Bing hits #2 spot, but will it last?
Microsoft’s Bing has overtaken Yahoo to become the second biggest search engine. But the figures are for a single day and may offer little insight into likely long-term trends.
The statistics in question come from StatCounter and only cover traffic from yesterday. StatCounter isn’t one of the firms whose figures get the most attention, though it does appear to have a data sample big enough to be a fairly reliable snapshot.
The figures show that in the United States, Bing is in second spot with 16.28 percent of all searches, ahead of Yahoo on 10.22 percent. Google remains dominant on 71.47 percent.
For worldwide searches, Bing’s only narrowly takes second place, out-performing Yahoo by 5.62 percent to 5.12 percent. Google’s international figure is 87.62 percent. Bing’s weaker performance here is likely due to a combination of Microsoft concentrating its publicity campaign in the U.S. and the way key Bing features such as customizes search categories aren’t available in all countries at the moment.
There are some obvious caveats to Microsoft’s apparent success, the main one being that interested in Bing is likely to be much higher this week given its novelty and publicity. Only time will tell whether new users stick with the site.
The raw figures also look better because Microsoft has brought together all its search options (including both Live and MSN) into a single site. Going on Statcounter’s figures for last month, Microsoft was only slightly behind Yahoo when you combined all its search sites, but the split made it look much weaker at first glance.
It’s also likely that marketing the statistics will be more important than the stats themselves. Microsoft would no doubt love to establish a firm lead over Yahoo, but being a distant number two does not sound that much better than being a distant number three in the big picture.
It’s also worth remembering that advertisers aren’t just interested in how many people use a search engine, but also how responsive they are to ads on it. Microsoft will be hoping Bing’s new features make it easier for advertisers to reach the precise users they are targeting.
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June 6th, 2009
Of course any new search engine will have a peak. Lots of people (especially tech sites) will be hammering it for results to compare against Google. Let’s see where it is in a month.
But sure, by combining all search properties MS could easily become the consistent #2. But unless Google does something incredibly stupid or illegal, there’s little chance of anyone beating them or even getting to half their percentage.