Slashdot Mirror
Bing Search Overtakes Yahoo
SharkLaser writes "Microsoft's Bing search engine has overtaken Yahoo for the first time. While both Bing, Yahoo and a bunch of meta-search engines like the privacy-oriented DuckDuckGo use Bing's back-end, it clearly shows Yahoo's declining market share. comScore has also released its search data for 2011 — overall, Bing gained 3.1% of market share while Yahoo lost 1.5% and Google lost 0.7%. Yahoo's new CEO Scott Thompson has lots of work to do."
Here's how I have contributed:
I used to employ Google for all kinds of web searches, but over the last few month's, I realized (by accident), that Bing's video search returns were better presented (but not necessarily more relevant) than Google's.
Particularly, I have come to love Bing's playing of the videos when the mouse is hovered over them. Google has nothing close! Google should watch out.
That's a great feature in Bing, actually. Especially if looking for more adult material. Another thing is that Google has really crapped their design lately. It relies heavily on javascript and they've gone and hidden the cached link in the side panel that opens when you hover it. It's slow and clumsy. Same thing happened to their image search. It's sad because Google always took pride in providing clear, useful interface, but not anymore. I guess they get more ad clicks by frustrating users who use the normal search.
Yes, Google needs competition but Bing isn't it. Sad for MS but true.
At this point there won't be anyone else than can compete with Google either. Now a days search engines rely heavily on datamining and especially keyword data supplied by users when searching. It's also the reason why Google datamines so much. With their market share they get significantly more data than Bing, especially long tail keywords and keywords people search less often.
Google also relies on looking which result users choose and if they return back from that site. If user chooses a particular search, it means the user thinks it's relevant and could be good. But if he quickly returns back from the site, it means he didn't find the information he was looking for from that results. That is also data that Google gets much more just because they have so much more users.
So all in all, if it wasn't for Microsoft, we would only have Google. No one else can compete with them at this point. Interestingly, Google is failing in Russia, China and South Korea where local companies got the market share before Google, and they can't really do much about it. Google tried to play dirty tricks in Russia by disabling the initial search engine choice dialog and defaulting to Google instead of Yandex, but they were quickly called of it and had to stop that practice.
Sales for the Zune have overtaken sales for the Sony Walkman.
Cross post for a pic from reddit.com
There's always a reason why people still prefer using Google. The only reason why I can see people using Bing or Yahoo is because that's the default engine on their web browser or something like that.
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.
I smell a marketing campaign targeted against Google. Yahoo is powered by Bing. DuckduckGoo also powered by Bing.
I still prefer Google's track record on privacy over MS's or FB's. Not that I'm not worried about privacy, it is getting very difficult to escape the all seeing eyes...
I was using Yahoo! for years. Up until they started pushing pop up/pop under ads. At that point they were Google powered, and I asked myself - "if I'm just getting Google results, why not use Google?"
If their search engine is Bing - why not just use Bing?
The new CEO needs to figure out the answer to that question.
No one chooses Bing (ok some do but not many). People use Bing because their WindowsUpdate updated their browser from IEx to IEy and it changed the default search engine to Bing and the user never even noticed. I say this because, as an IT professional, every single user's PC I have ever seen with Bing as the default search engine, the user still thinks they're using Google. They simply don't pay attention to anything that's going on in front of their own eyes.
Bing is not gaining market share by being good - it's gaining it because MS is using their OS monopoly to "trick" users into using Bing. I say this as someone who generally likes Microsoft, too. When it comes to someone changing my browsers settings - any of them - without asking me, I get really pissed off.