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“Bing is bigger than you think,” Microsoft boasts, at 33% of US searches
- Thaxll 9y agoYahoo is only used in the US, in Europe it's all about Google.
- juice_bus 9y agoA few days (?) ago they also boasted that 70% of users are "ok" with their telemetry, or is it 30% haven't figured out how to turn it off? Or in this case, haven't bothered to switch to Google on IE/Edge?
- thisacctforreal 9y agothis is the source I could find https://m.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/09/microsofts_privacy_enhancements/ https://m.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/09/microsofts_privacy_en...
- humanrebar 9y agoWhy are countries like Paraguay, Uruguay, Russia, and Panama not on their maps?
- neilalexander 9y agoOnly bigger than you think because of the massive population of people who don't know how to change their web browser search provider, or their web browser altogether.
- zyang 9y agoIs Siri search counted in the stats?
- frandroid 9y agoMost probably... They'll use anything they can to boost their market share numbers.
- freehunter 9y agoIs it really as nefarious as you make it seem? Is Google allowed to count the number of browser that have Google search built in? Are they allowed to count Android phones where Google search is the default? Why would Bing not be able to count searches done on there just because they're done via Siri?
- frandroid 9y agoI'm not saying it's nefarious, I'm just saying they're desperate to show as large a market share as they can claim to. I used to work at Microsoft on MSN and helping Bing boost its numbers by all means necessary was job #1 by the time I left. Some of the means were not quite kosher.
- random023987 9y agoAnd how many of those searches are initiated by MS spyware that watches what you type in the start menu? (If you have a Windows computer with default privacy settings, press the Start key; type a few letters. You just "searched" Bing)
- cma 9y agoYeah, it isn't a coincidence that windows 10 was the first "free" major OS upgrade from MS and then we see numbers like this.
- nolok 9y agoWeren't Windows 7 and 8 already having "web search" enabled for the start menu ? I'm sure it was there, but not if that was default behavior or if it needed to be enabled. Not a Windows 10 introduction, although that one tends to find any excuse it can to call home.
- lucb1e 9y agoMaybe Windows 8? Because definitely not 7. I think it offered you to "search the internet" (aka bing), but it didn't do that by itself, you had to click that option.
- adventured 9y agoMicrosoft doesn't yield enough sales or profit from Bing for such a thing to matter at all, versus the profit given up from the free upgrade on their single most profitable product. Bing is a financial joke compared to Windows and always will be. The free upgrade was to get people off of 7 and 8. Windows 7 was an aging product that people were reluctant to give up, and Windows 8 was a disaster that was accelerating the erosion of Windows and doing damage to a brand worth tens of billions of dollars. Windows 8 was acting as a product generation blockade, most 7 users didn't want to touch it, and people who bought it had a poor experience. Bing had nothing to do with the free upgrade at all.
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- theonemind 9y agoI like the bing video search and image search. I normally get much better results with google for text searches. Does anyone find bing the best engine for anything besides video and image search?
- cosmie 9y agoProbably not what you meant, but it's definitely the best engine for B2B PPC advertising. It's a veritable goldmine for B2B marketing thanks to corporate policies forcing IE/Edge and leaving Bing as the default, combined with most advertisers focusing on Google instead.
- hashhar 9y agoI've had good luck with academic articles too. And yes, video and image search both give better results too and present them in a nicer manner with better tools too.
- teh_klev 9y agoI have to say that I prefer Bing's image search over Google's offering once I've run out of DuckDuckGo results.
- lucb1e 9y agoI use: - Bing Maps for aerial imagery, or business info when I'm in a mood to go the extra mile to avoid Google. Their map is super smooth and fast. - OpenStreetMap.org for general lookups, routing, etc. - Google Maps for street view and, when not on OSM, business information ("where's the nearest McDonald's"). Slow, bloated, but annoyingly complete because market share. I also have backgrounds from Bing because they're pretty and refresh daily. I haven't looked at Bing Images in a while, that's a good one. Image search, as well as video search (Youtube), is still a Google search for me. From a first glance, it looks pretty similar except for the preview thumbnails below an enlarged image; that's nice.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- seanalltogether 9y agoIE and Edge seem to make up about 10% of market share, while the rest goes to chrome, safari and firefox, which all default to google and yahoo respectively. I'm surprised that so many people would be changing their default search engine to make bing that popular.
- paulryanrogers 9y agoBing Rewards pays people to search in the form of Amazon and other gift cards
- Brendinooo 9y agoYeah, a cursory search of my inbox says that Bing Rewards has paid me about $165 in Amazon cards since 2012, and I've got another $20 or so in credit waiting to be redeemed. In a world of "good enough", getting the occasional payout is incentive enough to switch from Google, especially when Firefox makes it so easy to switch engines for a query if the first search doesn't work out.
