News of Microsoft Bing overtaking Yahoo greatly exaggerated
By Mike Ferro
Recently, news spread all over the Internet indicating that Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, overtook Yahoo as the number two search engine after Google. However, according to several research firms, the earlier reports indicating Bing’s victory may have been premature.
I talked about Bing (codename Kumo) not that long ago, indicating that this latest investment in R&D was to craft a potential Google-killer. However, Microsoft has to overtake Yahoo first, which holds a solid number two spot after Google in the search engine wars.
Bing was recently released by Microsoft last week after a long period of internal testing. Many sites around the Web proclaimed Bing as a success and were showering it with praises after StatCounter reported traffic numbers for last week.
According to Dailytech, Statcounter’s report revealed that Bing took 16.28 percent of the U.S. search traffic for last week, while Yahoo took 10.22 percent in the U.S. The estimated worldwide total for Bing was at 5.62 percent, compared to 5.13 percent for Yahoo.
The numbers looked phenomenal for Bing considering the fact Microsoft’s previous Live search engine was placing consistently behind Yahoo’s search engine. However, new reports indicate that StatCounter’s metrics could be wrong as several research firms have come forward to dispute these claims.
Market research firms such as Comscore, Nielsen and Hitwise reported that Yahoo was consistently doing three times the traffic as Bing for last week. Apparently CNET is also disputing these claims indicating that StatCounter’s data does not mesh with internal company data.
With so many sources refuting StatCounter’s report it seems more than likely that the original reports are in fact inaccurate. A slight surge in Bing traffic is expected considering its recent launch, but it would not create enough waves to surpass Yahoo at this point. If Bing is capable of steadily building up its user base it may have a shot at over taking Yahoo, but until then it will be a long and slow process.
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June 8th, 2009
Why is there so much emotion (positive and negative) when a news story focuses on Microsoft? Let’s stick with the facts and how they might or might not impact us. In what ways is Bing better or worse than Google or Yahoo? How will (or should) Bing’s introduction affect marketers? Here are my newest thoughts on Bing, Yahoo!, and Google.
June 9th, 2009
Bing doesn’t even show up as a search engine in my Google Analytics for my site. Of course, this does require for Google to add code to GA for this to happen ;=} However, if they want to show how hard it is for any search engine to make a dent in Google hold on the market they should add it to GA quickly.
I don’t know how MS will make a dent as long as they are splitting their efforts between MSN search, Live search and Bing.
June 11th, 2009
It’s pretty hard to draw conclusions on anything the first week it’s out. Yeah, Bing is an obvious loser and Microsoft has blown it again.
Seriously, it’s stuff like this that makes it difficult to consider bloggers journalists.