Internet audience measurement company comScore has released a preliminary study of the performance of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, during the first week of its public launch.
The study confirms earlier reports that Bing had a very good start, even overtaking Yahoo as the No. 2 search engine at some point according to web analytics firm StatCounter (although that apparently lasted only a day).
According to comScore, Microsoft Sites increased its average daily penetration among searchers in the United Stated from 13.8% during the period of May 26-30 to 15.5% during the period of June 2-6, 2009, an indication that the search engine is reaching more people than before. Microsoft’s share of search engine results pages (SERPs) in the U.S., increased from 9.1% to 11.1% during the same time frame.
Like many people, I’m trying out Bing for a month or so to see how well it stacks up against other search engines (primarily compared to Google, which has been my default search engine for many years). So far, I find the experience generally very pleasing and the search results to live up to the hype. It remains to be seen if I, and the many others out there who are taking Bing for a test-drive following the launch buzz, keep on using it when the momentum fades away.
But boy is it good to have some real competition in search going, even if just for a short while.
To be continued.
there goes another chance of yahoo being bought!!
can techcrunch please stop using statcounter as a source? its inreliable. All other sources like neilsen, compete, and comscore all say that yahoo has 19% marketshare and google has 64%. Statcounter is the only one that says yahoo has 10% and google has 80%. It’s honest laughable.
Anyone in the search engine business will tell you that statcounter is a joke.
Can people please stop replying to the first comment just because they’d like to make their own comment seem more important even though it is unrelated?
“inreliable”?????
you are a joke.
That’s why you/TC should reverse the comment orders
That way, people will (probably) comment even more, because the last one is shown on top
Just do this and all blogs will follow…
My free tip for TC
it’s our birthright to comment anywhere possible. @Robin be happy that we cant comment just above your blogpost title.
Search is commodity now. Bing, live, Google, Yahoo are very same.
The truth is no one wants to google around anymore, they want to bing stuff. Got it? BadaBING!
I said it before. Exclamation beats verb. BING!
no one will overtake Google. They are supreme and will stay that way, esp. when Google Wave comes out.
I was looking at how google wants to change the way we do IM. Its ridiculus they want to promote the stupidest thing I ever heard.
Google says instead of waiting other person to hit send, they want to send character by character as we type. ok how many times we mistype and hit backspace. google do some research on this…
LOL! Did you even watch the video from I/O, they have an option to turn that off. You should do some research before you attack something you clearly have no knowledge about.
I have said these before, but bing’s success will be driven with the ability to surface “interactive applets”. Think iPhone AppStore without having to install anything.
For example you search for weather in your city…instead of being shown a 5-day forecast and a bunch of links for your result. 5 weather widgets are shown in silverlight with maps, media playing, options for filtering 10-day, hourly, 5-day etc.
All of this can be done using Silverlight and the apps are “hosted” on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Storage.
I made bing my default search engine in firefox
Me too, and it has great results and so far I’m pretty happy.
how? I want to do that too.
I just installed the add on, now I have Bing as my default.
it is really faster than google.
Just made this for people who wanted to add it to your search box.
Link adds Bing to your upper right search box
javascript:addProvider(’http://www.searchplugins.net/createos.aspx?number=36743′);void(0)
Go Qi and Bing!
Yahoo is doo doo.
Thats a pretty good start and hope that the monopoly of the search industry is tested at least this time. Let us wait and watch how well it goes.
6/5/2009 – Did Bing Just Leapfrog Yahoo Search?
6/7/2009 – Quick Peak? Bing’s Reign As #2 Search Engine Lasted One Day.
6/9/2009 – comScore Study: Bing Is Off To A Very Good Start
make up your mind already
the problem was they relied on statcounter, the worst of the worst when it comes to reliability.
Its the best source though if you want misinformation
I set it to my default homepage and used it for searches since it came out.
I too was pleased with the results.
This didn’t last long.
The #1 thing Bing fails at is showing recent up-to-date results.
I had read a blog post about how ‘XYZ technology sucks’.
Wanting to find out if more people had this opinion, I searched bing. Didn’t really find anything.
I searched Google and found not only this recent blog post, but tweets from twitter and other very relevant (and recent) results.
It’s like bing is just a ’snapshot’ of several weeks or months ago. Whereas Google very much feels like it’s always on top of the current state of the web.
