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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."
It probably doesn't hurt that IE 8 updates make Bing the default search engine if you go the 'express' route. Even adding google as a search provider is weird - you can't just select it, you have to go to a web page and download the search engine provider package or whatever.
I'm shocked - *SHOCKED* - I tell ya. I find it hard to believe that ComScore would report such a thing.
Yes, I know the numbers may be valid but when a company is reporting on another company, with whom they are partnered, I find it hard to invest any credibility in the report.
Go ahead, you can probably blame some of this on me -- and people like me. I was in the market for an XBox 360 Arcade (with intent to add a HDD on my own) and had found through slick deals mention that if you went to bing and searched for Dell and clicked on the cashback link you could get an XBox 360 Arcade for 15%-30% off depending on when you do it.
... or even just hitting it up every couple days to see what I could find. Kept with Google on my other searches (Firefox and Chrome still put me through the same default search engine). But for a while, my desire to save a couple bucks probably pushed up Bing's marketshare. I can't help it, I blame my overly frugal parents.
... so what happened and who is giving me the money back? Is it Microsoft putting ad dollars to hard work for Bing or the retailer giving up some more profit margin in exchange for moving product? If anyone could shed light on how I was able to get better deals on -- sometimes any -- products on Amazon by first going through Bing, I'd appreciate it. And this isn't like a few pennies click through ad revenue, this is like tens of dollars across several purchases. Am I really that inept at how the world works to not figure this out?
Now, from what I read, your mileage may vary. Meaning you got anywhere from $20 to $30 off the price but you still paid $200. It was just recredited to your paypal account. It happened/happens with other large retailers like Amazon so I found myself periodically using Bing to squeeze 10% off a purchase here or there
I'm not sure how this was orchestrated. I mean, I thought commodities like DVDs and CDs and XBoxes were already shaven down to the some of the lowest prices online
So in the end, I apologize for causing all that cancer. You are correct to direct your slurs at me but I assure you that as soon as those deals dry up I will stop using Bing.
My work here is dung.
I've been seeing a lot of machines lately with the Bing Toolbar installed, and the client having no idea how it got there. Automated updates on a Windows machine are nice, but sometimes you get the latest helpful tool bar offering along with it. Sun Java, Adobe Flash, etc. often offer tool bars and other goodies that although are not harmful, might be unwanted. I'm not sure how much this would skew actual results, but it has to count for a few points of market share and larger reported install base of tool bars and hence search engine use.
When I look at AWstats for my site:
Google 18020 pages (linked to from Google)
Google (Images) 976 pages
Bing 226 pages
And from Google Analytics:
Top traffic sources:
Google 26,738 visits 85.24%
Yahoo 676 visits 2.16%
Bing 346 visits 1.10%
Admittedly the site is not about shopping or entertainment - it's mainly about technical topics which maybe colors the results.
I don't think Microsoft sponsored this article. I believe it just one of many periodic reports on search provider market share.
And personally, I don't think Bing is crap. It actually has some innovative features. I just don't have any incentive to switch from Google, especially with gmail and personalized home pages.
Would you care to tell me why you think Bing is a "piece of crap"?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Everyone is speaking of trickery to get the users. I switched my homepage over by choice - and I'm a Mac Safari user.
Reason? Much against my expectation, I found I liked the daily pictures rather than the blank of Google. I fully expected to prefer the clean look of Google (after all, it was that rather than quality of results which made me move from Alta Vista to Google many years ago.) but instead I found it was time for a change and I like the different appearance and the tagging they do I find interesting.
Search quality results - variable. Some good, some not so. It's no effort to just click the search box top-right and start using Google instead however, so effectively by having Bing as the homepage with a quickly accessible Google search I've got quick access to two potential sets of results.
So yes, I switched over for the pretty pictures. Yes, that's a shallow reason. It's doing no harm however, and I like it.
Cheers,
Ian
Well, MS is pushing out updates via OS updates.
I discovered the other day that IE on my XP box had suddenly decided that Bing was its default search engine, despite the fact that I'd previously set it to be Google.
I'm not saying I agree any more with the bundling of such things when you install other software (I don't), but Microsoft has an even more privileged access to my system in that they can push updates and I don't even get asked (other than agreeing to a cumulative security update with a long number and no real explanation). I certainly wasn't asked if IE could change its default search engine or to become the default browser (which has happened on occasion).
I have no doubt that a significant amount of their new-found market share was automatically set for users without their knowledge.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Seriously? I don't personally know anyone that uses Bing, and I even know a few people that aren't even aware of its existence.
I know that who I kow is a very small slice of "everyone", but still...where are these legions of people using Bing? Could the fact that many Windows Mobile phones use Bing as their default search engine be contributing to this number?
Living With a Nerd
Wow, I always thought BING was one of those geek recursive acronyms: Bing Is Not Google
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.