- semperdark 9y agoThe 33% counts Yahoo, which is powered by Bing.
- cosmie 9y agoYahoo search is basically a white-labeled version of Bing, and has been since 2009[1]. And Siri also uses Bing by default[2]. [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8174763.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8174763.stm [2] http://searchengineland.com/apple-makes-bing-the-default-search-engine-for-siri-162736 http://searchengineland.com/apple-makes-bing-the-default-sea...
- Houshalter 9y agoIt's included in Windows search.
- dumbfounder 9y agoThere are 3 types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. The short answer is that they probably aren't. There are a million ways Bing could slice this data to make them appear to have more market share than they have. I imagine Google has a completely different take on Bing's market share, it will be interesting to see if they refute the number.
- davidgerard 9y agoI've consistently seen searches coming from Google at >95% of search hits on all my blogs. Where are these invisible Bing searchers?
- discreditable 9y agoProbably not in your demographic.
- avs733 9y agothey aren't using Bing to search for your blog, they (i.e., my mother) are using Bing to search for Google.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pmoriarty 9y agoMy mom has a Windows laptop which she uses without even really understanding what a web browser is, or what a search engine is. She uses Bing because that's what the Windows search bar defaults to and because the default web browser on Windows by default opens with MSN as its home page, and she doesn't understand she has a choice in any of this, and probably wouldn't bother to change anything even if she did understand and knew how to change it. I strongly suspect that many Bing users are similarly borderline computer-illiterate, and just use Bing because it's the default. The same probably goes for many Google users, a lot of whom were probably tricked by some software they installed that had a tiny checkmark and small print telling them it was going to install Chrome and make Google their home page.
- boto3 9y agoI think the demographics that just use the default search engine are probably most desirable for the advertising publisher as they are more likely to click on ads.
- dumbfounder 9y agoAdvertisers aren't looking for the most likely to click, they are looking for the most likely to convert. Clicks cost money so they only want to pay for people that are highly targeted. This is why search advertising is so powerful, it is about matching the intent of the user (their search terms) to products and services, and getting them at the right time (when they are open to new paths).
- visarga 9y agoSearch ads are powerful for targeting users, but branding requires FB kind of ads.
- whipoodle 9y agoYeah, a huge portion of the traffic to a search engine is always going to come from default users. I don't think that changes this much, or makes it misleading or anything.
- En_gr_Student 9y agoBefore google they were running higher than 33%. They fell down flat on their faces because of the union of greed, technical illiteracy, and market illiteracy among managers/leaders.
- freehunter 9y agoWait, before Google search existed Bing was doing better with search results? I don't think Bing existed back then. Even MSN search didn't exist back then.
- sharemywin 9y agoGoogle predates Bing by 11 years. As for Microsoft they got slapped down by the government. The same thing google is starting to run into now.
- laxatives 9y agoProbably a large part of that is because they are much more permissive to bots/crawling than Google searches.
- junkculture 9y agoI switched to ddg and know lots of others who did too. DDG uses Bing.
- orng 9y agoSearch is such an integral part of how we use the internet today and a vast improvement of the link sites and books from 20 years ago. Competition in this space has never been more important, in particular in light of recent news of censorship from google and various big companies. Although I personally use DDG I applaud anyone that tries to compete with google and I hope that Microsoft won't give up on Bing. Edit: typos
- captainmuon 9y agoBing is my go-to search engine when I'm in China, and don't have access to a VPN. Most of the time, it gets the job done just as good as Google. Sometimes the results are even a bit better, but sometimes much worse, with the results not relating to the thing I'm searching for at all. It's hard to describe and I don't have an example at hand, but it's these failures that make it really frustrating. Sometimes I wish you could report a search as particularly bad, so that some human employees would have a look and manually move the for humans obviously correct result to the top.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Gaussian 9y agoI have seen analytics data for dozens of big sites and I have never seen numbers to even remotely support 33% to Bing. I have little doubt that MSFT is basing this on some form of data, but I'm guessing there is a twist or caveat in here somewhere. EDIT: For content sites and e-commerce sites, I see ratios that are between 18:1 and 50:1 for Google:Bing. Long way off from 33%.
- billmalarky 9y agoNo duckduckgo is bigger than you think. They'll be at a billion queries per month early next year most likely. 1/12 the size of bing may not sound like much, but I believe it's still run by just a few fulltime employees (fair amount of part-timers). Plus DDG isn't burning a billion dollars a year to compete with Google. https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
- xutopia 9y agoHow do they plan to make money?
- naturalgradient 9y agoI understand they are already profitable: http://fortune.com/2015/10/09/duckduckgo-profitable/ http://fortune.com/2015/10/09/duckduckgo-profitable/
- lioeters 9y agoThanks for this link, it's a short article but I hadn't heard about it. I switched my default search engine to DDG about a year ago (occasionally using !g syntax for Google search), and really appreciate their service. I'm glad to hear they've found a profitable model that doesn't need to track users.
