Bing Gaining Market Share Faster 406
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."
Bing is pretty good (Score:5, Interesting)
Market Variety (Score:4, Interesting)
While we should probably be happy to see more than one viable candidate for the search engine market, none seem to address privacy very well. Both Bing/Yahoo and Google are quite happy to tell you that they'll track user activity and use it to make a profit. Are there any viable alternatives left with more favorable privacy policies?
Re:Look, it's actually not bad (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Of course (Score:2, Interesting)
I prefer Google for straight up search, but Bing is nice for some specialty searches, e.g. hotels with price comparisons.
Re:Look, it's actually not bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Look, it's actually not bad (Score:1, Interesting)
... (I also have a Zune HD)....
Talk about presenting a good case and then shooting yourself in the foot....
How much would you pay for it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously the costs of operating a search engine are pretty significant and the market for people who'd pay for privacy is quite small. I suspect it'd need to be in the $20-50/month range, and i think that would deter a lot of people.
Little in life is free, and businesses that run on millions of dollars of hardware and fast internet connections are going to need to finance that.
In any event, if i'm going to have to deal with ads online then i'd PREFER that they were tailored to things i'm interested in.
Meanwhile, on the Internet (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Of course (Score:2, Interesting)
Come on. Just admit you dont like microsoft. It is very easy to change the default search engine in IE and Firefox. BTW Firefox comes default with google...
If firefox can default to google, IE can default to bing.
Both can be changed. There is little difference, just microsoft hate.
Re:Of course (Score:5, Interesting)
I was surprised to find a google search returned no hits from M$ itself, but when I switched to bing, it worked. It seems that M$ is blocking google from searching it's site.
Really? I just copied the phrase from your post "Exchange Certificate on a winmo smartphone" into Google and the first result [microsoft.com] was a technet article at Microsoft. The best that Bing could do with the same phrase was some press release stuff about the phones (at least on the first page).
I know the results vary depending on your country and phase of the moon, but it seems a bit premature to suggest that Microsoft are blocking google when a million other test searches could easily prove that wrong.
Then after installing XP on another computer, and updating everything (since she wouldnt) I found that in the newest IE I couldnt use google as my search, the "easy" way of adding it was gone.
In other branches of this thread, everyone else has already mentioned the Find more providers [ieaddons.com] option (which really doesn't seem that hard), but what "easy" way has been removed?
Re:Of course (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly. I suspect the increased search traffic is due to BCB, or Bing Cash Back if you're not into deals websites. Almost every single slickdeal [slickdeals.net] post in the month of December had BCB as part of their slick prices. I used it myself for several purchases I was planning on making anyway.
Basically when I wanted to get 20% cash back on a purchase at Walmart I went to bing and searched "Walmart Bluray" and it returned an ad offering cash back at Walmart.
Re:Good (Score:2, Interesting)
Agreed. Internet search is too important to be so dominated by a single corporation. Would love to see someone else mount a viable challenge to Google, but if it has to be MS for now, so be it.
Re:Look, it's actually not bad (Score:5, Interesting)
Just for fun, I tried Honda Civic as a search. Actually, Bing sucks. Where the results differ, Bing has either a comparison between Civic and Integra windshields, or an ungodly list of used car sites. The one bonus item: it actually has sites that show the manuals for various Honda/Acura cars. Here's the deal though: if I type in "Honda Civic", I want information about the car, not about a manual for it, and I don't want to buy one. Especially not a used one. Google on the other hand presents me with sites that have information about the car - edmunds review, price comparisons, guide sites, etc. Stuff that will help me know more about the car.
If I want specific topics, I'll search for them, thank you very much.
I found similar issues with the maps site: directions are easier to manipulate in Google, and Google lets me search by public transit, or by walking. One good feature in Bing: get directions based on traffic. Google does something similar with "avoid highways", but it's not the same thing.
You are right, Google hasn't evolved much in its core business of search - but that's good, because there isn't much that can happen, until the semantic web (ha!) comes along. Bing tries to pretend it can do semantics, but it really can't. It's just faking it fairly badly. Oh, and final gripe: the stuff it does to wikipedia pages is nasty, and on its own a reason to avoid it like a plague. Yes, I don't have to use the readability feature, but I can't turn off the side bar where that option sits. If I go to a site, I either run my own scripts, or I want to see the page as the site creators intended. Not what MS thinks would be a good version.
In tl;dr format: Google gets out of my way. Bing is and stays in my face. Google wins.
Let's get one thing straight (Score:3, Interesting)
*Yes, I realise that some people have actually switched to it - but I'm sure that 98% of Bing users upgraded IE or are turning on Win7 for the first time.
Re:Easy to do (Score:3, Interesting)
All Verizon blackberry storms now default (unchangably) to Bing. I'm sure that helps.