“After just over one month in market, we wanted to take the opportunity to THANK YOU for all your feedback and support of Bing and provide an update on our early results. We’ve been really pleased to hear so much positive feedback, and we appreciate all you who’ve taken the time to pass along your ideas on how we can continue to improve.”
How much was canibalized from MSN search and Live search?
I also find this statement doubious:
“Traffic to Bing Travel has increased by 90% month over month since launch, highlighting a strong reception to some of the great features designed to help travelers make smarter, more informed decisions on their airfare and hotel purchases.” The thing i find doubious is that bing was as far as i know launched 1st june… there hasnt been two months yet. (the preview launch was 28th may i think)
Bing IS Live Search.
Just incase anyone is confused
Bing is but isn’t live search 🙂
Think of Bing as Live Search v2.
All the old links from live search go to it but the underlying engine and way certain results are displayed have been Completely overhauled.
A simple visual example is the Bing image search which has been improved by a factor of n
It’s been improved by a factor of 10 (million dollars) or something like that. That’s called throwing good money after bad.
What’s the point beyond trying to confuse people into using it?
So many have come and gone and consistently, it’s been Google and Yahoo! who get most of the search business.
Since Microsoft is trying to sell the advertising group that got them the fancy new name and advertising campaign, what happens when they need a fix to the current approach?
Usage will drop and it’ll just be a memory, like so many others.
My girlfriend mentioned to me the other day that this new Bing search is annoying her. Basically, she normally opens IE (her work doesn’t allow anything else and doesn’t allow the users to install anything) and types google.com. It brings her to Bing with no useful information and a small link she has to click to get to Google’s search where before she used to just type google.com and end up at google.com as she expected. Now if that isn’t a blatant abuse of MS’s monopoly power I don’t know what is.
Sounds to me like she is probably typing “google,com” and her default search is set to Bing.
Its also not true. But yeah in fantasy land it is definitely abuse of monopoly power.
I pretty much refuse to use Bing just as I refused to use Live and MSN search. It has nothing to do with hating Microsoft and everything to do with the fact that it is a horrible search engine; the results are cruddy – results that would appear on the first page with Google are on the third page with Bing.
Then there is the integration issue; people using Google because they have their email, blog, and youtube account all in one location; Microsoft provides no alternatives, their blogs does not provide the ability to have a username.domain.com free of charge, their mail is bloated, slow and castrated in terms of attachments which can be received and sent, then there is the the lack of parity to the features Google provides.
Microsoft, yet again, just doesn’t get it. They should fire their whole staff in that area for shear incompetence, making mistakes so stupid that even I wouldn’t make them.
I’m ‘afraid’ the 90-% increase in traffic is due to spambots being now updated to include bing.com search among the others.
…AAAAND? Isn’t Bing supposed to fix the problem that Google gives you search results you don’t do crap with? In a way you kinda expect the results to rank differently.
I expect Bing to be superior search engine that weeds out the crap and gives me a superior search result – that is what I expect.
Btw, stop being a smart ass, it isn’t impressing anyone.
Actually, I was a little impressed…
For my idea of fun, a couple weeks ago I setup an old PII-266 laptop with Windows 98. It was fun to load some of my old shareware programs, like Liberty Basic, NoteTab Pro, etc (I mostly use Ubuntu). Anyhoo, I accidentally mis-typed something in IE 6. Of course, it immediately took me to Bing. Slick, Microsoft, slick. I think that’s part of the increase in Bing.
I will say, it did seem nice. I put in “Linux laptop”, and the results were very good – sites like LinuxCertified.com were near the top. Despite what some of my Linux buddies think, I don’t really think Microsoft products are that bad. I love messing with MS Access. And Visual Studio is an awesome tool (as am I). Unlike Live Search (or Live anything!), I think Bing (Bob Is Not Gone) is a decent product.
I’m just not a fan of some of their business practices. I like competition. Everyone wins. The shady OEM deals stink (think the recent netbook “takeover”). But I don’t think their products are bad. Come back, Bob!
Microsoft cannibalises yet another application. So, are we open-source, hell, even all the rest, to accept their great stride forward? I think not! Remember, Mao took a great step forward, too, and see what that did to the Chinese (and all those flunkies who wanted to copy him (read: Khmer Rouges, Communist Vietnamese, etc…). No, I’m not comparing Microsoft to Mao’s administration, but I am stating that Steve Balmer needs to get some lithium sulfate (LiSO4) into his system ASAP and FOCUS on doing one thing and doing it correctly. Thank god for open source: I apply updates once per quarter (maybe) and upgrade annually (usually).
Speaking as one of these statistics, when I enter a malformed URL in IE (at work) it takes me to bing.
Let’s see if it keeps growing. At all.