Bing Now Powers 30% of US Searches

http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/04/11/bing-now-powers-30-of-us-searches/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNextWeb+%28The+Next+Web+All+Stories%29

by sandaru1 • 15 years ago

76 98 15 years ago

thenextweb.com

pitdesi3• 15 years ago

It only lists Yahoo and Bing here to come up with that 30%, what about Facebook search? Is that not counted (or counted separately)?

It's "Powered by Bing"

peregrine• 15 years ago

Personally I am not a big fan of Facebook search. I can barely ever find links I've posted or any non-person/group/game/widget content.

wtallis• 15 years ago

Not too surprising. Just yesterday, I found that Bing had managed to get itself back in the list of search engines in my Firefox installation. I use a Mac! The only thing I can think of is that I must have updated the Flip4Mac WMV codecs, but I didn't even let it install Silverlight. If Microsoft is trying this hard to push Bing in so many ways, I'd be surprised if they couldn't manage to hit 30% while the competition is resting on their laurels.

Stormbringer2• 15 years ago

Much respect to Firefox for being the torch bearer in the darkness and all that, but their secret auto-updates in the background are why I don't use them.

I use a Mac not because I'm some techno-illiterate neo-lithic throwback, but because I'm a raging control freak. On the Mac I feel like I'm in control. Programs that go and do random weird stuff behind the scenes break that fragile illusion. :D

The worst was when Firefox's stealthy self-updating broke itself. I don't remember which version that was (sometime in 2008? 2009?) and it might have been on a work machine (Windows? Vista?) but there was basically no going back (couldn't use previous versions because of stealth updates...), and no going forward (wasn't gonna sit around waiting for them to patch it).

msg2• 15 years ago

All a little off topic, but...

  menu Preferences -> Advanced -> Update

  seek to "When updates to Firefox are found"

  check "Ask me what I want to do"

Now you have your control again.

natmaster2• 15 years ago

Bing is included as a search engine in Firefox by default. Did you start a new profile?

pitdesi3• 15 years ago

This doesn't foot with the traffic to our site. Would be cool to have our own little unscientific survey, as I'd like to see what experiences other folks on here have... can you fill in the following?

1) Domain

2) Audience

3) Google/Yahoo/Bing % of traffic

4) Notes

pitdesi3• 15 years ago

1) http://feefighters.com

2) SMB focused site that helps companies reduce their credit card processing fees

3) Google was ~88% of our search traffic, and Yahoo/Bing were ~5% each.

4) Numbers for past 30 days. We are ranked far higher on Bing for our key terms "Merchant account" and "Credit card processing"

thecoffman• 15 years ago

Far too small of a sample set to make a conclusion but on my personal blog Google beats Bing 2:1 in incoming traffic over the past three months. That actually corresponds roughly with a 70/30 split which would seem to corroborate the story However, my blog has far too few pages and way too little traffic to represent anything approaching a reasonable sample size.

theDoug• 15 years ago

1) http://ama.ab.ca/

2) Auto club (similar to a AAA club in the US) (see 4b).

3) Google: 89.29%, Bing: 6.2%, Yahoo: 3.4% (see 4d).

4a) Numbers from the last 30 days, so this is relevant. 4b) We have members in ~1/3 of all households province-wide, so we feel our traffic represents an average online user well. 4c) 350,000+ Unique Visitors monthly (search + organic). 4d) Search-specific traffic.

ratsbane• 15 years ago

1) Can't say (client site) 2) ecommerce 3) Google: 90% / Yahoo: 5% / Bing: 3.25% (last 30 days; search traffic only) 4) Bing's capture rate is .2% more than Google's but average revenue per visit is about 30% less.

bigiain2• 15 years ago

1) rather not say

2) gambling

3) 92%/2%/7%

4) Mar 12-Apr 11, ~46,000 visits. Other interesting numbers to jump out: Google's bounce rate 17%, Bing 28%, Yahoo 36%. The relative numbers haven't changed much going back to Jan - I'm not seeing any growth in the Bing or Yahoo numbers.

adriand• 15 years ago

1) raisethehammer.org 2) residents of Hamilton, Ontario / approx 1500 unique visitors per day 3) Goog/Yahoo/Bing: 92%/4%/4%

