Bing climbs to 13% of search engine market share in the US
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It's hard to keep track of the convo on Twitter so I'll comment here.
I think there's something wrong with the data.
The full chart shows a sudden drop of about 9% market share for Google from March going into April 2024. Meanwhile there are significant gains for Bing and Yahoo.
statcounter says they track referrals from search engines (vs. queries directly on the search engine). This suggests to me that there was some change that stopped tracking a significant number of Google referrals, though I don't know enough to know why.
On AI: they do not count moments when a chatbot response references a page, only if you click into the page itself. I think the reactions about ChatGPT/Perplexity eating Google are not entirely correct, considering this + the magnitude of the drop.
Would the headline benefit from reflecting this?
Assuming the OP's stats are accurate.
For example, if you search for ["foobar"!g] (without brackets), you will not be redirected to Google, but you would be if you did ["foobar" !g].
Foisting, lots of foisting.
1. Google clearly lost focus and is rotting. Sundar Pichai makes Steve Ballmer or Brian Krzanich look good by comparison. They're killing search to optimize metrics like "# of searches" that are harmful to long term user value of the platform [1].
Google search has been getting worse for ~5 years, and will not change direction until they get a new CEO. As long as Pichai is at the helm, they'll keep optimizing the KPIs that boost next year's bonus at the expense of making a good service.
2. Kagi does a lot right, but it's run by the kind of lunatic that will spend a significant fraction of the company's budget to buy a t-shirt factory to make t-shirts instead of, you know, making a search engine.
3. Bing exists simply to be a corporate alternative to a competitor. That doesn't make for a good service.
4. DDG <-> bing when it comes to the actual search results. Nothing disruptive in here.
5. LLM based search is nice, but it doesn't fill a lot of the core things people actually search for on a day to day basis. It's a value-add, not a replacement.
Couple of thoughts:
- With generative AI filling the web with noise at an increasing rate, it'll be more important to rely on actual trust of sources rather than the content that's in there. Network/graph based metrics should do better than parsing/embedding the content itself.
- If you're building a search engine service, maybe try to differentiate it for the 21st century? Start by targetting the kind of people that could switch - the same kind of people that already paid for Kagi.
Paying for search is a good idea; it's just that Kagi is run by a loonie. Companies run this way don't tend to last.
Kagi managed to get going with less than 5 engineers. You can bootstrap your project from commoncrawl these days.
I've been using it for a few years now and I haven't used Google in a long time. The results are pretty good and it also has pretty nice features compared to Bing/Google/DDG.
The UI is very minimal, not many distractions and there's also LLM search for those who need it.
Google search has been "llm based" since around 2019 - they've integrated BERT embeddings of your queries for a long time!
Having those embeddings plug into a text generation final layer instead of a retrieval infrastructure isn't somehow magical. ChatGPT only seems better because it's not filled with crap the same way google and bing are.
With that said, search does a lot of things that chatGPT is simply not good at. "Find a hardware store near me". "How does a E15 lightbulb head look like versus the one in my hand", etc.
Everything about the t-shirts has already been argued to death, maybe just relax and don't participate in the internet hate machine?
(and, yes, I'm a Kagi subscriber. I'd say the same thing if I wasn't a Kagi user though.)
I'm also happily paying for kagi - my point is it's a good time to start a competitor nonetheless.
A startup CEO that gets distracted by T-Shirt factories and all sorts of other shiny squirrels is too unfocused to keep his train on track for the long haul.
The t-shirt distraction is 99.99999% everyone else, by volume.
He made a post here explaining that it worked out cheaper that way, and that it hasn’t risked the company. Not that I agree with the decision, but you are painting it in a very bad light.
Kagi is a massive breath of fresh air, putting us, the user, at the helm again. We can choose what to personally up- and downrank, whether we want listicles, long or short site previews, the quick answer LLM is easily available, etc etc etc..
It has been a very very long time since I’ve seen a software product that is such a joyful improvement over all its competitors.
I'd want someone who is ruthlessly focused on growing the core search product. Focus is about saying no - I don't want a CEO distracted by a bunch of bullshit.
I think it's a good time to eat Kagi's lunch as well.
I thought this was a weird joke while reading but apparently it is true. I like it though. Only a lunatic would dare build a paid search engine and actually manage to find users in 2024.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
What are you referring to there? Is it this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39124802 / https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k?
As far as we're talking Google->Bing, are we sure we're not just changing our source of Internet Pap?
I mean, Vive la Compétition! and all. But for those of us worn out from the manipulated web, Bing results aren't exactly restoring hope.
Default iOS search now Bing, fuck it.
Google shouldn't be the default search engine on Android or Chrome. It's incredibly monopolistic. All users should get the right to choose before defaults are forced upon them.
Their payment of blood money to Apple and Mozilla are also unfair given the fact that they already own all of the other real estate.
It takes less than 30 seconds to change and Chrome is a product _they own_. Take some personal agency. The government doesn't need to hand hold you to change your search engine.
An enormous number of people don't even realize Google isn't the internet.
Defaults are the most powerful force field imaginable at population scale. It's like lead in the water.
Even technical users are dragged down by the second and third order impacts of defaults imposed upon the masses. For instance, Google gets to control how the web works and there's nothing you can do about it.
We should favor robust and healthy competition. Make Google sweat a bit more to earn their place, and give the ecosystem vibrant alternatives that force more rapid innovation.
I felt like I had time warped back to the 90s. So gross. Linux FTW.
Ability to raise/lower the results ranking of sites, along with ability to block sites entirely. (goodbye Pinterest!)
Results quality feels better than Google's.
Search query language actually works: https://kagi.com/search?q=recipes+%28szechuan+OR+cantonese%2...
It is a little surprising what Google still maintain such a high market share, but that's momentum and force of habit for you.