Microsoft is definitely relishing its Bing moment, communicating gains in market share every chance it gets to build a story of steady progression against both Google and Yahoo. Today, Microsoft self-reported an 8 percent increase in unique visitors to its search engine in June, the first full month after it debuted its Bing search engine (comparisons are to its previous effort, Microsoft Live Search). According to the Bing blog:
We saw 8 percent growth in unique users to Bing.com in June, which is an important indicator that you are trying Bing and the word is spreading. Based on our own polling, we have also seen the number of people “likely to recommend” Bing double in our debut month
An 8 percent increase in search traffic is significant, and paints the picture that some of the early gains reported by comScore and others managed to stick. Besides its main search page, Microsoft’s strategy of combining different search experiences under the Bing brand seems to be working for at least shopping and travel. Bing Shopping saw a “nearly a 3x increase in site visits and a 5.42% increase in transactions to Bing cashback” during the month of June, and Bing Travel (formerly Farecast) got a 90 percent boost to traffic versus May, 2009 simply by becoming the default travel tab for Bing.
I am amazed at how fast Bing is growing. I don’t know if it’s just the momentum or if its traffic is here to stay. Congratulations Bing.
http://www.twibeo.com
The FriendFeed and Twitter combination.
I agree with you, James. Bing is definitely gaining momentum. I think as long as Microsoft makes the right decisions Bing will continue to grow.
Did anyone read this news about a new worm affecting Twitter? Check it out here:- http://www.tech...tter-users.html
I BING it, do you BING it? I mean BINGING is my nature. Even the mafia BING’S but when they search and get the right result they say, “BADA BING”.
Default! The best 2 words in the English Language! Search is all about marketing, actually all internet sites succeed through marketing. I really do think having a good domain name can make or break a web company.
Bing in chinese means sickness.
I wasn’t to surprise with the growth in Bing usage. there was a lot of hype and the huge $100 million marketing budget.
i mean bing advertised on NYTimes & The tonight show with john stewart. here is a summary of all of Bing’s marketing efforts http://bingdeve.../bingmarketing/
and according come compete.com, bing got 49.5 million unique visitors in June, which is more than Twitter, Digg, and CNN.
but what really surprises me is that Bing is able to attain the reported growth while IE is losing market shares. since Firefox, safari and chrome all have Google as default search provider
also, you guys got to check out the bing, yahoo, google blind test http://bit.ly/l9rQS
Well I know a little chinese and it depends on how you say bing so its not an exact translation, it kinda sounds more like “beng.” But its all in the accent.
I would think advertisers are happy with the increased page-views, so they can advertise with Bing instead of Google. Perhaps they are encouraging the use of Bing as well.
“tonight show with john stewart”? lol.
It’s tonight show with conan o’brien and it’s “jon” stewart.
And to beat google it’s gotta be extraordinary. But with bing it seems like it’s more of a big marketing effort. Unfortunately switching from one search engine to another is really easy. So a marketing centric approach isn’t going to work, you’re gonna need a good product with good reputation.
Bing also means ice. Given the pronunciation of “Bing” in English with a high tone, “Bing” if Microsoft were to still call it that for the Chinese markets, it’d translate into the word for ice…or the word for a type of nut.
I’d be more interested to know if there are Cantonese equivalents for “bing.”
Bing will win be the second place on alexa rank in the future … pretty sure, no more.
John
http://www.encu...ntry/JobUsa.htm
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USA Online Jobs
Fantastic says http://tweetmyfinger.com the godaddy landing page to fart on people that spam TC…
internet explorer most used browser + loosening of credit = more shopping and travelling …. Bing is an unavoidable search engine if ppl still using explorer.
As IE Market Share continues to slip, Bing’s Market Share seems to rise. Therefore using Explorer is not the sole reason for Bing’s rise. There’s others of us (like myself) who have made Bing default in Safari (by using a plug-in). It’s too early to tell if this rise will continue or plateau, but here’s hoping it keeps going up.
Unavoidable search engine doesn’t explain share of search GROWTH. Since IE’s declining. Even if it was flat, it wouldnt’ explain 8% growth (that’s more than 150% annualized growth).
Bing’s growing because people like me think it’s actually a better search experience. And I’ve NEVER liked a Microsoft search engine.