1) vacation home rental site (can't say precisely) 2) mainly residents of Canada / approx 700 unique visitors/day 3) Goog/Yahoo/Bing: 87%/6%/5%

1) contest site for kids (can't say precisely) 2) mainly kids in Canada / approx 1000 unique visitors/day 3) Goog/Yahoo/Bing: 82%/9%/7%

I realize these aren't big numbers in most cases, but I checked multiple sites and Google was never less than 80% and usually > 85%.

silvestrov• 15 years ago

cheap vacation, Northern Europe. Google 87%. Bing 10%. Yahoo 3% (the site has a huge amount of Explorer users).

sbochins• 15 years ago

That seems to be a large increase. I was under the impression that Bing/Yahoo made up 10 or 15%. Wonder what the change has been.

nod• 15 years ago

I did the same double-take. They both make up between 10 and 15% -- when MS bought Yahoo's search traffic, they effectively doubled their traffic and jumped to about 24-28%. So that's the number they've grown from recently.

chaosmachine• 15 years ago

These numbers are bogus, as far as I can tell.

I help run a popular music forum that gets over a million pageviews every month, and our search referral numbers show Google at 98.7%. The numbers are similar across 10 other domains I own.

I challenge anyone to show me a site that gets 30% of their search engine hits from Bing. Seriously, if your Bing stats are even close to 30%, please share with us.

forgotusername• 15 years ago

That could happen for many other reasons, e.g. your relative ranking in either engine for particular keywords, the types of user that visits each engine, and so on.

As ever, statistics published by the likes of Hitwise can only offer a partial view of the truth, and have been shown to be grossly inaccurate in the past.

DaveMebs2• 15 years ago

Its certain that these are only estimates, however, Bing has been growing in market share consistently for quite some time now. If memory serves correctly, they have had month over month improvement for at least the last 6 months, if not longer. Bing was around 6% when it "launched." Not sure exactly what Yahoo! was at then, but it didn't sum to 30. Initially, Bing grabbed share primarily from Yahoo! searches, but more recently it looks like more has come from Google (though it hasn't been that significant). Interestingly, Bing even grew in January when it was accused on "copying" results.

Point being, while doubting the accuracy of the numbers reported is reasonable, I find it much harder to dismiss a trend.

Sakes• 15 years ago

One explanation could be that your users are highly technical when compared to the average pc user. I would bet the ground google lost went to new pc buyers that are happy using default apps/settings.

These kinds of people probably wouldn't visit your site.

ra• 15 years ago

My stats show greater than 97% of search traffic is from Google; that's aggregated across a handful of web sites and applications.

citricsquid2• 15 years ago

I'll throw in some numbers too, we're on target for ~200m page views this month (74.8m in first 10 days of April) (2 sites, 60/40 traffic split) and we have:

site a - 66% search engine traffic. google is 98.5%, other is 1% and bing is 0.5%

site b - 76% search engine traffic. google is 97%, bing is 2% and other is 1%

Around 10% of our traffic is Internet Explorer. We're using google analytics (maybe they're fudging numbers? Seems v. unlikely) and search is a large part of where we get our traffic. Our experience matches yours very accurately in a completely different sector. These are gaming sites btw.

kenjackson6• 15 years ago

Around 10% of our traffic is Internet Explorer

This should already tell you that your traffic is not representative.

barista2• 15 years ago

Hitwise is a reputed source of data. Their whole business depends on the accuracy and reliability of the numbers they report. Questioning their numbers based on your personal experience when your domain is not representative of the general internet traffic is too amateurish.

The trend of bing making slow and steady gains is confirmed by a bunch of other such sites as well.

Bing is far from being a credible competitor but lets give them credit for what they have achieved.

andos2• 15 years ago

What about the trends? Is Google losing ground?

seaotter002• 15 years ago

Last month I have is February unfortunately, but showing just under 400k search engine referrals with about 66% from Google and 16% Bing for a video-centric site.

qeorge• 15 years ago

I'm not here to defend Hitwise, but your assertion is bogus. Its roughly equivalent to the author of today's HN Funnel Analysis post[1] claiming there's no way 40% of the internet uses IE because his site only sees 4% IE.