- boyce 9y agoIf you want better privacy try !s instead
- lucb1e 9y agoThe important bit of the article is the quote at the end, which I will quote in full: > Most of the money is still made without tracking people by showing you ads based on your keyword, i.e. type in car and get a car ad. These ads are lucrative because people have buying intent. All that tracking is for the rest of the Internet without this search intent, and that's why you're tracked across the Internet with those same ads. They don't link to their source, but a simple search solved that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10346440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10346440 And for good measure, I also ran the search through Google. On Google it's the top hit; on DDG I have to pagedown once. (A random selection of words, without punctuation or apostrophes, quoted to do a literal search.)
- throwaway13337 9y agoHas anyone seen numbers with bing search ads that make this at all likely? I know that my experiments with bing search ads were cheap but so low volume that it wasn't even worth bothering with.
- amelius 9y agoAre there any substantial blogs out there covering the technology behind search engines, including hypotheses about how Google works? (I'm talking about real research, not SEO)
- Haul4ss 9y agoIt is entirely possible Bing's market share is improving because Bing itself has improved.
- xutopia 9y agoI trust nothing Microsoft says. They have a history of fudging numbers and hiring PR firms to publish studies that show them as cheaper or better than they really are.
- harrygeez 9y agoAnd you think Google is any better? I have lost count how many times when I try to install something and Chrome got bundled together without even prompting me. Latest version of CCleaner is a prime example.
- tsycho 9y agoOther commenters have commented on how the data is biased/cherry picked, and Google would have a different take on the market share numbers. However, it might be more to Google's benefit to say nothing and use this as evidence of not having a dominant majority share if there is a monopoly lawsuit against them in the US. In fact, I suspect that losing the Firefox search default might actually be beneficial to Google for the same reason.
- detritus 9y agoHere in Blighty, with a lot of companies still muddling on with the barest handle on web marketing, I've found Bing much more useful than Google for finding companies supplying materials or goods that aren't exactly 'exciting'. A lot of small - medium-sized industry output, for example. Just this last year I've added Bing to my [hardcoded] homepage and found two 'things' that I've been hard-pushed for literally years to find a non-American/German supplier for. It's fashionable and fun to bash Microsoft, but I can't say I'm much-amused by the utter stranglehold Google has on my internet usage otherwise (my fault, I know). Let's give Bing a chance.
- googlryas 9y agoCan you give an example of what you're talking about? Or what those two things are?
- detritus 9y agoOne was steel blades for die-cutting. I'd been on/off looking for a LONG time, with not much from Google, my primary search engine. Thought "Why not?" so tried Bing, and 'like a violin', a couple of relevant entries popped up. Now, full-disclosure - Google had for years offered me options for companies on the continent and across the pond, but given mine was an explanatory investigation, I wanted a local company so that I could pick their brains over the phone and order the bare minimum I needed to get me on my feet. This was about a year ago, so it may well be now that Google has the sites I found indexed too. - ed ...also, Google could previously find mass-industrial options here in Britain, but they were not the sort of companies I could order at my groping-in-the-dark scale from.
- fnordian_slip 9y agoAt the risk of being off-topic: ""Blighty" is a British English slang term for Britain or often specifically England" Just because that might be a thing that other non-native speakers are unfamiliar with (I always thought of my English as pretty decent, and never heard of it). Also I second the request for further information. @topic: I find it hard to believe that Bing actually amounts to much in terms of organic searches, but that might be my filter bubble speaking. I have recently been trying to use more different search engines, but the habit of just googling everything is hard to break. Other than the obvious candidates, can anyone recommend any search engines we are missing because google is so dominant? Someone recently recommended https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ to me, but I haven't used it enough to have an opinion on.
- cyphar 9y agoSome things to note: * The Amazon Echo uses Bing as it's default search engine, which almost certainly explains why the US has so much larger usage than other countries (since Amazon is so big in the US). * Windows' search bar feature searches the internet by default with Bing. As an aside, it's interesting to me how bad the backlash was on Canonical for doing this a few years ago, but it appears most Windows users don't care. * Edge uses Bing by default, and a not-insignificant number of internet users likely don't know (or care) to change their default search engine. Hell, some people probably just Bing "google" and then use Google. I've seen my grandparents do that before. So really these statistics seem to be quite misleading.
- marcosdumay 9y ago> but it appears most Windows users don't care. That's very likely. Probably, most people that care are using Linux or something more niche. That's why Linux distros can not do the same. That is similar to the walled garden situation, where Apple can wall their users, but Microsoft can't.
- thephyber 9y ago> So really these statistics seem to be quite misleading. I would argue it's less that they are misleading and more that people are still learning that there is more than one way to initiate a search. Do most people know that typing in the Windows Start Bar initiates a web search?