Personally, I prefer search.twitter.com for real-time searches.
That’s weird, Robert, because I totally opposite experience. Did a search for my company and found a writeup someone did just a day before. It was buried in the results way back on page 5 or something on Google.
Its the opposite. I was looking for some news on bing, it gave news results about 2 hours ago where google came with about 1 or 2 days news.
Robin,
Kudos for giving Bing a long try.
I find those bloggers who choose to trash Microsoft and Bing very narrow minded. I guess they have very little experience working with google as partners/publishers/advertisers. It is a company that is impossible to work with.
It is so important to venture-backed companies that google will have an alternative. Microsoft could be the one if early adapters and bloggers will give bing a chance and stop trashing it.
The bottom line is that Microsoft will spend millions of $ on on advertising (if you are a publisher you will benefit from that), it will potentially acquire a few startups (if you are a start up or VC you will benefit from that), and Microsoft is absolutely more supportive and cooperative when it comes to partnering with small companies than google.
So give Bing a chance.
All this sounds entirely disconnected from reality and the actual blog entry.
If Bing delivers better search results than Google it will take away users. Otherwise no amount of interface updates or convenient features will make up for not finding the page you want.
Microsoft is reknowned and in many federal cases proven to be a bully with its partners.
Nothing about Bing suggests some sort of acquisition surge for startups. So I have to assume this message is just some PR hacks second rate effort to create a strawman and bash Google as a company rather than the actual product.
All that we’re saying, is give Bing! a chance.
(With apologies to John and Yoko)
Yahoo! still beats google for my queries and bing doesn’t even register.
And I can’t live without http://search.y...oo.com/osc/help
Bing is very good. I have to say it, I like it better than google.
I think the 3 elements of this nice start are :
1) Fast : Really amaising fast result. I mean Google is second here. Nice to see.
1) Beautifull : the first page is always bloody nice. what a change to google’s home page.
3) the search result are good. Less good than google but not so far.
YES it looks there CAN BE finnally competition on search.
So happy to see it.
Battle of the Titans for 2009 and 2010 boys ! At least I hope so.
Thierry
1) False. Just had a look using Firebug and searching for “Yahoo” Bing took 922ms for DomContentLoad and 951ms for complete load (of course lots of it CSS, js and image). Google took 197ms and 388ms…
Without talking content load Bing took 257ms before I started loading the content (so request processing + network ping) whereas Google took only 67ms…
I also had only 1 result returned with Bing.
Of course you have to take into consideration that I am located in Ireland results might change depending on locations of Google’s and Microsoft’s Datacenter.
But looking at the content it needs to load (5 resources for Google and 10 for Bing) also assuming Google owns more datacenters (and probably faster ones + faster algorithm since search is their core business) I don’t think Bing even tries to compete on speed.
I think Bing is trying to compete on usability by offering a different User experience and is very likely to gain some marketshare as some users might prefer Bing’s experience.
I personally prefer Google’s simplicity and more accurate and fresher search results.
Clear your js cache before such tests. Or try test on second search in all pages.
Frankly, I don’t see much difference between the Bing results to its former Live, Google is way better and I think Yahoo is still doing a better job in search.
The buzz will be over soon and the three will take their original market share position…
Did any one watch the Bingathon on Hulu last night? I liked the way Bing sounded. Think Ding! (in a high pitched chime) but it’s Bing! when you get your result. which is pretty clever naming on Microsoft’s part.
I watched the Bingathon, that was one weird-ass show. I couldn’t help it, it was bizarre and creepy (especially that Ryan dude), but there were a lot of genuinely funny parts, especially at the expense of the little kids. That coolest cat did not deserve the #1 position, though, that thing was disturbing…
And well, really, an hour of Olivia Munn live, you don’t exactly have to twist my arm off.
Good as a Hulu-specific thing, though — Microsoft, you do not want to run that thing past the general public or they’re gonna think you lost your damn minds.
Bing!
oh, and as long as all of them agree Abbreviations.com is the place for ‘abbreviations’ I love ‘em all…
I agree with Robert that Bing does only seem to be a snapshot from a few weeks ago, or even months, while Google displays results from a couple hours ago.
I’m a forum moderator for a tech web site and sometimes research a question and have found in my search the very question from my forum listed in the Google results.
