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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."
With such a retarded name I didn't expect Bing to reach such popularity.
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.
No sig today...
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.
Still 90% to go.
I wonder if they get that far. I think Google is so fixated in the minds of people that it's hard to get it out. It's even on the homepages of not only younger people but also the digital elderly who are less computer savvy. Bing has to offer more and better search results then Google does before it gains any more then 20% of the market I think.
Don't forget, humans are conservative creatures, they only like changing when it saves money or reduces fat quickly.
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I wonder if there's any relation between this, and the number of users who've upgraded too IE8 and just not bothered/realised that they can change the default in-browser search client?
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
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.
Invisible to writers of malware?
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
...not backed by a global monopoly with 20+ years of entrenchment.
Just think of all of the captive Windows and IE users out there that can have MS-Whatever shoved down their throats.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
However, they did this same strategy with domainNames to get IIS up in rankings in late 2007 through early 2008. How are they doing now?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
These increases are very likely to correlate (causally, no less!) to Infection Explorer 8 being pushed hard, leveraging the majority number of computers that have M-Windows installed.
Capitalism is about having or obtaining a large quantity of something at price P, "talking it up" through Marketing or other bovine excrement until people want it, and then setting new price NP > P when they come asking for it.
Or, in clearer Slashdot format:
1) Have a large install base.
2) Push your browser hard onto the install base and set the default page to Bing (just as Google arranged with Mozilla).
3) ???? (bovine excrement)
4) PROFIT!!!
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
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
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!!!
Java is my common irritant with this. Whenever you run the install it hides a checkbox to load some type of crapware by default. I think it actually looks at your computer because it never seems to offer a piece of junk that you already have. It has offered the Google toolbar, MSN toolbar, Open Office, and now:
Bing...
I'm not sure your two links prove your point. As I age, I'm getting more critical of bad user interfaces.
If you are searching for Google, then you almost certainly want http://www.google.com./ Might as well show only that as sometimes less is more.
If that isn't what you wanted, click on the other results link just below and you can see lots of other stuff. But really, if you want anything other than the homepage, you are going to have to come up with a better query than "google".
Google got a lot of attention in the early days for its clean uncluttered interface. I applaud Bing for their clean uncluttered results page. At least for the example you pointed out.
can I get this analogy in a term I can understand? Like perhaps Cars per Library of Congress?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I find myself using Bing quite a bit. The reason - if I'm logged into gmail or Blogger, then Google shows me as logged in when I search in another tab. I can't log out of Google search while staying logged in to gmail or blogger, so I use Bing. Why do I want to log out? I don't really know - it's not like Google can't still identify me, but it just feels icky to have them blatantly flaunt that they track my searches.
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 (even though it does a mightly fine job of returning relavent results anyway). And, probably the best feature of Bing is that it's image search is really nice. You just scroll down and more results are loaded. It's worth using Bing for that feature alone.
However, the trouble with numbers like the ones in the article are that very few people will ever use only Bing. Google is still the de facto search engine, and Bing is an alternative for those times when you want something google doesn't do the way you want it to.
Why, I did a Bing search myself just the other day. I was using IE for the one thing at work that requires it, and I didn't know that Bing was the default in IE.
It only took me about 15 seconds to change it, though.
Seriously, though, other than the fact that it's the Evil Empire's search, I think this is mostly good. Competition breeds better products.
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
Funny story on this one. I was talking to someone about Bing Cashback and so he went to bing and tried to navigate the site and find information about the cashback program. However, he couldn't find anything. We tried using the search and the site navigation, and it was nowhere. I knew I had seen the main cashback page, and simply said to just Google it instead. So, yes that's right, he had to Google Bing (and it was the very first result). I think that is an indication of a search engine failing when you have to use another search to even find it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yesterday Google changed the layout of the igoogle page in Canada to match what it started around a year ago in the states. Over the past year many countries have suffered the same fate. There was however a work around that would let people use the main google.com page by going to http://www.google.com/ig?hl=all and this worked up until yesterday. It's very surprising that Google would force a significant and controversial change like this on its user base after over a year of people complaining and asking and googling for ways to change it back... I'd hope that they could at least figure out how much of the population that uses igoogle tried to get it to work with the established layout by talking to people on the appropriate team and using their own Google tools. I’m one of the many upset users who are now going to have to consider the value of my google branded homepage and if it is worth getting used to the new layout when the current people in charge over at Google don’t seem to understand the significance of keeping an option for the old layout that is in many opinions a much better use of space. I might or might not switch to bing, or yahoo, or any number of other sites but I’m honestly strongly considering leaving the igoogle home page after many happy years.
BlueBadger
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.
Here's how you do it in chromium:
(Just tested it, it works just fine. Now, let me change it back :D)
The real chuckle with IE8 and its search provider choices: MS has moved Google to the second page of search providers and some of the 1st page choices are a joke...