- cyphar 9y ago> Do most people know that typing in the Windows Start Bar initiates a web search? I hope so, or otherwise we would have to decide that making local search functionality ping the internet is unethical[1]. I'm only half joking of course, but it's more than a little worrying that there isn't more outrage about this. [1]: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/01/ubuntu-online-search-feature-disabled-16-04 http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/01/ubuntu-online-search-feat...
- rb808 9y agoI use Bing, its nice to support someone that competes with Google to avoid that company getting a complete monopoly. They also give rewards so I get my $5 voucher every few months which is handy.
- hacktothefuture 9y agoThis! I recently decided to try out Bing purely to see if comparing the results of both engines resulted in disparities like I had seen in the past. I was presently surprised to see that Bing results were pretty much on par with Google in my most common type of searches. The rewards program was a nice little bonus on top of it and decided to give them a try. The results are good quality. It isn't as fast as Google but not slow enough to halt my experiment. Mostly, I like the competition idea. If using Bing for a while keeps Google on their toes and helps improve Bing as well, then I think its a win, win, win.
- thanatropism 9y agoUnpopular to admit here (unlike, say, reddit): Bing is useful for pornography, Google is not. Hi, my name is thanatropism and on occasion I look at pornography. Throw eggs at will.
- 0xFFC 9y agoWe all are guilty of that crime ;)
- nickpeterson 9y agoDo you have a preference on egg type, I have quite a few ostrich eggs but no chicken eggs.
- hacktothefuture 9y agoPurely for academic reasons of course, why is Bing better suited for this purpose?
- seanalltogether 9y agobing still lets you control safe search filters the way google used to
- guiomie 9y agoYou get audio and video previews on the thumbnails. It's a great user experience, but in terms of quantity, way less search results than the better porn aggregator out there.
- odessacubbage 9y agogoogle changed their search results so that it is impossible to entirely disable safe search.
- vincengomes 9y agoIt's because Google is better at hiding such results and it's impossible to completely turn off safe search. So Bing by being the major player left is better for such searches.
- unfunco 9y agoWhat percentage of those are people typing "google"?
- thomasthomas 9y agowhat is defined as a search? searching within social networks is most definitely a 'search' but probably not counted. I would estimate almost half my daily searches are on a social network.
- 0xFFC 9y agohuh, Wait to get a load of Microsoft research. Microsoft combined its research branch with its search branch last year if I remember correctly. And Microsoft research is far superior compared to others. Just look how many people with h-index 50+ does work at Microsoft and compare it with Google.
- thephyber 9y agoSo to aggregate assertions in this thread, Bing powers: * Bing.com web searches * Yahoo.com search engine backend * DuckDuckGo.com search engine source * Windows Start Bar results * Default search engine for IE/Edge * Default search engine backend for Firefox * Amazon Echo web searches * Siri web searches * Facebook search bar web searches
- YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y agoI totally understand the reason why Microsoft wants to push Bing, I do. However, unfortunately (for us Finns at least) Bing search results are simply awful, almost incomprehensibly so. I could swear Google offered a better search 15 years ago (not that the situation is fully comparable). Add the total lack of additional features (not too long ago it lacked even a simple calculator, or at least failed to reliably show it) results in what is simply a very poor user experience for any user. My very much tech-illiterate relatives can only articulate to ask why the “search in their new computer” is so bad they always have to manually go to Google after almost any query.
- s3nnyy 9y agoBing doesn't seem to have SSL enabled by default. That's weird.
- StronglyTyped 9y agoThis is because when I go to the start menu and start typing the name of the application I'm looking for, a large percentage of the time the Cortana search process is corrupted and my start menu is not searched, instead, I get an Edge window opened with a Bing search for "Photoshop" I don't trust those numbers at all.
- verall 9y agoI recently learned this is possible to turn off from the settings as something like "search Internet for results". Probably the most annoying feature of windows 10, hit enter quickly enough and its always a bing search because it's too fast for local..
- skc 9y agoBing search results are similar enough to Google's these days (for non technical searches) for this to not be a surprise
- bluedino 9y agoI'm not surprised - you'd be amazed at how many 'regular people' have their browser set to return Bing or Yahoo results
- ecommerceguy 9y agoBing / Yahoo make up 1.6% of our organic serp traffic and ranking is not an issue. add: for the past week, according to ga.
- BackPropagate 9y agoBing is my default search engine. It works fine and about once a month I 'earn' a $5,00 Starbucks card.
- stevenh 9y agoSomeone please explain how to search for exact phrases on Bing like you can with quotation marks on Google. I've seen some claim that quotation marks work the same way on Bing, but it isn't true.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoWhen I am cyberstalking (or want aggregate information about any particular topic) I use Bing. On the other hand, Google makes waaaaay too many assumptions about what I want. When I really want to scour the internet.