Bing Gains 10% Marketshare 514
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the nowhere-to-go-but-up dept.
from the nowhere-to-go-but-up dept.
samzbest writes "According to ComScore's qSearch, Microsoft's retaliation against Google search, Bing, has gained significant market share, now facilitating close to 10% of US searches. That's a gain of two large points in five months."
Is it trickery? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are they only counting the places where people go to the page and do a search or are they counting all the 'embedded' searches which are snuck into other apps like IE and Windows Live to boost numbers?
Thought so.
Well (Score:2, Insightful)
Still 90% to go.
I wonder if they get that far. I think Google is so fixated in the minds of people that it's hard to get it out. It's even on the homepages of not only younger people but also the digital elderly who are less computer savvy. Bing has to offer more and better search results then Google does before it gains any more then 20% of the market I think.
Don't forget, humans are conservative creatures, they only like changing when it saves money or reduces fat quickly.
MSN/Live had about the same market share before (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not really news. Bing is just a rebranding of MSN Search. In June 2007, MSN had a spike of 16% market share (http://blog.compete.com/2007/07/09/june-search-share-msn-live-google-yahoo-ask/). Given the huge marketing behind Bing as well as the conversion of practically all search engines on every site that has anything to do with Microsoft, I would say, meh, no big deal.
Defaults.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if there's any relation between this, and the number of users who've upgraded too IE8 and just not bothered/realised that they can change the default in-browser search client?
Fallout from Windows Live? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bigger marketshare than desktop Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
There is no "1% Linux". Perhaps you're confused by the many distributions of Linux that offer you a choice between a Desktop (ubuntu), a server supporting the latest hardware (Fedora), a server which runs forever (CentOS), a bootable USB... well you get the point. With Linux you have choices.
So please take your attitude over to your 10% bing *LOL* (MSN search down 5 points in two months isn't a "win for bing", it's a LOSS for microsoft) with you and have a home professional ultimate day.
Ehud
Re:Who would've though? (Score:3, Insightful)
Bing is really easy name to remember. It's actually a great name from MS.
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google search is embedded into a hojillion websites as well as having browser plugins / toolbars for pretty much every browser. If "embedded searches" are counted it'll probably be to Google's advantage.
(I'm not saying that the study isn't trickery. I wouldn't know either way.)
Re:Bigger marketshare than desktop Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
...not backed by a global monopoly with 20+ years of entrenchment.
Just think of all of the captive Windows and IE users out there that can have MS-Whatever shoved down their throats.
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:3, Insightful)
The trickery should be clear because microsoft is trying to gain marketshare by having articles posted every time they get 1/100^56th of a marketshare increase, even though nobody wants that piece of crap. 3%, 5%, 6%, etc. It's search results are crap even. You didn't hear google publicizing every 1% do ya?
Amazing what money will buy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:5, Insightful)
> to the page and do a search or are they counting
> all the 'embedded' searches which are snuck into
> other apps like IE and Windows Live to boost numbers?
Don't be an idiot. This is Bing we're talking about, not Yahoo. Do you really think 10% of people go to it on purpose? Outside of extreme geekdom, nobody's even heard of it yet.
Basically what this means is IE8 has, mostly as a result of automatic updates, reached about 10% market share among people who think the browser's location bar is a search box and haven't bothered to express an opinion about what search engine it should use. IE8 ships with "Live Search", alias Bing, as the default; IE6 and IE7 used MSN Search as their default, so what we're seeing here is mostly new-version uptake.
There are also a few geeks using it on purpose to try it out, but even if 100% of the slashdot-reading population did that it wouldn't be anywhere near 1% market share, let alone 10%. And the single most popular search engine among the slashdot-reading geekdom is almost certainly still Google at this point.
No, the bulk of the 10% we're talking about here consists of people using the IE8 UI.
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would Google publish their marketshare changes? Especially because only way they can go is down, unless they can gain marketshare in China (from Baidu) or Russia (from yandex).
Re:Defaults.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Except for the fact that you have to jump through extra hoops AFTER installation to get to Google's entry in the IE8 search provider listing.
Surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, because Google's idiotic toolbar being bundled with everything from the end user Java VM to Adobe PDF Reader is so different a tactic.
Re:I wonder what happens when you Google Bing (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure your two links prove your point. As I age, I'm getting more critical of bad user interfaces.
If you are searching for Google, then you almost certainly want http://www.google.com./ [www.google.com] Might as well show only that as sometimes less is more.
