Last week Freshegg had a #BingFriday. On this day they specifically looked at Bing and they specifically asked people to use Bing. I thought that was a very nice and smart idea. Bing can use the attention with all the talk about Google.
We already saw the questions they asked Bing’s director Stefan Weitz yesterday. One of the other things they posted was this infographic about Bing. A little bit of Bing, in numbers. (more…)
Last week Freshegg decided to provide us with some attention for Bing. They posted about Bing, made infographics and did a lot more. The idea was to “encourage people to break the Google habit and use Bing on Fridays instead.”: BingFriday.
A very nice initiative from Freshegg and much needed in these days when most of the talk is about Google (yes, we are guilty of that too). One thing Freshegg did was do a Q&A with Bing’s Stefan Weitz. (more…)
I have done a couple of these search engine market share analysis pieces on my blog over the years, and for much of that time Google has ruled the roost. The likes of Yahoo and Wolfram Alpha (who????) have all offered much and delivered little and in recent times Bing has made some serious noises but struggled to gain much traction at Google’s expense – although recent news suggested Bing had made significant inroads in terms of the US marketplace
When I ran a similar piece of analysis around 9 months back, Google had around 90% market share, a figure it has had for the best part of three of four years now – and a trend commonplace pretty much around Western Europe – and North America to be honest. Whilst Yahoo used to be the deputy for much of that time, Bing has made some significant strides and over recent years has become a significant threat to the Yahoo market share and now accounts for a higher proportion of searches than Yahoo according to a number of recent Hitwise reports. (more…)
Bing and Google will probably never be best friends. The two biggest ‘official’ search engines got into a fight several months ago when Bing allegedly copied Google’s search results. Ever since the tension between the two has been there. Google will probably remain the biggest for a while, but Bing is closing in on Google according to the latest numbers.
It is not those numbers however but a Bing “Easter Egg” which got the most attention this weekend. A Googler noted that Bing had been hiding some interesting results which seemed to be a ‘pinch’ towards Google on specific searches.
Software engineer Andy Arnt found two results which seemed to have a negative message to Google inside the search results. A search for “more evil than satan himself” returned the results “10^100“, while “Hiybbprqag” gave back “hiybbprqag (orcish) = whiner (common)“. (more…)
I’ve reported on Bing Streetside before. In my view it could potentially even be a better product than Google’s Streetview. But like many of Bing’s products (and many other products too by the way) Streetside was only ‘really’ available in the US. Now it seems as if Microsoft finally found their way into Europe.
After the transition between Yahoo and Bing (also listen to our radioshow with Microsoft’s Cedric Chambaz about that) Bing now is starting to make Streetside available in parts of the United Kingdom, Germany and France. (more…)
There has been a lot of discussion about Bing lately. According to some experts Microsoft’s search engine was driving on a dead end street. They were going nowhere and Microsoft should consider selling Bing. But things might not be that bad after all.
Research from Experian Hitwise shows that Bing is not only growing, it is beating Google when it comes to success rates. Where on Google 68% off searches are ‘successful’, on Bing and Yahoo that number was a lot higher: 80 percent of searches. (more…)
Over two years ago Microsoft and Yahoo! signed a deal to become partners instead of competitors in their shared domain of search. They formed the new Search Alliance. One part of the deal was that Microsoft’s Bing would become the search engine behind Yahoo!. The transition started in August 2010 in USA and Canada, but Europe has been waiting patiently in anticipation. Until today! Yahoo! is officially starting the transition merging their organic results with Microsoft (Bing) for the European properties including; UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. (more…)
After Microsoft published its latest quarterly earnings last month, their Bing search engine received a lot of criticism. Microsoft’s earning figures showed that the division which is responsible for Bing was making a loss of $2.6 billion in the last fiscal year.
That’s quite a big loss to make, but that’s nothing new to Microsoft. They have a history of launching business models at a loss in order to grab a large chunk of market share (Xbox for example). (more…)
This is a guestpost by Jeroen Smeekens from E-Difference (original post in Dutch). Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily State of Search.
Ads between the organic search results. Have they gone mad at Microsoft? Like Google, Bing runs several different tests each day, showing different types of search engine result pages to its users. Some tests only show tiny changes, and regular users probably won’t even notice them. Others tend to be a lot bigger. But Bing just did the unthinkable and just stuffed its ads between its organic results. Shaking my head Bing, shaking… my… head! (more…)
The battle for search engine supremacy appears to be hotting up. No sooner have we seen the launch of Google+ than Bing announce a potentially huge deal with Baidu to power the English based searches. With the current Search Alliance running behind schedule (in the UK at least), Google must have been rubbing their hands at the thought of taking a further lead on their rivals however it appears that we are potentially seeing the sting in the tail, with Bing announcing a number of deals in recent months which could see them take a considerable step forward.
Its no secret that Google see Facebook as as big a competitor as they do Bing. Facebook certainly have the potential, they certainly have the audience – at the moment they dont have the where with all. Likewise, Bing have the where with all, unfortunately we often fail to see the innovation and speed of thought of Google. Whether this is simply down to culture is open to debate – certainly Google still have much of the dotcom speed of movement to them which Microsoft/Bing don’t however I can’t help thinking Bing are quietly working behind the scenese and we may just may get to the point where they actually have something special. (more…)
This post is part of our coverage of SMX Advanced London 2011. It is a panel discussing the differences between Google and Bing and how or if we should be optimizing for these differently.