Does anyone else here think that putting up beautiful pictures on the home page was a damn smart idea? I load up the home page everyday just to see the new picture they’ve put up
Puranjay, if you like the bing homepage you may like ShinySearch.com, its a personalized homepage service with google search results…give it a try!
I gave Bing a chance for a few days as my primary search engine, but have abandoned it in favor of the old reliable: Google. Here’s why:
I wanted to find an online copy that I knew existed of an old out-of-print book titled “The Black Hills Trails” by Jesse Brown and A. M. Willard. I searched for ‘black hills trails brown willard’ in Bing, and the first 10 results returned 0 – as in Zero – items that had anything to do with this book.
I entered the same search in Google, and 10 out of 10 of the first page of results were in reference to this book.
Now I’m certain that results may vary based on the specific search terms and context, however 0% vs 100% is enough for me to make my choice of a search provider. Now Microsoft can offer pathetic search to complement their pathetic OS products.
You problem is in the query, not the search engine friend…
http://www.bing...rc=IE-SearchBox
If you want to get any results that matter, you will need to learn to properly format your query. Providing an open ended query like that will give you garbage the majority of the time due to the fact that most of those are common words. I’ve even had that problem with google. You should try something like:
“The Black Hills Trails” Brown Willard http://www.bing...rc=IE-SearchBox
In bing that turned up plenty of relevant results.
As well as
http://www.bing...s&form=QBRE
But you are missing the point, why should he have to format it. If Google is giving him good results and poor format yet Bing provides poor results on poor format.
That is the whole point, Google is by far best “user friendly” engine. However if you are doing a specific search Yahoo seems to be the best.
I work in S.E.O and I just can’t wait for the hype of Bing to die off and it fall back in the ratings, like it will.
You know… if you put quotes around Black Hills Trails, the results get a lot better…
http://www.bing...2+brown+willard
I mean, you did know the name of the book upfront, right?
By searching ‘Trails Brown Willard’ I found a link to this article in Google. In Bing this article is not referenced at all. I think this illustrate the “freshness” of the information you can find on both search engine… :/
Funny, it shows up as teh 4th entry on this search for me…
http://www.bing...rc=IE-SearchBox
I added Bing to the Google Toolbar, so I could use both as I pleased. Google does better on more recent information, but Bing I found is better for general search questions like “Buying a new car”. I think Microsoft is clear in calling it a decision engine, and not promoting it as a search engine.
I do agree that it is a very neat idea to put on picture theme on the background every day .. Google is underusing their site, be it also in promotion of their own services …. now what Bing sorely needs is comprehensive keyboard shortcuts, just like other 2 search engines sites .. is it so hard to understand ?!? ….. and why TechCrunch.com web application still doesn’t have them smart keyboard shortcuts?? ….. http://friendfe...d.com/petrbuben :]
So their market share increased between 1 and 2 percent in the week of their launch, during which they were covered in nearly every major news and tech publication? That doesn’t sound like very much.
Bing Rocks!!!
I’m a binger now!!!
but still Bing as to go a long way to beat Google!!!
I forced myself into using Bing for a week and am just about to switch back to Google.
Bing is certainly an improvement over the last offering but I think the visual appearance of the results need a little tweak. The left nav forces the results into a strange alignment. My eye is drawn to the busy area in the top-left corner and not to the results.
EG: http://www.bing...RE&filt=all
and
http://www.goog...mp;aq=f&oq=
The Google local searches “pops” out a lot more and the listings appear more distinctive. I also prefer to absolute right alignment of the Adsense. It creates a neater separation imho.
There’s a sense of familiarity that keeps driving me back to Google and if bing is essentially going to mimick the behaviour and to a degree the layout, then it should just suck it down and mimick the layout almost exactly. If they want to be different, then be very different.
I do, however like their image and video search visualisations.
Sorry… I guess I’m a google slave especially with how easy they make it to use their web apps(Maps,Checkout,etc)
Interesting, I never would trust google with any of my personal information (i.e. checkout). I’ve explicitly cancelled transactions at shops that had lower prices on items because they wanted me to use google checkout.
Google checkout? Does it still exists? I thought they killed it as they realized they cannot beat paypal
Lol yes they still use it, especially with their phones now. Guess how you buy every single APP, and with the growth of the Android phones the growth of Google Checkout grows as well.
