadwarrior]

It's a MS search engine that is trying to compete as a neutral place for information rather than, say, a search for MS' own sites so yes I expect better.

Just as I expect a common Windows issue, like blue screen of death to include some sort of reference to Windows since it's a windows thing and as you find in all other search engines but some how MS' auto suggest thinks blue screen of death screen saver is more relevant as a suggestion.

There's no point in auto suggesting if you're going to ignore what people will likely want. They'll end up having to type the whole query anyway and therefore there is no benefit.

If *any* company wants me to use their search engine then I expect good clean honest results. If any other search engine were as bad then I'd not use that either. The fact it happens to be MS doing it doesn't really matter that much.

Re:What a surprise

[logfish]

I second that.

Sort of a double edged sword...

[Utopia Tree]

to be able to say our users are sheep

Re:Sort of a double edged sword...

[Kreigaffe]

On the other hand, money. Winner, money.

Re:Sort of a double edged sword...

[EnsilZah]

Seems to work out just fine for the catholic church.

The reason

[Jugalator]

It's because users of Microsoft services are more stupid than the general population. There, I said it!

Re:The reason

[miknix]

The really funny thing about this comment is that it was labeled informative instead of redundant.

There fixed it for you.

It's because users of Microsoft services are more stupid than the general population. There, I said it!

We all know that, hence the redundant mod fix. :P

Re:The reason

[Tubal-Cain]

The really funny thing about this comment is that it was labeled informative...

I agree. "Informative" is for a post providing new information. It should have been "Insightful".

Re:The reason

[morghanphoenix]

You're giving people far to much credit there, users of Microsoft services are exactly as stupid as the general population.

Re:The reason

[Ost99]

Having actually used Bing I think the click through rate has more to do with the accuracy of the links given by bing than the stupidity of the users. After the 10th useless link the mind starts to wander, and the adverts start to look like a better source of information compared to returning to bing for yet another try.

I've not yet made a search with Bing that actually returned anything useful, unless you count the adsense adverts on the page you land on.

Re:The reason

[jawahar]

Wisdom of Crowds (PageRank) versus Wisdom of ???

Re:The reason

[Junior J. Junior III]

It's because users of Microsoft services are more stupid than the general population. There, I said it!

It's because users of Microsoft services are more stupider than the general population. There, fixed that for you!

P.S. They are really a bunch of dumb dumbs! Total dooty heads!

Something fishy about Bing

[Darth_brooks]

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?

Re:Something fishy about Bing

[larry bagina]

maybe Bing's previews cause the user to hit your site without leaving the bing page.

Re:Something fishy about Bing

[PaintyThePirate]

It is just that your version of awstats is too old to recognize that Bing is a search engine. There is no technical distinction between a site referral and a search referral. Search engines are just individually filtered from the rest of the results by the stats software.

Google Analytics had the same issue for the first few days after Bing was released.

Re:Something fishy about Bing

[Darth_brooks]

That makes more sense than anything else.

Re:Something fishy about Bing

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like live.com, bing.com's bots send you some ref spam from a specific ip range. They claim it's cloak detection. However, no other search engine vendor does something like that.

Use their feedback form to complain. If enough people do it they will maybe stop being assholes.

Umm... cash back anyone?

[NitroWolf]

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.

Re:Umm... cash back anyone?

[colganc]

If cashback is something they keep around for two years or more I consider it as part of the search engine. At two years or more it must be part of their business model.

Re:Umm... cash back anyone?

[ChronoFish]

Who said you can't beat free?

Re:Umm... cash back anyone?

[Etherized]

I hear you. I'll often find products using google or deal sites, then go through bing just for the cash back - it would be really silly if that sort of usage counted as a bing success story.

TFA doesn't specify whether this sort of usage is included in the comparison.

Re:Umm... cash back anyone?

[carpe_noctem]

...and I suppose a guy with a link in his sig for "get paid to take surveys online" would know a bit about this subject, no?

Re:Umm... cash back anyone?

[gEvil (beta)]

*Bing* You've hit the nail on the head!

Re:Umm... cash back anyone?

[Skreems]

Cashback isn't going anywhere. It's a permanent feature. The goal, of course, is that you don't go back to Google when they don't offer up a carrot, because you've found that the whole thing is worth using. As long as they keep paying out on Cashback, they'll have a set of people ready and waiting to notice when they actually fix the product as a whole. Not that I think that will happen anytime soon.

