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These numbers are bogus, as far as I can tell. I help run a popular music forum that gets over a million pageviews every month, and our search referral numbers

These numbers are bogus, as far as I can tell. I help run a popular music forum that gets over a million pageviews every month, and our search referral numbers show Google at 98.7%. The numbers are similar across 10 other domains I own. I challenge anyone to show me a site that gets 30% of their search engine hits from Bing. Seriously, if your Bing stats are even close to 30%, please share with us.

forgotusername 16y ago
That could happen for many other reasons, e.g. your relative ranking in either engine for particular keywords, the types of user that visits each engine, and so on. As ever, statistics published by the likes of Hitwise can only offer a partial view of the truth, and have been shown to be grossly inaccurate in the past.
- DaveMebs 16y ago
  Its certain that these are only estimates, however, Bing has been growing in market share consistently for quite some time now. If memory serves correctly, they have had month over month improvement for at least the last 6 months, if not longer. Bing was around 6% when it "launched." Not sure exactly what Yahoo! was at then, but it didn't sum to 30. Initially, Bing grabbed share primarily from Yahoo! searches, but more recently it looks like more has come from Google (though it hasn't been that significant). Interestingly, Bing even grew in January when it was accused on "copying" results. Point being, while doubting the accuracy of the numbers reported is reasonable, I find it much harder to dismiss a trend.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Sakes 16y ago
One explanation could be that your users are highly technical when compared to the average pc user. I would bet the ground google lost went to new pc buyers that are happy using default apps/settings. These kinds of people probably wouldn't visit your site.
ra 16y ago
My stats show greater than 97% of search traffic is from Google; that's aggregated across a handful of web sites and applications.
citricsquid 16y ago
I'll throw in some numbers too, we're on target for ~200m page views this month (74.8m in first 10 days of April) (2 sites, 60/40 traffic split) and we have: site a - 66% search engine traffic. google is 98.5%, other is 1% and bing is 0.5% site b - 76% search engine traffic. google is 97%, bing is 2% and other is 1% Around 10% of our traffic is Internet Explorer. We're using google analytics (maybe they're fudging numbers? Seems v. unlikely) and search is a large part of where we get our traffic. Our experience matches yours very accurately in a completely different sector. These are gaming sites btw.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  Around 10% of our traffic is Internet Explorer This should already tell you that your traffic is not representative.
  - moxiemk1 16y ago
    It may not be, though. We have good reason to believe that most IE6 users are using IE6 because it is the browser installed by IT on locked-down work computers. It doesn't seem unreasonable (to me) that a significant portion, though probably not a majority, of users of other versions of IE are similarly in work environments. The point being, maybe IE users don't actually make up more than 10% of traffic. Maybe the situations in which people use IE are such that they use the web less. He did say 10% of traffic, not 10% of unique users. Not that I have evidence to back this up; however, the kind of analysis that gets done on market share in computing doesn't seem to be able to accurately reflect how much something is actually used.
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      The point being, maybe IE users don't actually make up more than 10% of traffic. Maybe the situations in which people use IE are such that they use the web less. He did say 10% of traffic, not 10% of unique users. I still don't believe this. I don't think that IE users are equal to or less than 10% of web traffic in the US or the world. That would be pretty huge if it was the case. Even a drop below 25% worldwide would be pretty huge news.
andos 16y ago
What about the trends? Is Google losing ground?
seaotter002 16y ago
Last month I have is February unfortunately, but showing just under 400k search engine referrals with about 66% from Google and 16% Bing for a video-centric site.
qeorge 16y ago
I'm not here to defend Hitwise, but your assertion is bogus. Its roughly equivalent to the author of today's HN Funnel Analysis post[1] claiming there's no way 40% of the internet uses IE because his site only sees 4% IE. Maybe Bing just doesn't like your site. I've worked with many properties that ranked top 3 in Yahoo/Bing yet were all but invisible on Google (not banned, just not ranking well), and vice versa. Especially on long tail terms, which forums like yours usually thrive on, its not uncommon to see a big separation. [1] http://blog.effectcheck.com/2011/04/11/hackernews-front-page-funnel-analysis/ http://blog.effectcheck.com/2011/04/11/hackernews-front-page...
patio11 16y ago
To my surprise, for March, Bing is at 15% and Yahoo is at 11% for BCC organic searches. My demographic is older, female-r, and more middle American than most of y'alls are. (Even with that, I cannot remember BingHoo being above 20% in years.)
- rokhayakebe 16y ago
  Yes, I think it depends on your target audience.
- enjo 16y ago
  We're at 26% in the business review space...
- nostrademons 16y ago
  When did it jump up? Do you know of anything they did that'd make them suddenly more popular?
  - prawn 16y ago
    Could it be something to do with IE9 or new OS installs leading people to give Bing a shot?
  - patio11 16y ago
    You guys should hire me for SEO consulting if you can't answer this one in-house. ;) Jokes aside: BingHoo share, followed by comparison to Google (which makes it harder to see). http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/nostra-answer-2.png http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/nostra-an... http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/nostra-answer-1.png http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/nostra-an... I'm not specifically aware of anything material which would have materially affected BCC's performance on BingHoo in the last 3 months, and the big candidate for affecting performance at Google (Panda or whatever you guys call content farming internally) largely seems to have missed me. When you compare year-to-year to back out the seasonality, though, both Yahoo and Bing show strong growth in my Jan/Feb/March numbers and Google growth is much more muted. Feel free to backchannel me if you want the spreadsheet. For reasons known only to the Excel gods, the X axis considers the last data point (March) to be in February.
crikli 16y ago
I have access to a couple of sites that get > 1 million visits a month...one hospital system site and one suite of home decor magazine sites. Fairly 'normal' user demographics. For both sites, Bing and Yahoo are at around 8% each. Google's at 80%. Looked at about 30 other sites we run (everything from personal injury attorneys to truck scales to HVAC companies to bariatric surgeons)...traffic from Bing is no higher than 9% and no lower than 3%.
jnorthrop 16y ago
I run a website for an association. Our visitors are solidly corporate types (with 10% still using IE6). For March, 90% of our search traffic came from Google.
GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
So first of all, the demographics may be at play here. Second of all, if yahoo is "powered by bing" that basically means that bing in itself did not win anything, they just took an entire existing user base and replaced one engine with another. Its like if secretly all ford engines were replaced with toyota ones, and toyota claims to have gained market share. Its true technically, but on a user level its not users flocking to them, its just the fact of life that happened due to a takeover. Note yahoo allowed paying to get better rankings, so those who used it were already used to shit results.