Maybe Bing just doesn't like your site. I've worked with many properties that ranked top 3 in Yahoo/Bing yet were all but invisible on Google (not banned, just not ranking well), and vice versa. Especially on long tail terms, which forums like yours usually thrive on, its not uncommon to see a big separation.

[1] http://blog.effectcheck.com/2011/04/11/hackernews-front-page...

patio112• 15 years ago

To my surprise, for March, Bing is at 15% and Yahoo is at 11% for BCC organic searches. My demographic is older, female-r, and more middle American than most of y'alls are. (Even with that, I cannot remember BingHoo being above 20% in years.)

rokhayakebe• 15 years ago

Yes, I think it depends on your target audience.

enjo• 15 years ago

We're at 26% in the business review space...

nostrademons2• 15 years ago

When did it jump up? Do you know of anything they did that'd make them suddenly more popular?

crikli• 15 years ago

I have access to a couple of sites that get > 1 million visits a month...one hospital system site and one suite of home decor magazine sites. Fairly 'normal' user demographics. For both sites, Bing and Yahoo are at around 8% each. Google's at 80%.

Looked at about 30 other sites we run (everything from personal injury attorneys to truck scales to HVAC companies to bariatric surgeons)...traffic from Bing is no higher than 9% and no lower than 3%.

jnorthrop• 15 years ago

I run a website for an association. Our visitors are solidly corporate types (with 10% still using IE6). For March, 90% of our search traffic came from Google.

GrandMasterBirt• 15 years ago

So first of all, the demographics may be at play here.

Second of all, if yahoo is "powered by bing" that basically means that bing in itself did not win anything, they just took an entire existing user base and replaced one engine with another. Its like if secretly all ford engines were replaced with toyota ones, and toyota claims to have gained market share. Its true technically, but on a user level its not users flocking to them, its just the fact of life that happened due to a takeover. Note yahoo allowed paying to get better rankings, so those who used it were already used to shit results.

bkhl2• 15 years ago

I've been using Bing since I found the Bing Rewards (http://www.bing.com/rewards), which gives you a point per 2 searches and lets you redeem the points for something later on. I have not found myself going back to Google, yet.

r00fus• 15 years ago

So each point is worth between $.007 and $.01 (based on the gift card conversions).

Assuming you make 50 searches per day, you'll make at most $.50 - is it really worth it for a half dollar a day?

bkhl2• 15 years ago

I don't know... $0.50 (Bing) vs. $0.00 (Google). What is better for me when I can still find whatever I need to find in both?

ajays• 15 years ago

$0.50/day could pay for an EC2 micro instance... :-)

lotusleaf1987• 15 years ago

If you really were getting 2 points per search I'd do it, but I just tried it out and it doesn't work that way, you only get points by taking advantage of their offers which are similar to Dropbox's free storage promos and WoW quests: How do I earn credits? You earn credits by taking advantage of offers that may include searching or exploring features of Bing. Offers are found in the Rewards credit counter located in the top right of the header on Bing.

And this buried a bit deeper: Search and earn. Earn 1 credit per 5 Bing searches up to 8 a day until Apr 30.

Stormbringer2• 15 years ago

Google's search is bad (spammy advertising), but Bing's isn't any better. Recently at work I went to do a search for something innocuous like

"what words can you put s in front of and still have a word"

And the number 2 result was something about anal sex. I'm like WTF??? I'm at work!

How they can tout themselves as a major search engine in 2011 and not understand the concept of NSFW I do not know.

----

My predictions:

1) So long as Microsoft keeps throwing money at it, Bing will continue to improve.

2) So long as Google's main source of revenue is advertising, they will continue to try to find that "sweet spot" of bombarding us day and night with ads, but not quite enough to make us switch.

It's like a choice between new evil and old evil... either way that ain't a good thing.

Cushman• 15 years ago

Well, Apple seems well on their way to making their own curated internet, so don't give up all hope.

guywithabike• 15 years ago

What makes you say this?

patrickk2• 15 years ago

It's important to note that Google made 88% of it's revenue outside of the US in 2009.

Here's is a paragraph describing how Google legally dodges tax:

"The Dublin subsidiary sells advertising globally and was credited by Google with 88 percent of its $12.5 billion in non-U.S. sales in 2009."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-sho...