Being former MSFT and there in the days when they failed about everything internet, it’s nice to see them stepping up to the plate and bringing in some healthy competition…. Yahoo shareholders must feel a stake going through their hearts…
Its 8% of not very much at all thouigh. What did they have before? About 10% total market share, I guess this might bump them up to 11!!!
Got a way to go yet.
That’s what folk used to say about FireFox’s growth. 1% every month adds up pretty quickly.
Besides, 1% is actually worth about a billion dollars in market cap in the search world. It’s billions of NEW searches per month.
I’m fast becoming a Bing fan. The only time I use Google now is for conversions or commands (why, when I put “map” at the end of a restaurant name doesn’t it go to/ show a map like Google does?).
agree, Google is losing flavour
“1% is actually worth about a billion dollars in market cap in the search world”
I know that’s what Jason Calacanis said but I never believe anything that comes out of his mouth. Are those figures correct?
I’m a binger too by the way.
I actually don’t REALLY believe it either. But the reason Jason says it is that ALL search players say it, and VCs buy it. Either way, it’s a huge win. Bing did in less than a month what no other search startup has managed to do in the last 5 years (outside of MAYBe IceRocket back in the day?).
Pretty sure not even Technorati has 1% share of search…
Good point aout the 1% per month as well, I never thought about it in those terms. Not that I think they’ll sustain that acceleration but I do expect it to continue going up.
Oh, don’t worry, I don’t expect it to sustain either. But then, I didn’t expect FF to sustain either.
Either way, though, 1% in a month is still a fairly significant shift!
Fundamentally I think the best experience will win. And right now that’s Bing. Google will counter, Bing will counter, and search will be the new browser wars. For real this time though. The last search wars were pretty pathetic ;-)
You ddn’t expect FF to sustain? t was a shoe in from the get go.
My Browser: Iron (Chrome without the Google Spyware).
My Search Engine: Bing.
I agree with Anthony. Bing is unavoidable to use. It’s the default search engine in MSN.com which is the default page in IE. All they did was switch over that search to bing.com domain. However, they are increasing direct hits straight to Bing.com.
Taking Google’s market share won’t come easy or fast. It will take time, and Bing really needs to show a differentiation for any hold to take place.
- James F.
Owner, TwitterBackground.com, #1 Source for Free Backgrounds
Google seems to be worried now :-)… its really interesting to see this search engine war!
GO BING!!!
Its great to hear this news.All the best to Bing.
“communicating gains in market share every chance it gets to build a story of steady progression”
That’s soooo unlike Apple. Apple at least does the “communicating” through some obscure survey firms.
wolframalpha binged google…. and thats how yahoo was born
bing, the best thing from MSFT in a long while. I like it that now MSFT will see that it not that we hate it, we hate what it has been doing. If you do something and do it right, heck we will appreciate it. Anyway, I’m still a google fan.
I doubt the growth will be month after month after month.
Can we maybe get a story on Bing’s marketing budget? Certainly it’s not operative here, of course, naturally, but in other places. Places that are not so impervious to participating in an advertising campaign.
Hum
Same trick over and over, I did install vista sp2 3 days ago in vmware. Bing was the default search engine in ie and firefox!!
Bing will grow at the number of new pc and new windows installations till users get educated enough or try google. Bing is in no way bad but google is till the king of the hill. And nobody force you to use it…
Its a great serach engine. It has a very polished feel about it and now suddenly Google feels plain jane.
It’s not an 8% share in search traffic. It’s a 8% gain in unique visitors. A unique visitor might come, do a single search and go. Or several searches. It all depends.
No question, a rise in unique visitors is important. But in terms of search share — percentage of actual searches that each search engine handles in a given month — which is closer to what they earn off of, the early stats so far paint a much more modest figure of 2% gain to even a drop, depending on which stats you look at.
I’ve made the not-so-easy switch to Bing because I’ve found it to be safer. My searches are not atypical and I’ve found a lot of spam / attack sites continue to indexed and ranked highly by Google. And Google does not do as well even on some simple searches …a quick search for ‘Friv’ on each engine demonstrates this perfectly.
it would be funny if microsoft turned out to have a more viable biz in search and google had a better biz in OS’s and in 10 years they switch places.
AHHAHAHAhaha but I don’t think microsoft can do anything right, especially now with steve ballmer at the helm. He’s too much of a sales and marketing guy.