Re:Umm... cash back anyone?

[Blakey Rat]

That doesn't really change the meaning of the article. Whether people are responding better to ads because of the cashback or because of some other reason, the *point* is that people are responding better to ads.

Re:Umm... cash back anyone?

[johno.ie]

Hmmm, that opens up the possibility of a new business model. It should now be profitable to sell $100 bills for $120 dollars. Get all your friends/family in on the act and get them to use bing to find your website. At 35% cashback, they will get $48 for each purchase so the real cost to them is $78, leaving them with $22 profit. In the meantime you are making $20 clear profit on each sale. No manufacturing costs. An almost infinite supply of new product... I think it's a winner.

Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Obvious

[Sporkinum]

Combination of no adblockers on the default IE with the default Bing search page on most computers. Bing cashback, and the obfuscation of ads mixed in with real results. I'd say they are doing a good job of covering their bases.

Well,

[theorem4]

Would that click through rate include the ads for Cashback? If so, I might consider the results skewed.

The ads are not presented as ads

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The ads are not presented as ads

[Rockoon]

..except that at least some of the time, when Joe Sixpack performs a web search, he is in fact looking for the ads.

These arent full time web geeks. They are often looking for something commercial.

Re:The ads are not presented as ads

[dotwhynot]

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.

What are you talking about? The ads and distinction made (background colour, "sponsored links", top and right) is damn near identical to similar search on Google. Are you talking about the "shop for" extra feature? That is not ads, but a (very useful) integrated shopping search result (similar to going to Google Product Search). Having additional levels of search functionality integrated in the answers like this for some verticals (shopping, travel, etc.) is one of the ways Bing try to differentiate from Google (together with the left column drill-down functionality, which I'm starting to like more and more after trying it).

Re:The ads are not presented as ads

[oogoliegoogolie]

Turn off Ad-block.

Re:The ads are not presented as ads

[Lakitu]

I was initially kind of shocked at the lack of distinction between ads and legit results, but then I looked at this screenshot someone else posted: http://i29.tinypic.com/mihpqw.png

Apparently there aren't any.

http://i31.tinypic.com/35906z7.png

S.O.P.

[meerling]

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.

easy come, easy go

[OrangeTide]

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.

Re:easy come, easy go

[d4nowar]

Google's homepage is nice too. For the most part it's just a search bar with a Google logo above it.

Re:easy come, easy go

[OrangeTide]

Google's homepage is simply utilitarian.

Let's imagine our demographic here...

[malevolentjelly]

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.

Idle Gossip

[mindbrane]

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.

Bing seems to be used by idiots

[oneandoneis2]

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..

Re:Bing seems to be used by idiots

[Mad Merlin]

Did you check if those search results actually have your pages in the results? I have one bot that really likes crawling Game!'s forums, and it always claims a referrer of Bing (and Live search before there was Bing) with a single word search term ("joined", "forum", "quest", etc). After finding that none of those searches would actually lead to me, I noticed that the IP ranges for this bot (65.55.107.0/24, 65.55.108.0/24, and 65.55.110.0/24) were almost the same as msnbot (65.55.208.0/24), in fact, many of the reverse DNS lookups for the former range gives msnbot. So, I'm fairly sure that this is just Microsoft trying to pretend they have way more users than they actually do. FWIW, I've seen about a dozen real users from Bing, and a couple hundred hits from the bot pretending to be a user.

Re:Bing seems to be used by idiots

[hacker]

Funny you mention that, here's my results (and our server is VERY heavily hit):

• eclug
• INSTALATION
• linux
• meeting
• message
• printing
• services
• terrorism

Only the first (eclug) and last (terrorism) are really directly relevant to topics on sites I host. Compare that with some Google search results:

• cool
• copy
• desktop
• gnu
• html
• LinkPilot
• mobile
• palm
• pilot
• plucker
• Plucker
• pluker
• restore
• rss
• sony
• students
• surf
• windows
• wxcmdlineparser

90% of the search queries by Google users are directly relevant. bing.com is just throwing random garbage around, it seems.

Re:Bing seems to be used by idiots

[LunarStudio]

yep - it's slinging a lot or irrelevant junk at the moment.

Re:Bing seems to be used by idiots

[shutdown -p now]

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.

