Bing Gaining Market Share Faster

sopssa sends along a TechCrunch report on comScore qSearch numbers indicating that Bing is currently gaining market share faster than ever before. "In December, Microsoft's search engine gained another 0.4 percent to capture 10.7 percent of US search queries. That makes five straight months of steady share gains for Bing since it launched — Bing's share is up 2.7 percent in total since May, 2009. Google gained only 0.2 percent to end the month with 65.7 percent market share. What is even more interesting is if you look at year-over-year query growth rates for each search engine. Bing's growth is actually accelerating. Its growth rate in query volume was 49.4 percent in December."

When you're at the bottom, the only place you can

[Anonymous Coward]

When you're at the bottom, the only place you can go is up.

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Like Firefox, Opera and Chrome do with Google? It's not hard to change search engine in IE, btw

Look, it's actually not bad

[sc7]

I run all OSes, Linux, Mac, Windows, and I set Bing as my default browser where ever I can. I can accept when Microsoft does something well (I also have a Zune HD). Bing is a great search engine, I find for specific queries, especially academic searches, it provides more accurate, as well as seperated results. Go ahead, type in "Honda Civic", and watch how it divides it based on more specific topics related to the car. The mighty Google has stagnated on its search engine like MS did on IE6 for too long, I'm glad to see some competition, and glad to see Microsoft trying again (as they are with IE8/9 and Windows 7).

Re:Market Variety

[sopssa]

Not alternatives, but Scroogle [scroogle.org] hides your searches among thousands of others (and removes Google's click-tracking javascripts and so on).

Strange..

[Anonymous Coward]

i look after quite a few sites in the UK and Bing is nowhere, less than 1% for most of them

Re:Of course

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Oh, come on. The first time you run IE8 it prompts you to pick a search provider or to use the default of Bing- and it keeps prompting every time you launch until you make a choice or tell it to go away. It lists Google right there, no need to search for more providers. It really can't be made any easier than that.

For an existing install, I can't say as I haven't tried it. But it seems odd to me that the first run would have data that a subsequent run would not.

Re:Of course

[Nerdfest]

Have a look at Google Squared [google.com] for those searches ... it's pretty cool, although you need to add a price column yourself.

Contradicting numbers

[trazan]

This completely contradicts two other reports from the last few days, which has Bing losing market share in December.

http://searchengineland.com/nielsen-yahoo-bing-down-google-up-in-december-33464 [searchengineland.com]

http://www.hitwise.com/us/press-center/press-releases/search-enginedec2009/ [hitwise.com]

And another thing

[Weaselmancer]

MSDN is now powered by Bing too. So every windows programmer in the world is now making Bing queries by default. That's got to boost things a bit.

Re:Sure...

[Idiomatick]

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/11/24/0112201 [slashdot.org]

Might be interesting if you haven't read it.

Re:Of course

[dougisfunny]

a bunch of Verizon blackberrys

Once again a misleading story about Bing

[pdboddy]

That total you see in the image in the article is for Microsoft Sites. This number includes searches from ALL of Microsoft's search boxes: Bing, Live, microsoft.com, etc etc.

If you look at the Nielsen report here: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/nielsen-reports-december-u-s-search-rankings/ [nielsen.com]

You'll see that they list Microsofts search sites as "MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search", which is a bit more explanatory I would say.

And if you check Hitwise, where they list searches BY domain name, www.bing.com LOST 4%. (http://www.hitwise.com/us/press-center/press-releases/search-enginedec2009/)

But Google didn't lose - it gained!

[twoallbeefpatties]

You know, when I look at the graph in TFA the Search Share for Google increased just as much as Bing did! In Dec-08, MS sites were at 8.3%, up to 10.7% in Dec-09. During that same timespan, Google went from 63.5% to 65.7%.

And in that timespan, Yahoo dropped from 20.5% to 17.3%. AOL also dropped from 3.8% to 2.6%. Guess what - MSN isn't stealing Google's shares yet. It's stealing from Google's competitors.

Re:For IE users, Bing lockin is assured

[spyrochaete]

IE keeps your previous default search engine when you upgrade it, actually.

Re:Of course

[AnotherUsername]

Tools->Internet Options->Type in the new home page in the big box.

You can even make tabbed homepages, if that's your thing.

Man, that was hard.

Re:Of course

[shutdown -p now]

It still doesn't explain anything, because IE6 also uses Bing as default search out of the box. Well, technically, it uses Live, but that redirects all search queries to Bing now.

Re:And another thing

[shutdown -p now]

Who doesn't use Google to search MSDN? I haven't tried MSDN's own search recently, but at least it used to be utter shit. Slow and bad results. You search for an API function, it turns up the Windows CE version near the top, with the normal one maybe buried software. Fucking useless.

I'm not sure what engine it was using before. Perhaps it was MSN/Live Search, actually, as that was also rather infamous for poor search results.

Now that it uses Bing as a backend, it actually works fine. For example, searching for CreateWindow [microsoft.com] gets the Win32 function on top, then the WinCE one, then a bunch of other links that are quite relevant (WM_CREATE, a sample application etc). It also has a decent presentation of search results with no information overload - just a very simplistic link listing, and no ads etc.

Re:Of course

[zehaeva]

As an avid blackberry user and enthusiast on Verizon, in an office full of blackberry addicts, I will tell you you are dead wrong sir.

I can not change the default search provider on my Storm 2, I have tried.

I did not install it either. When I purchased the Storm 2 Google was the default search engine, literally over night it was changed, with out my permission and against my wishes. The same happened to every single blackberry in my office.

The only option I have is to type google into my blackberry's browser to use it. That is hardly an option at all.

Also I did not want the Bing application installed to my blackberry and yet it was done for me over the air. I have not been able to uninstall it either. It does not show up in the applications in the options at all.

What option is this?

~Zehaeva

Re:easy to cheat

[mindwhip]

Not to mention that Microsoft migrated their various separate search engines (support, msdn, KB, etc... ) onto Bing so if you need any kind of information from the Evil Ones you are using the evil search.

Bing as a name makes me giggle anyway... to most people living in Scotland a 'Bing' is a heap of slag or other waste materials left over from coal mining and is often a toxic hazard to be avoided...

"Find More Providers"

[westlake]

This is what happens when you make your search engine the default one for your web browser as well as make it difficult for someone to add or change this option.

The drop down menu in IE 8 Search will take you to this page:

Add-ons Gallery: Search Providers [ieaddons.com]

Here's a sampling of the English language options. You have 25 languages to chose from:

Amazon
Google
Hulu
New Egg
New York Times
Wikipedia
Win 7 Comparability

Create your own Search Provider [ieaddons.com]

Add your own search provider to your copy of Internet Explorer by following these steps:

1. Visit the desired search engine in another window or tab.
2. Use the search engine to search for TEST (all capital letters).
3. Paste the URL of the Search results page here

You can customize the name of your provider. You can select the character encoding, from about 50 or so choices. You can view the XML.