forgotusername 16y ago

That could happen for many other reasons, e.g. your relative ranking in either engine for particular keywords, the types of user that visits each engine, and so on. As ever, statistics published by the likes of Hitwise can only offer a partial view of the truth, and have been shown to be grossly inaccurate in the past.

DaveMebs 16y ago
Its certain that these are only estimates, however, Bing has been growing in market share consistently for quite some time now. If memory serves correctly, they have had month over month improvement for at least the last 6 months, if not longer. Bing was around 6% when it "launched." Not sure exactly what Yahoo! was at then, but it didn't sum to 30. Initially, Bing grabbed share primarily from Yahoo! searches, but more recently it looks like more has come from Google (though it hasn't been that significant). Interestingly, Bing even grew in January when it was accused on "copying" results. Point being, while doubting the accuracy of the numbers reported is reasonable, I find it much harder to dismiss a trend.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

Sakes 16y ago

One explanation could be that your users are highly technical when compared to the average pc user. I would bet the ground google lost went to new pc buyers that are happy using default apps/settings. These kinds of people probably wouldn't visit your site.

ra 16y ago

My stats show greater than 97% of search traffic is from Google; that's aggregated across a handful of web sites and applications.

citricsquid 16y ago

I'll throw in some numbers too, we're on target for ~200m page views this month (74.8m in first 10 days of April) (2 sites, 60/40 traffic split) and we have: site a - 66% search engine traffic. google is 98.5%, other is 1% and bing is 0.5% site b - 76% search engine traffic. google is 97%, bing is 2% and other is 1% Around 10% of our traffic is Internet Explorer. We're using google analytics (maybe they're fudging numbers? Seems v. unlikely) and search is a large part of where we get our traffic. Our experience matches yours very accurately in a completely different sector. These are gaming sites btw.