Most likely, 80% of those - if not more - are from people just typing in the word in IE address bar. It has that "try search if domain name not resolved" feature since at least IE6, and all versions use Bing now (because of Live Search redirecting to Bing).

Re:Bing seems to be used by idiots

[Wannabe Code Monkey]

Funny you mention that, here's my results (and our server is VERY heavily hit):

• eclug
• INSTALATION
• linux
• meeting
• message
• printing
• services
• terrorism

Only the first (eclug) and last (terrorism) are really directly relevant to topics on sites I host.

Okay, since you state that eclug is a relevant term for one of your sites, I'm assuming you host either the site for the Eau Claire Linux User Group, or the Eastern Connecticut Linux User Group. If so, then I think the terms: INSTALLATION, meeting, and message are very relevant; and the terms: printing and services are quite likely to be relevant.

Bing l10n..

[Seth Kriticos]

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..

Re:Bing l10n..

[Anonymous Coward]

Set your Google link to "http://www.google.com/ncr" and you will get the default English page no matter what prefs you set or where you are.

Re:Bing l10n..

[Seth Kriticos]

Actually http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en and http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en work fine. It's just kind of annoying to figure out this option. Especially if all sites are starting to use geo-locations.. even more since there is a setting in the browser that is transmitted with the HTTP request - exactly for this purpose.

Re:Bing l10n..

[Seth Kriticos]

And there is another reason why I think geo-ip language settings are a horrible idea:

Let's say you are a UK or US citizen and are traveling with your laptop to Germany. You pug in to some local wireless access point and go to google.com, and you are greeted with "Willkommen auf Google" .. "Suche" "Auf gut Glück".

That's when you'll get one of those WTF?? moments. Even more fun when you travel to Japan.
(Assuming you don't speak the local language).

Re:Bing l10n..

[henni16]

Doesn't work for me.
That URL still forwards to google.de when I'm using a German IP address.

Re:Bing l10n..

[habys]

I wish they would simply fix it. Without knowing that URL I fought with google for a while to get English when I was in Japan.

I can fix that!

[elashish14]

/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.....

Re:I can fix that!

[miknix]

http://www.google.com/linux

Slimy Submission Text

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Slimy Submission Text

[wisnoskij]

"Why is someone who investigates an advertisement deemed less intelligent?"
No one should buy anything from a advertisement, they should look into what they want/need themselves and make an informed decision on what product to go with.
If you buy a product from a advertisement it is most likely going to have a lesser quality/price ratio then an item you find on your own that does the same thing, but the company does not spend millions on advertising it.

Re:Slimy Submission Text

[westlake]

I used to really like Slashdot, but the quality of the submissions is really taking an ugly tone. Who do we blame?

I think it comes down to a hard, bitter core of envy and frustration.

Windows runs everything of interest in FOSS. It offers the user an enormous, rock-solid back list of commercial software.

Freeware and shareware are still viable on the PC platform - think of the success of programs like SolSuite on Download.com.

Windows is the smorgasbord. The bazaar.

That's the only meaning of software freedom that will ever be intelligible to the user.

The geek will rant and rage over DRM - but to the consumer all it really means is that he can play protected media content over a super-fast HDMI link to his home theater audio system and HDTV.

Netflix catalogs 100,000 DVD titles, 2,000 in Blu-Ray. Why the hell am I downloading a mediocre DiVX rip over the P2P nets?

WalMart is a lost cause - one of many.

Not one Linux netbook to be had online or in their stores.

53 desktops eligible for a free upgrade to Win 7 - and laptops in proportion. Serious contenders for mass market sales - with hardware that is unquestionably up to the job.

Apple sells an upscale urban lifestyle. Microsoft, middle-class value. Linux remains a question mark.
   

Re:Slimy Submission Text

[Anonymous Coward]

By low-hanging fruit, I really didn't mean that to be offensive... but I can see how that could be misinterpreted. I certainly did not mean to make any claims about intelligence, tech-savvy-ness, or anything else you might have interpreted that comment as. Nor was I making any accusations for or against Microsoft or the folks who use their products.

          I simply meant that the dramatic rise in market share can be attributed to Microsoft's huge ad campaign, and that their rate of growth is probably unsustainable. The market share they have, one can argue based on the data, is the portion of the market share that is easy to acquire. i.e., they are the people who are not loyal to any particular product, and can instead be persuaded in one direction or another with greater success with advertising.

