“Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, was used in 10.7 percent of U.S. online searches in August, according to a new report by research firm Nielsen. That placed it third in the rankings behind Yahoo with 16 percent and Google with 64.6 percent. Microsoft’s month-over-month gain of 22.1 percent in market share suggests that the search engine may have legs even after Microsoft’s supporting ad campaign, estimated at costing between $80 million to $100 million, runs its course.”
It’s true. I’d forgot that Bing was out there already. I can’t imagine that too many people outside Microsoft remember, either.
All I can think that would result in such a good showing is that its usage is being forced through MSN Messenger, the MSN home page, and Internet Exploder.
Would anyone seriously go out of their way to use it?
OK, so bing is eating yahoo’s market share and google grows stronger meanwhile, according to the article. Considering that bing will soon be in the same boat with yahoo, that’s like getting 20 dollars from the left pocket and putting them in the right pocket. Now the right pocket’s content grew tremendously. And they spend 100 million dollars for this? Wow, now it makes sense.
They’re *very successful* at failing.
I guess Bing is mostly eating the market share of MSN Search, and that’s more like taking 5 bucks from your pocket, straightening it, and putting it back. Nothing but extra work.
I think a good measure of a search engine’s popularity is when the name is used as a verb. Right now I just don’t hear anyone saying “Just f*cking bing it!”.
I am, of course, just kidding (sarcasm doesn’t travel well on the Interwebs).
I have accidentally used BING numerous times both at work and school, since IE’s search page defaults to BING.
My university has some 9,000+ computers, all defaulting to BING. How many search hits does BING get in a standard 8 hour day from these machines purely by accident?
How many home users change their homepage from http://www.google.com to http://www.bing.com? How many even know how?
Funny thing – just for fun I installed Windows 98SE on an old laptop (my idea of fun, ya know!). After installing the latest I.E. it could run, you guessed it – Bing was the default search. I agree that Bing gets a lot of default searches that way. I don’t think it is a bad search engine, I still just prefer the simplicity of google.