Bing Now Powers 30% of US Searches
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
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.
As ever, statistics published by the likes of Hitwise can only offer a partial view of the truth, and have been shown to be grossly inaccurate in the past.
Point being, while doubting the accuracy of the numbers reported is reasonable, I find it much harder to dismiss a trend.
These kinds of people probably wouldn't visit your site.
site a - 66% search engine traffic. google is 98.5%, other is 1% and bing is 0.5%
site b - 76% search engine traffic. google is 97%, bing is 2% and other is 1%
Around 10% of our traffic is Internet Explorer. We're using google analytics (maybe they're fudging numbers? Seems v. unlikely) and search is a large part of where we get our traffic. Our experience matches yours very accurately in a completely different sector. These are gaming sites btw.
This should already tell you that your traffic is not representative.
The point being, maybe IE users don't actually make up more than 10% of traffic. Maybe the situations in which people use IE are such that they use the web less. He did say 10% of traffic, not 10% of unique users.
Not that I have evidence to back this up; however, the kind of analysis that gets done on market share in computing doesn't seem to be able to accurately reflect how much something is actually used.
I still don't believe this. I don't think that IE users are equal to or less than 10% of web traffic in the US or the world. That would be pretty huge if it was the case. Even a drop below 25% worldwide would be pretty huge news.
Now, I too would be very surprised if that observation brings 45% of web users down to under 10% of web traffic, but I don't doubt that web traffic from IE is lower than 45%.
Of course this neglects things like bandwidth via Netflix and Youtube, but still a decent proxy.
Can't say with any amount of confidence that Wikipedia is defining it correctly and/or using the statistics correctly, but there that is...
"StatCounter is a web analytics service. As of 1 June 2010, our tracking code is installed on more than 3 million sites globally. (These sites cover various activities and geographic locations.) Every month, we record billions of hits to these sites. For each hit, we analyse the browser/operating system used and we establish if the hit is from a mobile device. For our search engine stats, we analyze every hit referred by a search engine. For our social media stats, we analyze every hit referred by a social media site. We summarize all this data and this is how we get our Global Stats information.
We do not manipulate the data in any way. We do not collate it with any other information sources. No artificial weightings are used. We simply publish the data as we record it.
In other words we calculate our Global Stats on the basis of more than 15 billion hits per month, by people from all over the world onto our 3 million+ member sites."
The only thing they talk about are hits, and they mention it extensively. Maybe they do some analysis to determine unique users, but if so they don't mention it, and that would seem to be a pretty big oversight. That's why I said as best I can tell they use page hits.
UPDATE: I went to the Wikipedia link you provided and it says this: "StatCounter (July 2008 to present) Usage share of web browsers according to Stat Counter. Statcounter statistics are directly derived from hits (not unique visitors) from 3 million sites using Statcounter totalling more than 15 billion hits per month.[22] No artificial weightings are used"
This seems consistent with what I said earlier.
google.com = 146,718,000 refers bing.com = 5,592,000 refers
Quickly flicking through my analytics reports, I'm seeing IE percentages ranging from 84% (on an investment management site) down to 11% (a designer furniture site).
It wouldn't surprise me at all to see a youth oriented and/or computer gaming oriented site even further skewed away from IE than my furthest outlier.
The trend of bing making slow and steady gains is confirmed by a bunch of other such sites as well.
Bing is far from being a credible competitor but lets give them credit for what they have achieved.
Maybe Bing just doesn't like your site. I've worked with many properties that ranked top 3 in Yahoo/Bing yet were all but invisible on Google (not banned, just not ranking well), and vice versa. Especially on long tail terms, which forums like yours usually thrive on, its not uncommon to see a big separation.
[1] http://blog.effectcheck.com/2011/04/11/hackernews-front-page...
Jokes aside: BingHoo share, followed by comparison to Google (which makes it harder to see).
http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/nostra-an...
http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/nostra-an...
I'm not specifically aware of anything material which would have materially affected BCC's performance on BingHoo in the last 3 months, and the big candidate for affecting performance at Google (Panda or whatever you guys call content farming internally) largely seems to have missed me. When you compare year-to-year to back out the seasonality, though, both Yahoo and Bing show strong growth in my Jan/Feb/March numbers and Google growth is much more muted. Feel free to backchannel me if you want the spreadsheet.
For reasons known only to the Excel gods, the X axis considers the last data point (March) to be in February.
Anyway, I bet there's probably somebody in search quality whose job it is to track these numbers, but I don't know who it is, and it's easier just to ask you. Plus, this way the HN community gets some interesting numbers. Thanks. :-)
Looked at about 30 other sites we run (everything from personal injury attorneys to truck scales to HVAC companies to bariatric surgeons)...traffic from Bing is no higher than 9% and no lower than 3%.