          If Yahoo or Google or anyone else launched even greater marketing campaigns, many of the new Bing users may be lost as quickly as they were gained. Again, sorry if anyone found this offensive....

Re:Slimy Submission Text

[twostix]

If you think Slashdot was at any time in history less "juvenile" towards Microsoft and people who use Microsoft products then you really must be new here.

Ten years ago CmdrTaco himself used to regularly post inflammatory stories with little personal swipes and jabs at whatever took his fancy.

If anything Slashdot has become far more corporate and reserved than it used to be. It is what it is, and it was NEVER as you try and claim - some mythical and refined purveyor of deep discourse. That only exists in your head either as a delusion or a hope. My conclusion? You're a Microsoft fanboi and are using the same tactics conservatives use against the "liberal media" in a weak attempt to get Slashdot to change more to your line of thinking.

It's getting there unfortunately and will soon be just another boring, bland "unbiased" (lol) news aggregator.

Of course then it will become just like all the other pro MS sites on the web - a ghost town.

Re:Slimy Submission Text

[euxneks]

I certainly didn't read that as unintelligent people are more prone to advertising. Low hanging fruit is just easy to pick - that doesn't imply anything else to me. Perhaps you have a certain bias yourself? I know quite a number of people who are prone to advertising but I wouldn't call them dumb or imply they are less intelligent.

Referrer spamming

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Just Ignore, Manipulation in Progress

[tuaris]

This is "News" meant to manipulate the confused and clueless. Mod it down and move on....

TFA has a blatantly skewed perspective

[liquiddark]

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?)

Re:TFA has a blatantly skewed perspective

[oncehour]

Do you really believe that Bing will be any different once it can drive targeted traffic? Shady internet sites are here to stay, sadly. They're the late night infomercial of the Internet. You can thank Clickbank.com for that.

Re:TFA has a blatantly skewed perspective

[plasmacutter]

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?)

the other possibility could be "parent post is a paid microsoft astroturfer"

Re:TFA has a blatantly skewed perspective

[introspekt.i]

That's not what he was talking about, though. He was suggesting alternative reasons why Bing had a better clickthrough rate.

Re:TFA has a blatantly skewed perspective

[salted]

I'm choosing to click on ads just to support bing over google. Its about time there was another search engine that was fairly decent. So to promote competition, I click on an ad nearly every time I use bing, even if I'm not interested in what the ad is. I've told my friends the same thing. If you like what you see on the internet, click an ad to support them, even if you don't care what the ad is selling.

Re:TFA has a blatantly skewed perspective

[liquiddark]

Or "TFA is a paid Microsoft detractor". It's not like there's nobody with a commercial reason to cut them down these days, particularly on a site as widely read as this one.

Re:TFA has a blatantly skewed perspective

[plasmacutter]

Its not like theyre bribing people to use their services with "30% cash back" for using them as a referral for purchases.

Do keep spewing their party line about google being some evil empire though. Maybe their bribery of us officials to investigate them for trust activity will bear fruit. The new standard oil is here, with tentacles so deep it can now leverage the government as its anti-competitive club.

Re:TFA has a blatantly skewed perspective

[liquiddark]

Brainwashed much?

Correlation...

[denzacar]

To an earlier story, perhaps?

I'm just sayin'... Bein' No.1 pr0n browser has its advantages...

Re:Acording to PT Barnum

[binarylarry]

Unfortunately for Microsoft, that's not a lot of users.

It's all Live Cashback bribery

[Junior J. Junior III]

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.

Re:It's all Live Cashback bribery

[asg1]

In effect, Microsoft is bribing the general public to use their search engine.

I believe the word you are looking for is competition.

Google is ripe for replacement

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Google is ripe for replacement

[CAIMLAS]

Yes, between killing Usenet (forums and blogs = poor replacement; a plain text digest really is the best format for some things) and the increasingly less useful/interesting search results (starting maybe 5-6 years ago?), google has gotten to be a bit of a necessary evil: less useful than before, but still the best game in town.

As for improving search results? I haven't the faintest. But I do think that we're getting to a point where we need more of an informationally segmented Internet again: Google's search results were more useful (to me, as a geek) when they indexed Less Stuff. Now they index everything, and often information-dense pages get crowded out by a product spec PDF or someone's presentation powerpoints.

