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Bing Gains 10% Marketshare
samzbest writes "According to ComScore's qSearch, Microsoft's retaliation against Google search, Bing, has gained significant market share, now facilitating close to 10% of US searches. That's a gain of two large points in five months."
I recently installed the Google search provider in IE8. Not only did I have to "Find More Providers", but Google was hidden on the second page of the default list and mislabeled as "Google Search Suggestions". Accidents.
Bing is not just a rebrand of Live/MSN Search. When they launched, they added tons of features and introduced new indexing and ranking algorithms that actually bought the results pretty much to same level as Google's, even if not over.
All the obvious product placement and subtle placement in trashy reality shows ("lets 'bing' it") probably haven't hurt either.
Sure they did some work on creating Bing, but even so it did replace both MSN Search and Live Search. So it really is no surprise at all that Bing has about the same market share than those combined.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I had the same experience - it took some digging to figure out how to make Google the default search provider, and there were several Googles listed on the page where Google eventually showed up and no good information on which to choose. Worse yet, I was in the process of installing Windows 7 and it decided to install updates after I'd done this, and somehow managed to reset the default search provider to Bing in one of those.
Well, one is tempted to mention the fact that Bing has been made only for the purpose of stealing users and customers from Google who built a search engine for the purpose of making information more accessible and easy to find. It just happened to be a fantastic business idea as well... Therefore at least one reason Bing is piece of crap is because of it's evilness!
If you used Firefox (or Opera) you could use greasemonkey (or userjs) to change Google's background to Bing's. Then you could get your pretty pictures and quality search results at the same time.
MS really loves to reset IE default page and also reload their url bookmarks for their websites if they are removed. Very annoying.
I wasn't the only person to have experienced this issue (which may have been more an ie8 than windows 7 issue) -
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Web_Development/Search_Engines/Q_24641989.html
(scroll to the bottom for the posts)
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
microsoft is making themselves better and more productive? LOL I seriously hope you are joking. Bing is still very skewed to show positive results for things that MS is interested in gaining marketshare from.
I really doubt it. I just did a search for "virtual machines". Something that Microsoft would dearly love to increase its market share in. The first result was a Wikipedia article. The second was VMWare, the third was from Sun, and the 4th was Virtual PC. If they were being biased, don't you think that they would put their product 1st?
Same thing with doing a search for "database servers". On Bing the first result to an actual product is the 5th entry and it's for MySQL. On Google, the first result to an actual product is the 4th entry and it's for Microsoft SQL server.
I could go on, but the reality is the reality is that Bing isn't that bad and no more biased to any of Microsoft's stuff then Google is.
I have a slightly fairer comparison which excludes relative rankings.
If you search for the name of my shop, Hannah Zakari, my website is the first result on every major search engine (I've just tried google, yahoo, bing, ask, search.com and baidu)
People who have searched for "Hannah Zakari" in the past 30 days came from the following search engines:
1. google 95.86%
2. bing 1.60%
3. yahoo 1.35%
4. aol 0.75%
5. search 0.30%
The same period last year looked like this:
1. google 92.77%
2. live 2.95%
3. yahoo 2.09%
4. search 1.52%
5. aol 0.57%
The site is UK based, so this will be a geographically limited sample, but I'm not seeing a massive surge in Bing-age.
I had the same experience - it took some digging to figure out how to make Google the default search provider, and there were several Googles listed on the page where Google eventually showed up and no good information on which to choose.
Can you clarify the latter part? When I click on the dropdown arrow on the right of the search icon in IE, and select "Find More Providers...", it opens this page. Google provider is indeed tucked away on the second page there, but so far as I can see, it's the only one with "Google" in its name.
I wonder if this has to do with Window 7. Its the default search
It's not really default - when you run IE for the first time on a new user account, it'll ask you if you want "Express: Bing Search", or "Custom", with neither checked by default, so you have to pick one to move on. I would imagine that more people who don't know any better pick "Express" though, so there may be something to it.
The problem is that Win7 is still at, what, ~2%? And most of its early adopters are power users or developers, who usually install a different browser pretty much first thing after the OS install.
meep
"Let's bing it?"
Eh? Wait, what? YouTube or it didn't happen!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Bing is default, and if you don't initially select an alternative, it takes some searching of Microsoft's 'search engine' chooser to find Google.
The terminology used is also confusing, so that the first items that appear for a search for Google are actually not for the search box at the top RHS of the window.
Microsoft are using obvious dirty tricks to steal market share, as they usually do. Time for another complaint to the EU.
Ask and ye shall receive. By the way, this clip comes from InfoMania which is an awesome show.
Here's how you do it in chromium:
(Just tested it, it works just fine. Now, let me change it back :D)
Yea, because Google's idiotic toolbar being bundled with everything from the end user Java VM to Adobe PDF Reader is so different a tactic.
It is a different tactic.
Google's toolbar is everywhere because people decide they like it and want to include it in their products.
Microsoft's search is because MS is including it in their own products, not because people like it.
I stole this Sig
A couple of other items of note - for C# programmers, Bing is nicer in that it allows the sharp sign in a search, as opposed to google which doesn't
Forget about Bing for C#, try Google Codesearch:
http://google.com/codesearch
About finding the pictures, I'm now frequently searching for better image sources with the reverse image engine:
http://www.tineye.com/
You just scroll down and more results are loaded.
What a crappy feature !
IE8 is already slow, increasing the size of the page just makes it slower.
It's also on slashdot, on your messages page.
What are you talking about? Dragon Age, their most recent release, has no DRM past an old school serial number and DVD check! There is no online activation required, no install limits, nothing. Now, granted, the downloadable content for it has DRM, but the base game itself has ZERO DRM.
I don't own it, but I believe Sims 3 shipped without DRM as well.
Perhaps you are referring to the Mass Effect and Spore debacles from a year or two ago?
Living With a Nerd
Sorry, my recollection was a bit off, but the end results was the same.
http://search.slashdot.org/story/09/08/06/1334225/Bing-Search-Tainted-By-Pro-Microsoft-Results