Important to keep in mind that when Hitwise/Comscore/Nielsen/etc. measure "Microsoft/Bing powered searches" they're including a LOT of searches that never leave MS/Yahoo's sites. If you do a search on MSN Autos or Yahoo! News or in Facebook's web search, for example, those are all powered by Bing and count toward their share.
Contrast with Google, where very few searches on Google's entire network lead to another page on Google (most of that traffic goes out to other sites like those we own/control). Thus, while 30% of web searches may be Bing powered, the Statcounter numbers are the ones I'm much more inclined to look at as a comparison. 8% for Bing and 11% for Yahoo! seem like plausible figures for outbound traffic sent from those engines.
Microsoft inflates their search share statistics with sites like this: http://www.clubbing.com
Where they bribe people to play games that "search" on Bing in exchange for points they can use to buy things.
Additionally, this site is really easy to automate bots for (there are whole communities that work on this) in order to automate the prize winning process.
Even still, that's all good for Microsoft as far as I can tell, since even playing with bots brings up their share in the search market.
I've been using Bing since I found the Bing Rewards (http://www.bing.com/rewards), which gives you a point per 2 searches and lets you redeem the points for something later on. I have not found myself going back to Google, yet.
Not too surprising. Just yesterday, I found that Bing had managed to get itself back in the list of search engines in my Firefox installation. I use a Mac! The only thing I can think of is that I must have updated the Flip4Mac WMV codecs, but I didn't even let it install Silverlight. If Microsoft is trying this hard to push Bing in so many ways, I'd be surprised if they couldn't manage to hit 30% while the competition is resting on their laurels.
The most important number is search advertising revenue. The entire online services division (which includes Bing) has revenues of around $2 billion per year. Google's AdWords brings in about $15 billion per year. Microsoft is nowhere close to 30% of the search market, revenue wise. For individual ad clicks Microsoft gets about as much as Google, so clearly Microsoft is not doing 30% of "real" searches (actual people looking for actual things and occasionally clicking on an ad.)
Sorry. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious but can someone explain how I'm expected to resolve these two statements as something other than contradictions:
Yes, Bing-powered search ...clocking in at 30.01%
Google in the same time period dropped .. to 64.42%, ceding that ground to Bing.
[Edit: Oh, sorry. yeah, I'm a fool. It reads That was a rise from its February tally of 28.48.. So Bing was already almost 30%. I get it now. That said? No Way.]
I manage a site with 61.92% of users using Internet Explorer
Google = 92.66% Bing = 3.65% Yahoo = 2.03%
This just really isn't sitting well with me... so, warning. Total conspiracy-theory cynicism ahead.
These numbers are from a company that at least in part appears to generate revenue from supplying analytics, and helping other companies tune their search results. While that may put them in a good position to tally these kinds of numbers, it also strikes me that it puts them in a good position to benefit from a redistribution of search-engine market share.
I'm not making an accusation at all. I'm far from informed enough to do so. That said, I'd love some insight on this angle from someone who's more familiar with the space that Hitwise is in.
> clocking in at 30.01% in March according to Hitwise. That was a rise from its February tally of 28.48%. Google in the same time period dropped from 66.69% to 64.42%, ceding that ground to Bing.
So Bing gained 1.53% while Google lost 2.27%. Where did the other 0.74% go?
According to Statcounter the number is closer to 20%. http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-monthly-201103-2...
It's important to note that Google made 88% of it's revenue outside of the US in 2009.
Here's is a paragraph describing how Google legally dodges tax:
"The Dublin subsidiary sells advertising globally and was credited by Google with 88 percent of its $12.5 billion in non-U.S. sales in 2009."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-sho...
So it seems a bit silly to focus solely on US searches. These are global markets we are talking about.
EDIT: link
Yahoo search uses Bing? I must've missed the memo... that could help explain the 30% value - Bing's site usage is still a percent and a half below Yahoo's.
A question, if anyone out there has an answer / speculation:
>Yahoo! Search and Bing achieved the highest success rates in March 2011. This means that for both search engines, more than 80 percent of searches executed resulted in a visit to a Website. Google achieved a success rate of 66 percent.
How much of that is impacted by the ridiculous number of queries Instant generates?
That seems to be a large increase. I was under the impression that Bing/Yahoo made up 10 or 15%. Wonder what the change has been.
Right... the majority of the searches involve terms like "download firefox" and "download chrome". :-)
People just use Bing to search for porn so Google can't see that. Then they use Google for pretty much everything else, which is not much.
What % on non-windows?
This doesn't foot with the traffic to our site. Would be cool to have our own little unscientific survey, as I'd like to see what experiences other folks on here have... can you fill in the following?
1) Domain
2) Audience
3) Google/Yahoo/Bing % of traffic
4) Notes
It only lists Yahoo and Bing here to come up with that 30%, what about Facebook search? Is that not counted (or counted separately)?
It's "Powered by Bing"
Current numbers for the past 7 days for TheNextWeb: 95% Google. Hitwise snorting?
Google's search is bad (spammy advertising), but Bing's isn't any better. Recently at work I went to do a search for something innocuous like
"what words can you put s in front of and still have a word"
And the number 2 result was something about anal sex. I'm like WTF??? I'm at work!
How they can tout themselves as a major search engine in 2011 and not understand the concept of NSFW I do not know.
----
My predictions:
1) So long as Microsoft keeps throwing money at it, Bing will continue to improve.
2) So long as Google's main source of revenue is advertising, they will continue to try to find that "sweet spot" of bombarding us day and night with ads, but not quite enough to make us switch.
It's like a choice between new evil and old evil... either way that ain't a good thing.
These numbers are bogus, as far as I can tell.
I help run a popular music forum that gets over a million pageviews every month, and our search referral numbers show Google at 98.7%. The numbers are similar across 10 other domains I own.
I challenge anyone to show me a site that gets 30% of their search engine hits from Bing. Seriously, if your Bing stats are even close to 30%, please share with us.