In this post we will describe the talks from Gill Reich, VP of Product Management, at Answers.com and Daniel Ruby, Research Director at Chitika. They took an in depth look at the differences between the search engines.
Firstly some basic demographics:
- The biggest difference between the browsers: 87% of Bing users come from IE vs 47% of Google users from IE
- Users of Bing predominately come from the US - 83% vs just under 50% for Google
- Top cities are all US for Bing vs Google where only NYC is the only American city in its top 10 traffic-generating cities.
Yahoo! and Bing are potentially monetising better than Google and seeing significant growth. This double combination is enough to warrant a second look. Users of Bing are generally less tech savvy therefore generate a greater value per impression, this is worth taking into account.
There are varying views on how well/poorly Bing/Yahoo! will do over thecoming months. Some (Mashable apparently) say that at this rate, Bing could potentially surpass Google within the next year.
Sounds more than a little optimistic to me. Others (Henry Blodget) suggest that the traffic acquisition costs are more than three times their revenue as they try to hit scale.
Bing is buying their traffic at the moment, hoping this will pay off in the long run. Whether it will or not remains to be seen.
Take the MSN homepage as an example– not only is there a search box that points to Bing but it also includes footer links and sidebar links that point to search results on Bing.
Looking at upstream traffic to Bing – 21% comes from MSN whereas Google has a wider variety of sources including 17% Facebook followed by YouTube etc.
Bing SERPs are clearly centred around their own properties – e.g. above the fold predominately centred around links back to MSN pages. Google is much more open, it powers the entire web. E.g. Adsense = a large chunk of pages on web are advertising Google and monetising large amount of the web.
Bing is focusing on being a portal. Google a platform.
How Gill came to Understand Search Engines’ Importance
Search engines were previously always used to help you find websites. Now search engines, particularly Google, is how you find information. Often you barely even know you are on another site. This makes it very difficult for webmasters.
People no longer think of search engines as a way to find a website with an answer, they see it as a direct means to an end.
Bing has got significantly better but Google’s technology is still in a league of its own. This sets it apart.
Daniel Ruby, Research Director at Chitika.
Volume
Yahoo/Bing has become the first volume related competitor to Google in years. Based on traffic generated by search engines – even though Bing serves much more as a portal, it does still drive traffic. 15-18% for Chitika.
Value per impression
Both Yahoo! and Bing users are more likely to click on an ad, so they’re worth more as monetisation tool.
By and large, it’s similar to Google – content, links etc.
1. Bing does not like forums, 90% of forum results show up further down Bing results than Google results.
Many forum results that Google positions on the front page don’t appear in Bing’s top 100.
2. Bing does not like content farms
Even post-Panda, Bing tends to rank low quality content sites lower than Google positions.
3. Bing is significantly worse than Google at broad matching keywords such as 401k – Retirement Plan
Verbatim keyword matching is much more important for Bing traffic. Be more verbatim in your keyword strategy for Bing, don’t expect it to understand synonyms and context as well as Google does.
4. URL results are ineffective
If a user searches for a url, Google will assume that the user is looking for information on the url and will also show results with that URL as keyword
5. Bing is more likely to show related searches, sites that are similar to that original searched-on url
6. Phone number searches
Bing provides fewer results, assumes that if you don’t find the number you are looking for within the first couple of pages – there is no point in showing more ‘spammy’ types of results.
7. Ambiguous searches
If a search has multiple possible meanings, Bing will err of the side of local results whereas Google is more likely to err on the side of brand.
Bing more likely to censor ‘questionable’ content such as watching copyrighted tv shows online, finding free essays, cheats etc. It also seems to struggle with parsing PDF files compared with Google.
- The number one long-tail results on Google will appear on Bing’s first page 67% of the time, Bing/Google have a lot of fractured results crossover.
- So do I need to focus on Bing? Yes, according to Daniel. And yes again.
- The traffic is growing and it is valuable.
Someone who could be a competitor is Yandex. The session at SMX ended with a few words from Andy Atkins-Kruger on his experience of Yandex having visited Moscow and met its founder Ilya Segalovich recently.
Yandex is focusing increasingly on MLR (Machine-Learned Ranking), which some are suggesting is also the preferred route for Bing. Google uses this to a much lesser degree, favouring it only for the Adwords algorithms. This could lead to increased differences further down the line.
All in all, Bing is growing and isn’t about to go away. It can provide valuable new visitors that may not reach your site if you focus all of your efforts solely on Google. It’s worth taking the time to consider it.
(Thanks to Razorfish for the image!)
More posts about Bing vs Google that might interest you:
- Google or Bing: The Royal Wedding
- Searches on Bing More Successful than on Google
- The Bing and the Beautiful
- Bing keeps denying copying Google and accuses Google of clickfraud
- Osama Bin Laden killed: how did Google and Bing respond?
- Why Bing will be trailing on Google and why it should hook up with Apple and Facebook
At State of Search we have decided to take a closer look at the differences between Bing and Google when it comes to current events. Yesterday we explored the differences on reporting the death of Osama Bin Laden and last week we looked at the Royal Wedding. One thing we didn’t really take into account is other services that both Google and Bing explore, like the special YouTube-channel Google had set up.
Microsoft (Bing’s boss so to speak) now releases something around the Royal Wedding using their service Photosynth, of which I am personally a big fan. The service, which also is used in Bing Maps for example, has gathered photo’s from the Royal Wedding and has placed them in a very nice interactive Photosynth set. The images were taken by the Press Association and putten together using Photosynth. OK, it is not search, but it is very nice to see and use. (more…)
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