Well I tried BING. With some searches may be it came close to google but most others it wasn’t even close. I am sticking with google. Sorry MSFT guys.
The 8% jump was probably because of people like me trying out something new because of all marketing. Its probably going to fade away in couple of months if not in a month.
I really, really hope Bing stays. And brings in more transparency. I’m getting sick of Google.
Uhoh, another story on Bing. Time to send in the BIng PR bots to act as users and write positively about this otherwise forgettable service that is riding on the back of a live.com name change and a $100 million ad campaign.
go bing!
I don’t get why Microsoft is taking the approach they are with bing.
I feel like their such engine is somewhat cluttered and their commercials are terrible and show exactly why people favor Google.
Those commercials where someone says something and the other person goes off on a million different definitions about the word online is exactly why people left portals and Google became so popular.
Bing seems cluttered and like they are advertising to you to hard. Even though it does have some cool features.
Try MyGoBox.org, it is a simple search engine powered by Yahoo that allows users to vote on the usefulness of your result links. This allows you to identify the useful links.
8% growth in what? 8% over Bing last week? Or 8% of market share?
Microsoft is reporting this but is anyone else? StatCounter shows a 50% DECREASE in usage over the last few days after showing a 25% increase the week before.
Something smells funny and I’m surprised TechCrunch is not asking any questions.
BING is cool than before .i use bing 50% right now .
Everyone realizes that 8% UU growth isn’t 8% search query growth right?
Bing is catching up to Google. Alot of people are sitting back to see what happens next :-)
I’m not sure why this is exactly a big deal. I mean June was when it was rolled out with a huge marketing machine behind it. Of course unique visitors will increase as that’s happening. All it really says to me is that the advertising paid off a bit. I’m almost surprised that figure wasn’t higher than 8 percent.
Now if those unique visitors are sticking around? That’s certainly a big deal. But Microsoft wants to see increases in search share, so this is kind of dull news to me and almost a bit misleading. I think Bing is fine, by the way. I think they have a legit chance of seriously closing the gap in a couple of years depending on how proactive they are in trying to innovate.
http://www.eZanga.com
So they paid $100M for 8% growth in the first month. Are they gonna pay another $100M for the second month?
If TC spent $100M to market their site, I bet you they’ll experience a lot more than 8% growth.
It still remains to be seen after all the hype and marketing dies down if the growth will continue.
Comparing Bing’s growth to FireFox is stupid. FireFox didn’t have to spend $100M for their growth. They did it through word-of-mouth.
I highly doubt Bing’s growth will continue at the same pace after their $100M runs out.
I went, I saw, and I wasn’t impressed. Categorizing search results isn’t new. Ask have done it for a while.
I’d have to say these stats don’t really prove that Bing is making any real gains. So they had an 8% increase in the number of unique visitors, that’s all well and good, but how many of these unique visitors made more than one visit? How many searches did these visitors make.
You can have as many unique visitors as you like but if you have 8 people, they all only visit once and make one search to see what it is like then you aren’t really making any gains.
Microsoft are spending a lot of money pushing this, but the only way this is going to really stick is if people keep using it once the advertising money runs out.
Don’t get me wrong, it would be good to see some competition in the search market, I never like to see one company getting it all their own way. Just no sure that Bing is serious competition for Google just yet!
Bing is going to need much more than a fancy marketing campaign, like innovation new search features that set them apart from Google search. What makes their search better than Google? The buzz about a ‘decision engine’ and ’search overload’ is really just hype, they don’t appear to offer much more than a working copy of the same functionality that Google has had for many years.
8%, this figure is sure to include a lot of traffic related to the newness of their service and people wanting to see what all of the fuss is all about. It will be interesting to see how many of these people stick around and continue to use Bing down the road after the initial curiosity has worn off.
Here’s a pretty good head to head comparison: http://searchen...h-results-20006
Don’t want to choose? Bingle it: http://bingle.pwnij.com/
They forget to mention that MS is setting up Bing as the default search engine for Internet explorer. So inevitably, just like MSN search, we will see an increase of use (most likely inversely proportionate to MSN search use). Plus, there are a bunch of organizations that have been “persuaded” to make Bing the default search engine, such as the City University of New York. So seeing growth at this point means nothing in popularity nor trend setting, and is misleading to investors at best.