If that isn't what you wanted, click on the other results link just below and you can see lots of other stuff. But really, if you want anything other than the homepage, you are going to have to come up with a better query than "google".
Google got a lot of attention in the early days for its clean uncluttered interface. I applaud Bing for their clean uncluttered results page. At least for the example you pointed out.
Re:Surprising... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a very different tactic: a defensive one.
Put it this way: if Google didn't piggyback on things like Acrobat or Java, they'd be wiped out by Microsoft. Most MSIE updates (and more than a few non-MSIE installs) over the past few years have switched users to MSN/Live/Bing/Whatever-its-called-this-year, and it's not at all easy to straightforward to change MSIE's search provider to Google. Heck, Bing is designed to look enough like Google that users aren't alerted sufficiently to the change
If Google wasn't pushing back, that 10% gain for Bing would be a lot higher.
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, don't forget that when Windows 7 came to mass market, Microsoft still didn't allow you to change the default search engine from Bing to Google in IE8. I tried several times and MS only allowed you to download 'something' Google-related (some plug-in) from their site that wasn't Google Search for the toolbar. It's only just recently they 'fixed' this.
Anyone who snagged Windows 7 early and was using IE8 (poor deluded souls) would possibly be contributing to this 10%. Since they fixed the 'glitch' maybe we can see this 10% go down from now.
Re:Surprising... (Score:1, Insightful)
I discovered the other day that IE on my XP box had suddenly decided that Bing was its default search engine, despite the fact that I'd previously set it to be Google.
The only time Windows Updates ever remotely came close to changing my search page is when it installed IE8 and it went through a wizard the first time I ran it and asked what I wanted my search page to be. Even then, I believe the default option was to keep my old search provider, which was imported from IE7 settings.
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:4, Insightful)
microsoft is making themselves better and more productive? LOL I seriously hope you are joking. Bing is still very skewed to show positive results for things that MS is interested in gaining marketshare from. It's when people realize this, that they start to have less interest in bing. The only reason it has *any* marketshare beyond like 1% is being embedded and defaulted everywhere.
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing wrong inherently with evil, ya know. Nor is there anything inherently wrong with trying to scam off with Google's lunch. It's called 'business as usual', ya know. I checked Bing out when it first started getting airplay on tv, didn't see what all the excitement was about. IIRC, early results were heavily weighted to shill Microsoft products. Big surprise, eh? Now the recent XP/Vista updates toggle default browser search engines to Bing, Win7 ships with default search engine of Bing, any embedded native Windows search uses Bing, and it's a surprise that Bing picked up 10% of the search engine market? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight...
Google took years to conquer the market and stomp on Altavista. Microsoft can do it with a click of an update button. Fun, eh? See you Patch Tuesday. And don't forget to click back to Google...
Re:Shocked (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it hilarious that - even with the obvious money-under-the-table bias, even with the fact it's shoved in every IE user's face by default (and the fact changing the default on that is deliberately hard and confusing), they can still only get 10%.
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, no, I think the lack is on your part [tvtropes.org]. Even a 100% monopoly can gain sales, but they can't increase market share -- that is, the fraction of the market they reach. If the number of searches doubled, and Bing doubles and Google doubled (pretending they're the only two engines), then their market share remains the same, 10% and 90% respectively.
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:3, Insightful)
It is worse than that. Let us say that you want Google as the default for said address bar search feature of IE8, and you go to the Microsoft tool for adding said capability and you look for Google, it is no where to be found. WHAT???? They have search tools I have barely heard of listed, but no GOOGLE????
Oh wait, it is on page two. Never mind. No, Microsoft isn't trying to hide it ... NOOOOOO.
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:4, Insightful)
Note, I call them nutjobs because they make noises about going after Intel and Google but not a peep about Ebay or Paypal which are CLEARLY abusive monopolies.
igoogle changes = win for bing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's different in that, Google has offered these things and people used them. Most of the Bing stuff that I have seen have been trying to sneak it in the back door or ram it down my throat. I will not Google for stuff on Bing.
Re:Amazing what money will buy (Score:3, Insightful)
Bing will follow a similiar bell curve as more ppl realize that Bing is simply manipulated results. HOWEVER, it will never go back to flatline. The reason is that it is the default for Windows install. Considering that MSN is pretty much the default for Windows and will likely indicate what is likely, then Bing will probably get to about 25, maybe 30 % (due to MS payments) and then will trend back to under 20%. It will continue that way until Google's leadership is turned over to business ppl who will then kill innovation (think IBM, GE, Disney, Intuit, Yahoo, etc).
