So it has been a few months now that Bing has been with us. Since its introduction a lot has been said about its potential to overthrow Google with a lot of people dismissing the impact it can have and others seeing it as a welcome change. So how has it faired so far?
Well a reports have stated that in the US Bing’s market share saw an increase of 8.9% last month and is the second of two monthly spikes since its beginning with and 8.4% rise in market share in June. These results are music to Microsoft’s ears considering it is still early days. Many people have put any initial spike in traffic down to the hype and coverage that Bing received from the launch however a few months on and it still looks promising.
More interestingly is news from Hitwise has shown that in Canada, Bing is the best search engine at producing successful searches although it is the 6th most used search engine in Canada. A successful search is defined as “one where the consumer leaves the search engine after performing a search.” However this is a poor measure of a successful search as it doesn’t necessarily mean the user has found what they want. Also as discussed in a post on SELand some searches may be successful but does not mean that users leave the search engine and give an example of search shortcuts. However regardless of the issues this is still a promising result from Bing and can further enhances the fact that it is vastly superior to its counterparts MSN and Live Search.
Although Google still lead the way these results the momentum for Bing is still there and once it the partnership with Yahoo gets fully underway in two years Microsoft could be in its best position to overthrow Google yet. Only time will tell.
Also I must mention that the UK is certainly a much tougher market for search engines as Google takes up a much bigger share than the rest so it will be interesting to see how Bing is doing over here…