So it seems a bit silly to focus solely on US searches. These are global markets we are talking about.

EDIT: link

andos2• 15 years ago

This is just how revenue is collected, no? I believe the Irish subsidiary must have a lot of american clients.

staunch• 15 years ago

> It's important to note that Google made 88% of it's revenue outside of the US in 2009.

I don't think that's accurate. I read that article as saying that 88% of the $12.5 billion it made outside the US was booked in Dublin. Not that 88% of their revenue is from outside the US.

jsnell• 15 years ago

I think you misread the quote. 88% of the non-US revenue going through Google Ireland doesn't in any way imply 88% of the total Google revenue being non-US.

Bing results are total garbage outside the US at the moment, so it's no surprise that their share would be low. And likewise it makes sense for MS to concentrate on reaching a critical mass in a single market first, and only worry about the rest of the world later.

patrickk2• 15 years ago

Indeed. Thanks.

gabbo• 15 years ago

I don't think that's what the Bloomberg article meant. They're talking about how Google funnels 88% of its non-US revenue (which totals $12.5B) through its Dublin subsidiary to reduce their tax burden.

Their total 2009 revenue was much higher, $23.6B (URL: http://investor.google.com/earnings/2009/Q4_google_earnings....) making non-US revenue a pretty big chunk at 53%.

Teckla• 15 years ago

"They're talking about how Google funnels 88% of its non-US revenue (which totals $12.5B) through its Dublin subsidiary to reduce their tax burden."

Please stop using the phrase "tax burden". It's loaded language and not-so-subtly encourages a biased interpretation. It would be like saying "tax opportunity"; i.e., "an opportunity to pay tax".

3am• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_Arrangement

awa• 15 years ago

According to Statcounter the number is closer to 20%. http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-monthly-201103-2...

xutopia• 15 years ago

Really? It says 8.72% for Bing for April 2011.

citricsquid2• 15 years ago

Yahoo is just bing search, so they're combined I assume.

famousactress2• 15 years ago

Sorry. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious but can someone explain how I'm expected to resolve these two statements as something other than contradictions:

Yes, Bing-powered search ...clocking in at 30.01%

Google in the same time period dropped .. to 64.42%, ceding that ground to Bing.

[Edit: Oh, sorry. yeah, I'm a fool. It reads That was a rise from its February tally of 28.48.. So Bing was already almost 30%. I get it now. That said? No Way.]

famousactress2• 15 years ago

This just really isn't sitting well with me... so, warning. Total conspiracy-theory cynicism ahead.

These numbers are from a company that at least in part appears to generate revenue from supplying analytics, and helping other companies tune their search results. While that may put them in a good position to tally these kinds of numbers, it also strikes me that it puts them in a good position to benefit from a redistribution of search-engine market share.

I'm not making an accusation at all. I'm far from informed enough to do so. That said, I'd love some insight on this angle from someone who's more familiar with the space that Hitwise is in.

kenjackson6• 15 years ago

Hitwise has been around before Google. I've never known them to be in the middle of a controversy. It's always possible, but application of Occam's Razor wouldn't look favorably on your theory.

brudgers2• 15 years ago

"They're making money" is often the simplest explanation - not that I'm advocating a conspiracy theory.

sinaiman3• 15 years ago

Microsoft inflates their search share statistics with sites like this: http://www.clubbing.com

Where they bribe people to play games that "search" on Bing in exchange for points they can use to buy things.

Additionally, this site is really easy to automate bots for (there are whole communities that work on this) in order to automate the prize winning process.

Even still, that's all good for Microsoft as far as I can tell, since even playing with bots brings up their share in the search market.

sinaiman3• 15 years ago

For anyone that can't tell what the site is about at first glance: it's a collection of word-based games (think text twist) and every time you guess/figure out some word correctly, a search to Bing is fired off in a separate frame.

The reasoning behind this Bing-fueled gaming experience is so that you can "research" words as you play...or something.

