Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, has certainly made its presence known. Though its unveiling was mostly overshadowed by Google Wave’s introduction, the new engine has been received quite warmly from many users and pundits. However, after an impressive spike in traffic, Bing seems to be slipping the way of Live.com.
According to StatCounter, Bing overtook Yahoo!, the longstanding second banana to Google, with 15.64 percent of the U.S. search engine market on Thursday, June 4. Yahoo!’s share on this day was 10.32 percent.
However, Bing has since settled underneath Yahoo! with 5.89 percent of the market as of Monday afternoon, compared to 11.02 percent for Yahoo!.
Hitwise posted similar figures for Bing’s performance in the U.K. market. Here, Microsoft’s new baby reached its peak on June 3, when it grabbed 10.8 percent of the U.K. search engine market and was the eighth most visited Web site in the U.K., “ahead of all BBC properties, but one behind MSN UK,” notes Robin Goad, research director of Hitwise U.K.
It has since plateaued to around 3.15 percent as of June 6, which was above Yahoo! UK and Ask UK.
While many have made a big fuss about this early fall for Bing, it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. Early hype can only take a search engine so far.
However, all is not lost for Bing. It did receive some pretty high marks from many users, particularly 55 percent of 1,000 people surveyed by One News Page who said they could envision themselves replacing Google with Bing as their primary search engine.
Also, nearly 6 percent of the search market, at least according to StatCounter (Google boasted 80.86 percent as of Monday afternoon), is nothing to laugh at, especially after a little over a week of public exposure.
Goad notes that “one positive sign is that average visit time has increased to eight and a half minutes. This is half of Google UK’s number but only slightly below Yahoo! UK Search, implying that the people are actually spending time on the site and using it rather than just visiting out of curiosity.”
While Google probably isn’t shaking in their boots at this newcomer’s appearance in the ring, Yahoo! is probably the one who is more at risk of losing some significant market share.
Hitwise also looked at the top 10 industries visited after Bing and Google UK for the week ending June 6. For Bing and Google UK, “Entertainment” was the top industry, taking 13.2 percent of Bing’s downstream traffic and 14.2 percent of Google’s.
“Shopping and Classifieds,” “Computers and Internet,” “Business and Finance” and “Search Engines” rounded out the top five categories for Bing.
Sources:
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/06/08/bing-loses-ground-after-fast-rise
http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-daily-20090508-20090608
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2009/06/initial_bing_stats.html
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