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Bing is 'Bigger Than You Think', Says Microsoft (onmsft.com)

Microsoft said this week that Bing is "bigger than you think" and provided some numbers that could be a surprise to many. The company claims that fully one-third of searches in the US are powered by Bing, either directly or through Yahoo or AOL (both of which provide results generated by Microsoft). From a report: With 9% market share worldwide and 12 billion monthly searches, almost half of that (5 billion) comes from the United States where Bing has 33% market share.

17 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Most searched word on Bing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Google"

    1. Re:Most searched word on Bing... by tomxor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You joke... but there are still many people who don't know what a browser is, they go buy a cheap 100$ laptop preloaded with winbloat 10 avengers home business whatever edition it is now, pre-loaded with Edge+Bing by default, they probably end up searching for google in edge's omnibar every single time they want to go to google... Bing counts that as a search of course, not a domain autocorrect. You might even be able to roughly calculate this proportion if Google released their "Google.com via Bing.com" stats you could subtract it from M$ stats.

  2. Re:Umm, yeah, sure by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That and many browsers will have its default search engine as Bing or Yahoo. And still they are #2 behind Google.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  3. Re:And this matters to me... by MBGMorden · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's controlled by a big corporation, so you should use Bing instead.

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    "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
  4. Re:It's the name by thebullshitpatrol · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Why would they name a service that you use to Google things "Bing"?

  5. Bing VIDEO is really good by Spy+Handler · · Score: 5, Informative

    search Bing for whatever porn you want, let's say tentacle henai, then click on the "Video" tab. It will pull up lots of videos of tentacle hentai. Also you can watch these videos from Bing search results without going to the video's originating website (which can be very sketchy and full of malware)

    1. Re:Bing VIDEO is really good by saider · · Score: 4, Funny

      I'm sure Microsoft will talk about this use case in their next commercial.

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      Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
  6. So True by OrangeTide · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I suspect many non-porn Bing searches are variations on "How do I set Google as my default search?"

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    1. Re: So True by qortra · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I would have thought the same thing. However, I've been using Bing since the James Damore incident out of curiosity, and it really isn't that bad. I haven't had to do as many technical (i.e. programming) searches since I switched, and that was always Bing's weakness compared to Google, so I reserve full judgement for later. Regardless of what you feel ethically about Google vs Microsoft, it can't be good for any particular search engine to have a near Monopoly in the US.

  7. Default by superdave80 · · Score: 5, Informative

    ..." that fully one-third of searches in the US are powered by Bing, ..." Only because there are so many browsers that MS has managed to get Bing setup as the default search engine. The worst was my Thunderbird email client. Not only did it have Bing set as the default search engine, but MS had somehow made it so that Google was not on the list of selectable search engines if you wanted to change from Bing. You actually have to install an add-on to get Google as a search option. I wonder how much they 'donated' to Thunderbird for that one.

  8. Really, Microsoft? by OneHundredAndTen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, after all these years, Bing remains so irrelevant that you have to resort to proclaiming that it is not irrelevant?

  9. Re:And this matters to me... by Voyager529 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What's so horrible about google?

    1. Their search results have gotten progressively worse of late. it's either so fuzzy as to have half the top results completely irrelevant, or "verbatim" won't come up with anything because of spacing or the literal order of words is incorrect.
    2. Search for "driver download" and you'll get some very shady websites, many of which don't actually provide driver downloads...and they do nothing about it. Same for "teamviewer" and other legitimate tools that get hijacked by "your computer has a virus" websites. If they want to perpetuate the blurring between the URL bar and the search bar, that's fine, but literally nobody has Googled for teamviewer and been okay with the sketchy sites that rank very high.
    3. Overall creepiness. They collect *a lot* of data, even if users go out of their way to avoid it. Though they *say* they'll be responsible with it (and to be fair, so far they appear to have done so), it's incredibly difficult to opt out of data collection, because so much of the web depends on them (go ahead, disable Google Fonts and Google AMP and see what happens to the internet...)
    4. Questionable practices - preferring faster sites is understandable, defining 'faster' as 'using Google AMP' is shady. Ad blockers are one thing, but adding an ad blocker to a browser that has a controlling slice of the market when 90% of their revenue comes from ads is 90's Microsoft levels of monopoly.
    5. E-mail is a great thing. Gmail has twisted it very heavily from being an analog of letter-based correspondence to being a de facto chat client, and twisting POP and IMAP to make it less practical to use a third party mail client, and require an obscurely placed setting to allow third party clients to connect via standard protocols...and it's not getting better.
    6. Discontinuing useful services and changing UIs and APIs to make things less useful (Reader, iGoogle, their 1,001 chat clients, none of which are XMPP compliant anymore, the list goes on).
    7. On Android specifically, mandating profitable things ('Play Store' must be on the first page) but not openness-based things (mandating unlocked bootloaders or that shipped apps can be removed if not a core function). Yes, they sell their reference phones, but if they're going to have requirements that are purely for profit reasons, there's no reason they can't mandate Samsung do the same thing.

    Now yes, I know there are rebuts to most of these items, but collectively Google has a stranglehold on the internet advertising market and controls enough of the internet infrastructure that avoiding them is near impossible, I do expect better behavior out of them.

  10. I like Bing by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 4, Funny

    He had a real self-effacing humor which played off well against Frank Sinatra's brash cockiness.

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    #DeleteChrome
  11. Re:I Switched to Bing by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's a bit extreme... Maybe protest by setting yourself on fire or something, but using Bing?!

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    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  12. Re:And this matters to me... by JohnFen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That's very strange. One of the pleasant surprises I had when I start using DDG was that the search results I got tended to be much better than what I was getting out of Google.

    Neither are perfect, of course.

  13. Such a shame then by kilodelta · · Score: 4, Informative

    Because I block Bing on my firewall as I discovered Microsoft was using it for the Windows 10 phone home. Just block 65.52.108.210, 204.79.197.200 and 13.107.21.200 - buh bye Bing! And it's funny my firewall logs - it's all hits to those IP's. So I know I blocked the right ones. So far nobody on this network has complained and there are about 8 of us using it. And not a single Windows mobile device either.

  14. Heh... by XSportSeeker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Bing comes as a default search engine (as does Edge), it's obligatory to use in Windows 10S, and Microsoft offers freebies for people who use it (a big reason why the percentage is so big in the US - Bing rewards is not available in several countries).
    Sure, some people use and like it, but I'd say 9% worldwide is a huge failure when you are trying to sway the market with agressive strategies like those.