It's all very shady/hilarious.

kyp• 15 years ago

Google is doing the same thing with A Google a Day: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383379,00.asp

natmaster2• 15 years ago

I'm not sure if hitwise includes this, but there are separate metrics tracked that do not include this (including it is silly). An interesting point however, is that the clubbing traffic is small, and never really goes up. So the basic idea of the article - that bing is still growing in share - is true, regardless of clubbing.

sinaiman3• 15 years ago

Hopefully it's separate.

I'm not sure how accurate compete.com is, but here are the stats for clubbing.com:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/clubbing.com/

They were pulling over 1 million uniques/month until January (not sure what happened in January). And now their traffic is indeed insignificant at about 200k for February 2011 (who knows how accurate this is).

However, if you factor that many of those unique hits are playing a game that fires off between 10-100 searches per play, well that's a lot of searches, especially if people play more than one game. Or maybe I'm wrong, as this is a bunch of guesstimating on my part.

Of course, I can see your point...in the grand scheme of things, Club Bing is probably just a drop in the bucket.

Dramatize• 15 years ago

I manage a site with 61.92% of users using Internet Explorer

Google = 92.66% Bing = 3.65% Yahoo = 2.03%

hardtke• 15 years ago

The most important number is search advertising revenue. The entire online services division (which includes Bing) has revenues of around $2 billion per year. Google's AdWords brings in about $15 billion per year. Microsoft is nowhere close to 30% of the search market, revenue wise. For individual ad clicks Microsoft gets about as much as Google, so clearly Microsoft is not doing 30% of "real" searches (actual people looking for actual things and occasionally clicking on an ad.)

brudgers2• 15 years ago

>"The most important number is search advertising revenue."

The effects of that kind of thinking at Google is why I often use Bing - too often Google's results appear to be skewed toward ad impressions rather than usefulness.

Groxx• 15 years ago

Yahoo search uses Bing? I must've missed the memo... that could help explain the 30% value - Bing's site usage is still a percent and a half below Yahoo's.

A question, if anyone out there has an answer / speculation:

>Yahoo! Search and Bing achieved the highest success rates in March 2011. This means that for both search engines, more than 80 percent of searches executed resulted in a visit to a Website. Google achieved a success rate of 66 percent.

How much of that is impacted by the ridiculous number of queries Instant generates?

sorbus• 15 years ago

> clocking in at 30.01% in March according to Hitwise. That was a rise from its February tally of 28.48%. Google in the same time period dropped from 66.69% to 64.42%, ceding that ground to Bing.

So Bing gained 1.53% while Google lost 2.27%. Where did the other 0.74% go?

shadowfox• 15 years ago

ddg perhaps

randfish2• 15 years ago

Important to keep in mind that when Hitwise/Comscore/Nielsen/etc. measure "Microsoft/Bing powered searches" they're including a LOT of searches that never leave MS/Yahoo's sites. If you do a search on MSN Autos or Yahoo! News or in Facebook's web search, for example, those are all powered by Bing and count toward their share.

Contrast with Google, where very few searches on Google's entire network lead to another page on Google (most of that traffic goes out to other sites like those we own/control). Thus, while 30% of web searches may be Bing powered, the Statcounter numbers are the ones I'm much more inclined to look at as a comparison. 8% for Bing and 11% for Yahoo! seem like plausible figures for outbound traffic sent from those engines.

ooorrr• 15 years ago

Rand, I thought one of the providers (Hitwise or Comscore) started to separate out internal v. external links. Perhaps those were just pure links, like when a link at MSN.com went to a search results page?

I also don't get the Facebook reference. Google has distribution deals - Google searches in Firefox still count for Google, for example. Is it just the fact that web results are at the tail of the page?

randfish2• 15 years ago

I think you're correct that Comscore controls for/removes links to searches (like Bing's news links) but not for the queries done "in network" (at least, not that I'm aware of).

patrickc• 15 years ago

People just use Bing to search for porn so Google can't see that. Then they use Google for pretty much everything else, which is not much.

amurmann• 15 years ago

I suspect the same. It would be really interesting to see an analysis of search terms on Google vs search terms on Bing. Bing's video search also lends itself to porn searches.

lisperforlife• 15 years ago

Right... the majority of the searches involve terms like "download firefox" and "download chrome". :-)

known• 15 years ago

What % on non-windows?

Bing Now Powers 30% of US Searches

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