kenjackson 16y ago
Around 10% of our traffic is Internet Explorer This should already tell you that your traffic is not representative.
- moxiemk1 16y ago
  It may not be, though. We have good reason to believe that most IE6 users are using IE6 because it is the browser installed by IT on locked-down work computers. It doesn't seem unreasonable (to me) that a significant portion, though probably not a majority, of users of other versions of IE are similarly in work environments. The point being, maybe IE users don't actually make up more than 10% of traffic. Maybe the situations in which people use IE are such that they use the web less. He did say 10% of traffic, not 10% of unique users. Not that I have evidence to back this up; however, the kind of analysis that gets done on market share in computing doesn't seem to be able to accurately reflect how much something is actually used.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    The point being, maybe IE users don't actually make up more than 10% of traffic. Maybe the situations in which people use IE are such that they use the web less. He did say 10% of traffic, not 10% of unique users. I still don't believe this. I don't think that IE users are equal to or less than 10% of web traffic in the US or the world. That would be pretty huge if it was the case. Even a drop below 25% worldwide would be pretty huge news.

andos 16y ago

What about the trends? Is Google losing ground?

seaotter002 16y ago

Last month I have is February unfortunately, but showing just under 400k search engine referrals with about 66% from Google and 16% Bing for a video-centric site.

qeorge 16y ago

I'm not here to defend Hitwise, but your assertion is bogus. Its roughly equivalent to the author of today's HN Funnel Analysis post[1] claiming there's no way 40% of the internet uses IE because his site only sees 4% IE. Maybe Bing just doesn't like your site. I've worked with many properties that ranked top 3 in Yahoo/Bing yet were all but invisible on Google (not banned, just not ranking well), and vice versa. Especially on long tail terms, which forums like yours usually thrive on, its not uncommon to see a big separation. [1] http://blog.effectcheck.com/2011/04/11/hackernews-front-page-funnel-analysis/ http://blog.effectcheck.com/2011/04/11/hackernews-front-page...

patio11 16y ago

To my surprise, for March, Bing is at 15% and Yahoo is at 11% for BCC organic searches. My demographic is older, female-r, and more middle American than most of y'alls are. (Even with that, I cannot remember BingHoo being above 20% in years.)

rokhayakebe 16y ago
Yes, I think it depends on your target audience.
enjo 16y ago
We're at 26% in the business review space...
nostrademons 16y ago
When did it jump up? Do you know of anything they did that'd make them suddenly more popular?
- prawn 16y ago
  Could it be something to do with IE9 or new OS installs leading people to give Bing a shot?
- patio11 16y ago
  You guys should hire me for SEO consulting if you can't answer this one in-house. ;) Jokes aside: BingHoo share, followed by comparison to Google (which makes it harder to see). http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/nostra-answer-2.png http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/nostra-an... http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/nostra-answer-1.png http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/nostra-an... I'm not specifically aware of anything material which would have materially affected BCC's performance on BingHoo in the last 3 months, and the big candidate for affecting performance at Google (Panda or whatever you guys call content farming internally) largely seems to have missed me. When you compare year-to-year to back out the seasonality, though, both Yahoo and Bing show strong growth in my Jan/Feb/March numbers and Google growth is much more muted. Feel free to backchannel me if you want the spreadsheet. For reasons known only to the Excel gods, the X axis considers the last data point (March) to be in February.

crikli 16y ago

I have access to a couple of sites that get > 1 million visits a month...one hospital system site and one suite of home decor magazine sites. Fairly 'normal' user demographics. For both sites, Bing and Yahoo are at around 8% each. Google's at 80%. Looked at about 30 other sites we run (everything from personal injury attorneys to truck scales to HVAC companies to bariatric surgeons)...traffic from Bing is no higher than 9% and no lower than 3%.

jnorthrop 16y ago

I run a website for an association. Our visitors are solidly corporate types (with 10% still using IE6). For March, 90% of our search traffic came from Google.

GrandMasterBirt 16y ago

So first of all, the demographics may be at play here. Second of all, if yahoo is "powered by bing" that basically means that bing in itself did not win anything, they just took an entire existing user base and replaced one engine with another. Its like if secretly all ford engines were replaced with toyota ones, and toyota claims to have gained market share. Its true technically, but on a user level its not users flocking to them, its just the fact of life that happened due to a takeover. Note yahoo allowed paying to get better rankings, so those who used it were already used to shit results.