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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'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.
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.)
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 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.
> 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.
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.
Plus, it is a recursive acronym. BING: Bing Is Not Google.
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.
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.
So you are saying Microsoft is leveraging an existing monopoly to force their way into other markets. Wow, that's pretty clever, and certainly innovative on their part. Surprised they didn't try that earlier.
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.