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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Bing isn't even mentioned.

There used to be a CEO of Bing (Qu Lu and Nadella had been in that slot) but last year, Bing was split up under 5 VPs; there's no longer a real Bing organization.

It's strange. Bing has 20% market search share under its own name, plus 13% under the Yahoo brand. That's 33%. Google has 64%, so Bing is now more than half the size of Google in terms of searches. That's OK market share; it's like being Chrysler vs General Motors.

Bing's profits, though, are awful. Microsoft apparently loses money on Bing.[1] It's hard to tell from the way Microsoft reports online services. Google's advertising revenue is 18 times Microsoft's. That's Bing's problem. Nobody buys Bing ads. It's surprising, with the the market share, that Bing can't fix this.

[1] https://www.ventureharbour.com/visualising-size-google-bing-...

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I am employed at MSFT. This post (currently the top post) is factually incorrect on basically every level, both on subjects that look good for the company, and on subjects that don't. I'm stepping in to correct this because it's better that people understand honestly where we are and aren't doing well, then it is to have ridiculous rumors spread by people who shouldn't talk about what they don't understand.

Bing is under Qi Lu, full stop. Lu is very senior VP who reports directly to Satya Nadella. Bing is NOT split among Qi and 4 of his VP peers. It IS true that Lu has split the responsibilities of managing Bing up among SOME of his direct reports, almost all of whom are themselves VPs. But the idea that there is no real "Bing org" anymore is just completely and totally wrong. They all answer to Lu, and they've split responsibilities along sensible boundaries, so that things like UX are under one VP and infrastructure is under another VP.

Second, Bing does not have 20% market share "plus" Yahoo's market share. Bing and MSFT properties like MSN have 20% market share. Yahoo has 12%. You can't just credit Bing with Yahoo's market share. That's a search experience they work hard on, and the fact that Bing powers Yahoo is largely immaterial to their consumers, who come to Yahoo for the Yahoo experience. They could switch to Google tomorrow and the vast majority of consumers would not notice or care. Truthfully, the biggest (and arguably only real) benefit for Bing is the increased ad revenue.

Third, Bing IS profitable. This is well-known and reported on.

Fourth, it is basically completely untrue that "nobody" buys Bing ads. Obviously it would not be profitable if that were true. Furthermore, the supposition that you should buy ads based on market share of the search engine is hilariously wrong. You should purchase ads on the platform where they will be more successful. A lot of times this is Google; sometimes this is Bing. The fact that the parent got this wrong basically indicates that they are not to be trusted on this subject, at all. If the poster doesn't know what they're talking about here, it's better to just stop talking then it is to provide information that is wrong or harmful to people listening in.

Welcome to HN, where people vomit their assumptions like it's fact and get to the top of the comments section.

When is bing the right choice and google the right choice? I figure with their market shares that it would be pretty normalized. Just curious why there's a big difference between the two search engines in terms of users.

I run lots of PPC for lots of clients, and Bing is very relevant. Their UI has been painful, and the quantity of their search traffic varies wildly compared to Google, but it is also much cheaper.

Bing traffic by and large tends to be older, more affluent, and less tech literate... people who don't tend to change their default search engine. For many types of businesses, this is ideal. Also we have had good results in tech B2B marketing with Bing. My theory is that most MS sysadmins don't want to run chrome on their servers but surf from their boxes and get lazy. Also porn.

The big story with Bing is its tight integration with Windows, XBox, Cortana, etc. Their research direction per Stefan Weitz has been to focus on making natural language search really work. Less effort has been invested in trying to keep up with Google and more has been trying to create a different search experience.

When Cortana really hits the main stage this summer/fall, we'll be seeing the manifestation of Bing at its fullest, and if they really get the Neural Networks nailed they could pull off a big shift in how people search, and also how people advertise...

http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/04/30/cortana-...

This coincides with my theory explaining why bing is bigger in the US and not Europe. European regulators forced microsoft to make it easy to switch search engines/browsers, and users when given the choice tend to choose google. That means bing is successful due to being a microsoft product forced upon its users.

Good to see some clarification. I can tell it means a lot to you since you've become aggressive and belittling. Don't be aggressive and belittling.

Bing has 20% market search share under its own name, plus 13% under the Yahoo brand. That's 33%.

That's hard for me to believe; where do those figures come from? No site I currently work on gets anything close to that much traffic from Bing and Yahoo compared to Google. Anecdotes vs. data and all that, but I'm talking about a few different sites on completely different subjects here. We see quite consistent traffic levels from different search engines if you compensate for active advertising campaigns and similar factors.

Google's advertising revenue is 18 times Microsoft's.

Is that specifically for adds on search engine results pages, or do the figures also take into account other advertising channels?

probably from here: http://searchengineland.com/bing-reaches-20-percent-search-m...

I concur. Our analytics are fairly consistent with a lot of sources when it comes to browser usage, etc. but we've never seen numbers for Bing + Yahoo anywhere near even 10%.

The Google percentage seems accurate, but there are other sources to consider.

Whenever someone types "facebook" in IE's omnibar [assuming IE has an omnibar], it counts as a "Bing search".

Not to anyone responsible for things like allocating advertising budgets for search engines, I suspect...

But that's true for Chrome/Google too.. if anything, since Chome is more popular than IE, Google probably sees more of these types of searches than Bing does.

Bing's under Qi Lu. I guess the main reason is that a search engine by itself can not improve its market share. You'll need more channels to increase the traffic. By giving more power to Lu, Bing can leverage other channels too like desktop search, enterprise search, etc. to increase brand awareness and traffic.

Google is not just a search engine by itself. Most of everything else that Google does also aim to protect and increase search traffic.

We buy Bing ads and they covert better than Google. Though there's far fewer referrals.