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Bing Gains 10% Marketshare

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the nowhere-to-go-but-up dept.

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."

7 of 514 comments (clear)

  1. Is it trickery? by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Are they only counting the places where people go to the page and do a search or are they counting all the 'embedded' searches which are snuck into other apps like IE and Windows Live to boost numbers?

    Thought so.

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    1. Re:Is it trickery? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Google search is embedded into a hojillion websites as well as having browser plugins / toolbars for pretty much every browser. If "embedded searches" are counted it'll probably be to Google's advantage.

      (I'm not saying that the study isn't trickery. I wouldn't know either way.)

    2. Re:Is it trickery? by jonadab · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > Are they only counting the places where people go
      > to the page and do a search or are they counting
      > all the 'embedded' searches which are snuck into
      > other apps like IE and Windows Live to boost numbers?

      Don't be an idiot. This is Bing we're talking about, not Yahoo. Do you really think 10% of people go to it on purpose? Outside of extreme geekdom, nobody's even heard of it yet.

      Basically what this means is IE8 has, mostly as a result of automatic updates, reached about 10% market share among people who think the browser's location bar is a search box and haven't bothered to express an opinion about what search engine it should use. IE8 ships with "Live Search", alias Bing, as the default; IE6 and IE7 used MSN Search as their default, so what we're seeing here is mostly new-version uptake.

      There are also a few geeks using it on purpose to try it out, but even if 100% of the slashdot-reading population did that it wouldn't be anywhere near 1% market share, let alone 10%. And the single most popular search engine among the slashdot-reading geekdom is almost certainly still Google at this point.

      No, the bulk of the 10% we're talking about here consists of people using the IE8 UI.

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  2. MSN/Live had about the same market share before by guruevi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not really news. Bing is just a rebranding of MSN Search. In June 2007, MSN had a spike of 16% market share (http://blog.compete.com/2007/07/09/june-search-share-msn-live-google-yahoo-ask/). Given the huge marketing behind Bing as well as the conversion of practically all search engines on every site that has anything to do with Microsoft, I would say, meh, no big deal.

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  3. Surprising... by Gription · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It is amazing how a simple campaign of drive-by installs and default check boxes that change your search provider can increase your market share!!!

    1. Re:Surprising... by MrNaz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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      I hate printers.
  4. Re:Shocked by Ant+P. · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I find it hilarious that - even with the obvious money-under-the-table bias, even with the fact it's shoved in every IE user's face by default (and the fact changing the default on that is deliberately hard and confusing), they can still only get 10%.