Surprise!

[tompaulco]

According to this study, it turns out that people who are highly susceptible to browser advertising are also highly susceptible to other advertising.

It could mean Bing produces better results, too

[harlows_monkeys]

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.

Re:It could mean Bing produces better results, too

[pedantic bore]

Yes, it could certainly mean that. It's a perfectly valid explanation!

For the searches I've tried through Bing, it seems on par with Google.

I'm amazed that nearly all the posters seem to think that Bing users are stupid victims of a marketing campaign, or that Microsoft is up to something fishy with spurious click-throughs. I realize this is slashdot, and Google can do no wrong here, but perhaps, just perhaps Bing doesn't suck.

Bing Market Share?

[Marketing Gary]

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?

Re:Bing Market Share?

[haifastudent]

If you're already thinking about it, that means that it's time. For you.

Monopoly, anyone?

[Thad Zurich]

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.

Re:Microsoft knows their market.

[burni]

Well and I will introduce to you, the fourth group you probably missed out, but which is well represented on /. I guess

- 4.) Those who use XP since it has matured, and strip it down with nlite, tweakui etc..,
Those who used Win2k for a long time, those who also use/used Linux and/or FreeBSD,

those who are tired of ever changing Desktops through "UI-devellopment", those who are tired of being said that
they can unset all the blinky transparent shiny clumsy slowingdown addition to KDE but are tired to do it to go through every
configuration interface of Kontrol to gain back a desktop which is fast and not a bonfire of graphics,

those who like their Win-explorer/commander like setting for file browsing, no special media treeview etc.. by default

WE JUST WANT A BUTTON "VISTA & MAC influences burn in hell", and perhaps a button
"win2k/xp looks good, and KDE can do too"

- desktop
files on it, quick links, simple Clock and everything else must be add on,
a "System Control" Mandrake had in it's days it was called Mandrake (9/10.X)

btw. and even if a distribution delivers this, we want a consistent packaging system,
not to be bound to ever changing incompatible versions subversions and subsubsub-versions,
the --force tag is annoying for a 1.2.3_2 Version to match 1.2.3 requirement,

hey dll hell lol, rpm/deb/etc..-hell is worse

running FreeBSD/Linux as a serverOS for 10+ years now, and for 5+ years solely FreeBSD,
those systems are wonderfull,

but to go back to the topic, I don't use bing, I don't click on adds, I use an add blocker and
crush google cookies.

I judge this post myself offtopic, but I think those things had to be said, one time or another.

Re:Microsoft knows their market.

[bjourne]

Oh grow up. 95% of ALL computer users uses Windows.

Yeah, I wonder who's doing the clicking?

[WheelDweller]

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...

WTF is Bing anyway???

[thatbloke83]

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????

This should not nbe a suprize...

[3seas]

...as microdoft is well known for biasing what they sell.

It shows that they are indeed forst and foremost a marketing company....

Big Whoop

[westlake]

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.

Microsoft users

[Sam36]

only microsoft users are dumb enough to click on ads.

Great news for me

[spywhere]

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

[Locutus]

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

Latest Awstat version: 6.9

[iYk6]

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

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What seems more likely?

[tahpot]

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.

[OT] Signature

[ochnap2]

I like your signature. Thanks!

Re:[OT] Signature

[causality]

I like your signature. Thanks!

I am glad you appreciated it. Thank you too, for taking the time to say so.

Re:Microsoft knows their market.

[plasmacutter]

So you mean Windows users are people who work, are logical consumers, or aren't technical? Sounds like a pretty significant share of the market to me. Yup, at least 90%. If I were advertising for any kind of consumer product, I'd definitely want to reach these users.

there is nothing logical about buying a product with 75% shorter shelf-life and 300% more expensive upkeep (than mac) for only 30% less money.

Sorry, but price is not the only factor in a purchase, otherwise i'd buy a little tyco remote-control car and ride it to work, after all it's a car and its SOO much cheaper than a toyota.

Can't Stop Myself

[djdavetrouble]

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.

Re:People are not stupid

[Sporkinum]

The interesting thing about that is that the amount of cashback sometimes correlates with what you searched for, but does not correlate with what you actually purchased and got the cash back on. What that means is that you can search for cell phones and get a cash back on lawnmowers in order to get a bigger cash back. Some stores don't offer cash back unless you search for a "cash back" item. Once you are on the site through the bing cash back link, you can get the cash back on most anything on the site.

