Google loses 2.6% per year. At the same time, Bing gained 4.2% market share. | Hacker News Reader

Google loses 2.6% per year. At the same time, Bing gained 4.2% market share.

brafton.com

14 pointsfear9129 comments

Please can someone edit this title to correct the "looses" to "loses"?

No, I'm not being a grammar nazi, I'm just trying to reduce friction for readers. Those who don't know the difference won't notice, but those who do notice the difference will care, and will have a small "jar" of annoyance, sigh about illiteracy, and be distracted from the main point.

This isn't spam, where bad grammar is deliberate and acts as a filter to help focus on those more likely to be duped into clicking. This is submission to HN, where the purpose is to share knowledge with similarly-minded people.

Do you get your web sites proof-read? Do you use correct grammar and spelling on the pages intended to attract customers and sell product? Do you do everything you can to improve the experience of your visitors, to make their visit pleasant, annoyance-free, and funnel them into conversions?

Why should you treat your colleagues here on HN differently? Show them some respect, and pay attention to friction-free communication.

I do recognize that not everyone here is a native English speaker. For them I hold huge respect. Many times I've tried to communicate in a language not my own, and I have some insight into the size of the task. This is aimed firstly at people who don't seem to respect their audience enough to even try, and secondly to point out that small things like this might very easily have an effect on sales.

(Added in edit - probably according to someone-or-other's law there will be a grammatical or spelling error in this comment. If you had to hunt for it then you don't win, you're just missing the point. If you stumbled over it and it spoiled your flow, please let me know so I can fix it. Thanks.)

(Added in further edit - This comments has already had at least two up-votes and at least two down-votes. I don't care about the karma, but I do care about effective communication. Here's my opinion - instances of using "loose" instead of "lose" (to pick one common example) damage effective communication for some of your intended audience. If you don't care about that, fine. It is, however, information for you. If you want to shoot the messenger then feel free to down-vote.)

Thank you. It's becoming quite common to mistake 'loose' with 'lose' and they have entirely different meanings. It's one of my pet peeves and something I try to help out non-native english speakers with as well.

Not sure bout you but I see this as an _extremely_ common misspelling on the web. I would love to know how it arises. Phonetics? Soundalike? Lose and loose certainly have very different meanings.

I'd guess that people assume it's "oo" from the way it sounds.

"lose" doesn't sound like "pose"...

Ah english... bruise, muse, prove, proof

Maybe there's a similar word in another language. There's lot of mistakes of this kind. For example, french often say "actually" when they mean "currently", because its translation is "actuellement".

We could probably get the answer by hanging out on an ESL forum for a bit, that's assuming it's non-native English speakers who are making this mistake (it might not be!).

I suspect it's almost entirely native English speakers making this mistake. Those who learn their English as an acquired language are taught about this sort of thing, and it's known intellectually.

Native English speakers just rattle stuff out, and don't know any explicit rules (and their exceptions) to go back, re-read, and check.

>according to someone-or-other's law there will be a grammatical or spelling error in this comment

If you or others are curious, it is Muphry's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphrys_law)

Good god that is awesome.

Agreed! The thing I found most confusing in the title though is "At the same time, Bing gained 4.2% market share."

Over what period of time? I am guessing that it is over the past year but the first part specifies a rate and not a specific time interval.

The article doesn't mention a rate at all or show data prior to 2011, so the headline should really be comparing differences between 2012 and 2011 and not mention 'rate'.

I found Compete data for 2009-2010 (http://media.marketwire.com/attachments/201009/MOD-13263_ima...) and have copied it below.

Aug 2009 72.6%

Aug 2010 70.1% (-2.5%)

Aug 2011 68.3% (-1.8%)

Aug 2012 65.7% (-2.6%)

So, the percentage indicated in the headline isn't horribly inaccurate (Google's share also dropped by 2.5% between 2009 and 2010 and averages a 2.3% drop in market share per year over the past three years.)

I agree that the first number shouldn't be a rate. x per y implies a rate though like 26 kilometres per hour or 16 miles per gallon.

As a handy guide for those who struggle with this:

  Lose rhymes with choose.
  Loose rhymes with abuse.

No doubt that will completely clear up the confusion! :)

Not to be obtuse, but shouldn't loose should rhyme with choose, and lose with chose.

As a non-English speaking person, i get more than annoyed when I see such common spelling mistakes. It's hard enough to read correctly spelled English, don't make it harder please.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-monthly-200807-2...

http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=5&qpaf=&... (global, have to pay for US only data).

And as already mentioned, Comscore shows Google at an all time high in the US.

Bottom line, these types of things are very hard to measure, so take every statistic with a grain of salt. The only thing we really know is that Google is the king and Bing is slowly growing, mostly taking marketshare from Yahoo. Anecdotally, most people who run websites are seeing barely any traffic from Bing, and on a global scale, Bing is basically a non-factor.

Brafton's editorial reads like a press release from Mircosoft Bing. The premise is that Bing is growing in the month of August and that Google is losing market share. The analysis of Bing being a contender seems very premature considering many technical people reviewing their analytics will see a minute portion of their traffic comes from Bing vs. Google.

This kind of promotion is unlikely to make developers make the switch, but I am interested -- maybe the short-term lose of Google could be explained by the gain of Duckduckgo. That's the bias I would editorialize.

https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

I think that's still under 1%, which is awesome it's getting that big, but wouldn't be enough here. The other complicating factor is that yahoo is either down a little (compete) or down a lot (comscore).

Is Compete's data reliable? If it is reliable, is it useful?

Does anyone know if Jeff Atwood's (2009) post about Google providing 99% of their traffic is still relevant, or was ever relevant outside a small community?

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-elephant-in-the...

or if you ask comscore, Google is up 1.6% year over year and Bing is up 1.2%.

This site seems rather sleazy (even) for HN, but these "market research firms" definitely remain useless.

As ColinWright said, it's not "looses" but rather "loses." It's not a major mistake—from the point of language design, this is something that's wrong with English.

Looses: makes less tight.

Loses: fails to win.

I hardly believe people are saying "screw google, I'm using bing", I think the numbers have more to do about defaults, your grandpa/aunt opens IE and bing is the default search engine.

Alexa reports rapid increase for Bing and a rapid decline for Google:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bing.com#

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com#

I am curious what caused this.

IMO A lot of that decline/increase is probably where Bing has bought integration into an existing product. I've seen it a lot lately, "powered by Bing" and the like, but I've not seen a single person actually type Bing into the address bar. It seems to me that this increase is coming from those people who don't know/care and are just being directed to Bing, not making a concious choice of which search engine to use.

I believe buying market share is a common pattern for Microsoft.

This must be in US-only. Bing's market share globally is almost in-existent.

Considering how much Bing advertises and Google doesn't, it must have cost Microsoft a fortune to increase Bing by 4.2%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com