Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.)
> 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.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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.
I hate printers.