A couple of gotchas I found out, that if you have to return a defective item for exchange for a non defective one, that will cancel the cash back. The other is that if you use a coupon, that will nix the cash back as well.

Is this data from Chitika audited?

[Helldesk Hound]

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)

What a surprise: Dumb, Da Dumb Dumb!

[AmazingChicken]

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.

Maps too

[dj245]

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.

Defective metric. Garbage in.. Garbage out.

[Technician]

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.

Some positives - some negatives....

[LunarStudio]

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.

Stupid MSN.com "headlines"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Microsoft knows their market.

[shutdown -p now]

Those that are to stupid to use Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc.

Oh grow up. 95% of ALL computer users uses Windows.

GP is most likely one of those guys who really like the word "sheeple" - so there's no contradiction in his mind. 95% of all people use Windows; 95% of all people are idiots. He, obviously, isn't either one of those. To prove his point, he even writes "M$" (check the comment history).

Possible explanation

[SpaghettiPattern]

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.

Immitation of Wolfram Alpha

[SgtChaireBourne]

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.

Bing marketshare

[dingen]

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.

Re:Bing marketshare

[dingen]

I forgot to add a link to Net Applications. Here is it: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx?qprid=5

Bing users 55% more likely to click on an ad?

[dmmiller2k]

"... folks who arrive at websites via Bing are 55% more likely to click on an ad than if they arrived from Google"

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.

people who use Bing are far more sus

[commodore73]

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.

In other news, Bing users are more gullible...

[pbhogan]

Then again, maybe Google users have become better at tuning out ads over time. I hardly notice them anymore.

It's the Bing Cash--AKA the MONEY!

[PatSand]

Folks-

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.

SOMEONE CLICKED AN AD, THEY MUST BE RETARDED!

[AP31R0N]

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

Excellent

[TranscenDev]

Bing = newest form of mind control! Finally a way to take over the world one click at a time!
~Ami
Chicago Web Design

Only 55% more?

[hazydave]

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.

Re:Microsoft knows their market.

[hazydave]

That's an oversimplification.. there are plenty of us smart enough to use Linux, or for that matter, write their own OS (I have been involved in chunks of three of them, as well as designing the computers on which they ran in two out of three of those cases).

The simple fact is that there are major holes in the applications supported under Linux. Sure, you can find some in the same categories... take Electronics CAD for example. Such apps exist on Linux, most are, to put it as nicely as possible, toys. With some exceptions, this is true of many workstation-class apps... you're not given the choice of Linux.

As far as "too cheap for MacOS" goes... much the same problem, apps-wise. And yeah... when you have the applications handicap of MacOS, why on earth would anyone pay 3x as much for virtually identical hardware in an ever-so-slightly prettier case? That's the effect of chosing a proprietary platform over an open one.. many people here would reject Apple simply for that, even if it did have reasonable applications (which it doesn't.. try to design a computer motherboard, including schematic, PCB, FPGA, and cross-compiler support, on a Mac).

It may not be the vast majority of Windows users, but there are plenty of people using Windows simply because of applications support.. bigtime. It's not even that one can choose an inferior app on Linux or MacOS, it's often the case that no such app exists, period.

I for one would drop Windows like a bag of cat crap if I could. But that's nothing I or Microsoft have control over -- it's by far the applications. Sure, if you're an office drone, it's a different story... Linux does the job, entirely and better, you are probably just not aware or able to make the choice.

And there are many of us expert-types who use a PC as a PC, not a workstation. I do electronics CAD, digital video, photography, internet, software development, music, and many other things on the same PC. Linux is sometimes better for software development (in particular, when the end product is Linux based... but, hey, kind of a "duh"... you'd be better off under Windows developing a Windows app).

But often not. For many embedded CPUs, GCC may exist, but it may well suck compared to a pay-for compiler that's only on Windows. I'm not about to pay for double the Flash ROM just to be able to run slower code generated by GCC vs. someone's tweaked compiler that's only on Windows... examples: TI MSP430, Motorola ColdFire, everyone's ARM.. so far. GCC is pretty good at x86, it would seem, though I hear Intel's may bet better).

Having just returned from a C64 conference...

[hazydave]

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.