Second of all, if yahoo is "powered by bing" that basically means that bing in itself did not win anything, they just took an entire existing user base and replaced one engine with another. Its like if secretly all ford engines were replaced with toyota ones, and toyota claims to have gained market share. Its true technically, but on a user level its not users flocking to them, its just the fact of life that happened due to a takeover. Note yahoo allowed paying to get better rankings, so those who used it were already used to shit results.
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.
I also don't get the Facebook reference. Google has distribution deals - Google searches in Firefox still count for Google, for example. Is it just the fact that web results are at the tail of the page?
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.
The reasoning behind this Bing-fueled gaming experience is so that you can "research" words as you play...or something.
It's all very shady/hilarious.
I'm not sure how accurate compete.com is, but here are the stats for clubbing.com:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/clubbing.com/
They were pulling over 1 million uniques/month until January (not sure what happened in January). And now their traffic is indeed insignificant at about 200k for February 2011 (who knows how accurate this is).
However, if you factor that many of those unique hits are playing a game that fires off between 10-100 searches per play, well that's a lot of searches, especially if people play more than one game. Or maybe I'm wrong, as this is a bunch of guesstimating on my part.
Of course, I can see your point...in the grand scheme of things, Club Bing is probably just a drop in the bucket.
Assuming you make 50 searches per day, you'll make at most $.50 - is it really worth it for a half dollar a day?
And this buried a bit deeper: Search and earn. Earn 1 credit per 5 Bing searches up to 8 a day until Apr 30.
I use a Mac not because I'm some techno-illiterate neo-lithic throwback, but because I'm a raging control freak. On the Mac I feel like I'm in control. Programs that go and do random weird stuff behind the scenes break that fragile illusion. :D
The worst was when Firefox's stealthy self-updating broke itself. I don't remember which version that was (sometime in 2008? 2009?) and it might have been on a work machine (Windows? Vista?) but there was basically no going back (couldn't use previous versions because of stealth updates...), and no going forward (wasn't gonna sit around waiting for them to patch it).
menu Preferences -> Advanced -> Update
seek to "When updates to Firefox are found"
check "Ask me what I want to do"
The effects of that kind of thinking at Google is why I often use Bing - too often Google's results appear to be skewed toward ad impressions rather than usefulness.
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.]
Google = 92.66% Bing = 3.65% Yahoo = 2.03%
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.
So Bing gained 1.53% while Google lost 2.27%. Where did the other 0.74% go?
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
I don't think that's accurate. I read that article as saying that 88% of the $12.5 billion it made outside the US was booked in Dublin. Not that 88% of their revenue is from outside the US.
Bing results are total garbage outside the US at the moment, so it's no surprise that their share would be low. And likewise it makes sense for MS to concentrate on reaching a critical mass in a single market first, and only worry about the rest of the world later.
Their total 2009 revenue was much higher, $23.6B (URL: http://investor.google.com/earnings/2009/Q4_google_earnings....) making non-US revenue a pretty big chunk at 53%.
Please stop using the phrase "tax burden". It's loaded language and not-so-subtly encourages a biased interpretation. It would be like saying "tax opportunity"; i.e., "an opportunity to pay tax".
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?
1) Domain
2) Audience
3) Google/Yahoo/Bing % of traffic
4) Notes
2) SMB focused site that helps companies reduce their credit card processing fees
3) Google was ~88% of our search traffic, and Yahoo/Bing were ~5% each.
4) Numbers for past 30 days. We are ranked far higher on Bing for our key terms "Merchant account" and "Credit card processing"
2) Auto club (similar to a AAA club in the US) (see 4b).
3) Google: 89.29%, Bing: 6.2%, Yahoo: 3.4% (see 4d).
4a) Numbers from the last 30 days, so this is relevant. 4b) We have members in ~1/3 of all households province-wide, so we feel our traffic represents an average online user well. 4c) 350,000+ Unique Visitors monthly (search + organic). 4d) Search-specific traffic.
2) gambling
3) 92%/2%/7%
4) Mar 12-Apr 11, ~46,000 visits. Other interesting numbers to jump out: Google's bounce rate 17%, Bing 28%, Yahoo 36%. The relative numbers haven't changed much going back to Jan - I'm not seeing any growth in the Bing or Yahoo numbers.
1) vacation home rental site (can't say precisely) 2) mainly residents of Canada / approx 700 unique visitors/day 3) Goog/Yahoo/Bing: 87%/6%/5%
1) contest site for kids (can't say precisely) 2) mainly kids in Canada / approx 1000 unique visitors/day 3) Goog/Yahoo/Bing: 82%/9%/7%
I realize these aren't big numbers in most cases, but I checked multiple sites and Google was never less than 80% and usually > 85%.
It's "Powered by Bing"
"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.