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:3, Insightful)
Created for the purpose of stealing Google's customers is logically flawed (though I'm sure you know that). It presupposes that Google has some a priori right to these people and that it is wrong for another company to lure them away. Secondly given that we are seeing things from the customers' point of view (because that's what we are), we see no harm to ourselves in moving to a different provider if we are given a better product. In short, this statement is not a criticism that can be levelled at Microsoft, it's just a double standard.
And to steal customers from Yahoo, of course. ;) But we'll leave the double standard critiques. I don't believe that anything on the scale of Google "just happened". There was a business model all along. But really it's irrelevant. If the comment above is a criticism, which from phrasing and context it must be, then it's implying that there is something inherently more wicked about something being a business idea, which is a notion I reject. You don't get moral superiority over business rivals because you don't want to make money (not that Google aren't after every penny they can get. They censor web results in China after all which is suggestive of priorities).
"Crap" in the context of this discussion has clearly been along the axis of Good-Bad, not Moral-Immoral. Prejudice against Microsoft has no logical impact on whether their product is actually good or not. Though reading through the Slashdot comments, that thought is clearly lost on many.
If people want to make the case that Bing is worse than Google, they should do so by giving factual examples: real world searches carried out in both search engines which illustrate more appropriate results from one search engine than another.
Re:Surprising... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:3, Insightful)
Google did the exact same thing. Or do you believe that they didn't setup a search engine to steal customers from Yahoo, Altavista, and others just to sell ads?
And... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:3, Insightful)
you've never heard of IE changing default search to bing? http://searchengineland.com/internet-explorer-6-forces-bing-as-default-search-provider-20398 [searchengineland.com]
Huh, you got me there.
I can dig deeper, but that is by far not the only isolated incident.
The article you just linked said it was. The issue doesn't apply to any other version of IE. (That is, versions of IE used by sane people.)
The issue here about the previous search results (prior comment) is that they are showing other OS's first, and MS is nowhere to be found.
That's not evidence of rigged results.
I wasn't even specifying an OS, so why or how would it magically put in linux and mac as insecure
What makes you think it "magically put in linux and mac as insecure" (whatever that means?) You've demonstrated absolutely nothing here.
You could be noticing a pattern, for example: articles about Windows don't include the term "OS" as often as articles about Linux and Macintosh. That might be a reasonable conclusion to draw, and has nothing to do with some paranoid conspiracy theory you've brewed up.
The only thing you've concretely shown is that Google and Bing don't have identical search results. Whoop-de-shit.
(re: your reply to me)The other issue here is, when I'm looking for something I don't need bing to tell me what I want to find, that by searching google I don't need it to automatically assume I don't know how to type google.com., which is what it's essentially defaulting.
That's because millions and millions of users do, in fact, type "google.com" into a search box to get to Google. This just proves you're completely out-of-touch with the search industry, and know nothing about the average user.
Likewise with Microsoft. I don't want "all about Microsoft from Microsoft's webpage", because a company's own view will always be skewed. I want "all about Microsoft from everyone else in the world other than Microsoft". This is a failure of the search engine for me.
Then hit "more results," the link's right there.
Re:Is it trickery? (Score:3, Insightful)
Dig all day? We've seen one claim from you that the results for "Least Secure OS" are skewed, when the initial results of both Google and Bing are identical. We've also seen you complain that when you type "Google" into Bing, you don't get the results you want (which apparently are something other than Google). Here for all to see are the comparison results: http://yfrog.com/5hgooglevbingp [yfrog.com]. I think the one on the left actually looks less cluttered and I like the way all the popular Google services are neatly collated for you at the top. So yes, as you're the one making accusations of conspiracy and saying how many instances of this there are, you do have to do more digging if you want to convince anyone.
You seem incredulous that people think the press on this was "accidental". It's just a news story. Either you're saying that the results aren't true and that Bing doesn't have 10%, or you think this isn't newsworthy. If you have evidence to disprove the former, bring it. If you don't think the latter, don't bother posting.
I think you're actually a Microsoft shill trying to push people into arguing the benefits of Bing by posting such easily refutable arguments against it. It's more plausible than someone actually saying these things because they believe them. Am I right?