I personally think that Bing provides good results.
However, I miss three things compared to Google:
1) Google’s other services like Maps etc. If you could customise the links to other services like Gmail, Maps etc.
2) Ability to filter results from past 24 hours.
3) A similar service to Google Alerts.
As regards the search results I find that it provides satisfactory results.
I agree, time based search criteria would be pretty sweet. By customise links, what do you mean?
I gave Bing a try, because I agree that competition in the search market is beneficial to everyone. In my industry Google’s results are just much more relative than Bing’s results. Yahoo use to give terrible results, but has really gotten much better over the last 18 months. I would put them just behind Google in terms of quality of results in our industry with Bing a distant 3rd.
I am open to leaving Google, but don’t see a reason to at this point
I actually have high hopes for Bing. I would like to see Google have some competition that will push them to create innovative search products.
What is wrong with Time based search results, blog results, book results, news results, image results, video results, the Google Wonder Wheel…
I see the most options on Google in regards to searching.
I think it is hard to make comparisons over 1-2 queries. Some people here claim that Google has more recent results. My experience has been quite the opposite when I searched for NBA Playoffs or news on recent earthquakes. In terms of UI, Bing is the clear winner. I like the features like when I type in Kobe Bryant it gives me statistics, past 3 games and next scheduled game etc. or when I type in something like usps, it shows the nearest usps locations on a mini-map plus gives me ways to interact with usps without having to go to their website and follow several links. For example I can track packages from within Bing directly. If you average hits and misses it is at least as good as Google. Plus what would take me 10 clicks with Google takes 1-2 clicks with Bing. One thing they definitely need to improve is Virtual Earth. It is not as good as Google at recognizing addresses when you put them in the search box on the main page.
But Google gives you the more options button now. You can search the most recent, within the past 24 hours, past week, past month, etc. You can target you searches with the options a lot better.
Google also gives you the USPS option as well not in their search engines but in their Gmail. I find it much better than on the engines, because most products I buy I get a tracking code emailed to me. Right from gmail I can just click on the numbers and it sends me to the site.
Hey, give me a 100MUS$ to spend on ads, and let me show you how far I can go with my search engine – http://www.pingoog.com/...
That company (MSFT) is so lucky the world is addicted to windows (it’s even worse than oil)..
I am a Google addict, but have been trialing Bing for a while and really like some of the integration ideas, vertical approach, nav helpers, etc.
However, I am a techy and was much more interested in responses from my “non-techy” friends and family. So, as a techy I did a “taste test” of Bing vs. Google with 5 friends, mom, dad, brother, grandma, and 11-year old nephew. Asked them to do ~5 tasks on each…
Not data, but anecdotes: 8/9 preferred Bing overall, 4/9 asked how to change it to their home page (love the cool picture on the home page!!), 3/9 sent an email to others recommending it.
So: tough to break a Google habit for sure…but pretty compelling competition
You must love the Bing results for the term OBAMA!
http://www.bing.../search?q=obama
http://www.goog.../search?q=obama
Makes google look terrible
I don’t see how Google looks terrible in this case. I like Bing’s image and video searches. The search results are adequate and the search preview functionality is quite nice.
I’m seeing a time in the near future in which people will use different search alternatives for different purposes. Bing seems to be specialized for certain things such as shopping, healthcare, travel, etc… and for these purposes I find its results satisfactory. However, for research purposes I find Google to be the clear winner.
For computational, historical and summarized data I think Wolfram|Alpha is an excellent candidate.
Then you have offerings like Twitter Search that allow you to have real-time data, as it’s currently happening.
I’m up for anything that will make searching the web a more efficient and compelling experience, and I hope that Bing continues to gain popularity, as it will undoubtedly cause all other alternatives to improve as well.
I think MS is using all it’s drones all over the world to “hit” Bing to create these scores.
Jeremy Wa!
Where are you dude?
No Microsoft comments today?
i’m in asia
bing can’t search for porn
useless!
also, i like the google’s clean white page. this is why i dont use that yahoo much, too much clutter
this article is biased
The Microsoft equation: shitty products + shady practices to force users to use their shitty products + even shittier products + even shadier practices to force users to use their shitty products = FAIL