Bing breaks 10 percent barrier
Microsoft has broken a symbolic barrier with Bing now being used for more than 10 percent of U.S. Web searches. But the news was tempered by contest results which suggest the site is more prone to bugs than its rivals.
According to Nielsen’s figures for August, Bing took 10.7 percent of searches, compared with 64.6 percent for Google and 16 percent for Yahoo. However, comparing the figures to July suggests it’s more likely a case of Yahoo losing users (who jumped in roughly equal amounts to Bing and Google) rather than Bing taking customers from Google.
That might not be a bad thing for Microsoft however: with the combined Bing/Yahoo share actually dropping slightly, there’s no extra reason given to regulators to believe the proposed search tie-up would give the firms too much power.
As usual with Nielsen figures, it’s worth remembering the shares are based on the number of queries made, meaning a more efficient search engine might actually lose out slightly because users make fewer queries to get the information they need.
Meanwhile a contest by software testing firm uTest suggests Bing is the most bug-prone search engine. Participants were challenged to find bugs in the major search engines, with prize money distributed based on the quantity and importance of the bugs discovered. The participants came up with 321 different problems in Bing compared with 130 in Google and 70 in Yahoo. To make things worse, 14 percent of the Bing bugs were rated as in need of immediate attention, compared with 8 percent of those for Google.
The results aren’t necessarily that representative, however. For one thing, it’s virtually inevitable that a recently launched site is going to have more bugs than an established rival. For another, the way the competition worked meant participants were much more likely to devote their attention to the search engine which they expected to have the most bugs, rather than to compare them in a controlled test.
It’s also worth noting that, despite the problems, most participants were impressed with the technical side of Bing.
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