Bing off to solid start, but not that good
People are searching with Microsoft's Bing, but perhaps not as much as one company thinks.
(Credit: Screenshot by Ina Fried/CNET)Ah, statistics.
Microsoft's new Bing search engine has received positive reviews in its first week on the planet, but did that early buzz translate into traffic? A report from Statcounter picked up by TechCrunch suggested that Bing's debut was successful enough to eclipse Yahoo Search during its first week, but subsequent analysis from Search Engine Land as well as data from CNET's network of sites suggests otherwise.
Statcounter, a Web traffic tracking company, reported that as of Thursday, June 4, Bing accounted for 16.28 percent of the U.S. search market, surpassing Yahoo's 10.22 percent just days after going live on Monday. Worldwide, Bing's advantage was said to be slimmer (5.62 percent to Yahoo's 5.13 percent), but that was enough for Statcounter to proclaim "Bing overtakes Yahoo!"
However, it's not quite that simple. Statcounter's data is "based on aggregate data collected by Statcounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion page views per month collected from across the Statcounter network of more than 3 million Web sites. Stats are updated and made available every 4 hours, however are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 7 days from publication," according to the company.
Therefore, it will be interesting to see if those numbers change next week. Search Engine Land checked in with Comscore, Nielsen, and Hitwise, and found that over the past week in the U.S., Yahoo Search did about three times more traffic than Bing, roughly the same level where it was the week before when Microsoft-branded search consisted of Live Search and MSN Search.
Nielsen figures show that there was indeed a surge in interest among U.S. Web surfers related to Bing on June 1, the first day it went live. But that's not all that surprising given natural curiosity surrounding something new and shiny, and Bing's surge appeared to neatly replace the corresponding drop-off in traffic to Live Search and MSN Search.
CNET data suggests a similar story. For the first four days that Bing was live, the new search engine accounted for 2.2 percent of all session starts across the various CNET sites, including News, Reviews, Download, CNET TV, and CNET Shopper. Yahoo searches accounted for a little more than twice as many session starts, or 4.5 percent. Google, of course, was responsible for the rest. Bing did better than Yahoo on some sites, but worse on others.
Measuring Internet market share is notoriously tricky, and five different companies could very well reach five different conclusions. But even Microsoft has said that its basic goal for Bing over the next year is to pick up 2 percentage points of share, which unless Yahoo goes completely dark will still leave it solidly in third place behind Google and Yahoo.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
(goes to hunt down Microsoft's balance sheets)
How much money do you think YouTube makes? Zero. YouTube costs Google huge amounts of money every year.
How much money do you think Twitter makes? What about Facebook? Google Docs? Hulu? Sony PS3? Zero. Nada. They never made any money.
According to your logic, Google should shut down YouTube and Docs. Facebook and Twitter should quit. Sony should abandon their gaming console business.
Microsoft is doing the right thing by investing in a very profitable product. And they are getting better with every release. Bing works great and is by far the most credible competitor to Google. So they should keep investing in it even if they did not make a single dime yet.
I am very impressed with Bing's results, it works great. I don't think anybody can distinguish between Bing vs Google in a blind test.
FOR $#$@ sake, its just opened and has 2 percent of the market?
Isnt that like 10s of millions already switching?
And thats in, what, 1 or 2 days??
Oops, is that math at work? Is that too difficult to calculate for this article, REALLY?!!
Ok now back to the comment, Google built an industry out of just a search engine. Now imagine if they lost half of that, which they could do with MS live,live mail, Bing, their sync groove, MS zune library and messenger all combined to be mobile where ever you go.
Google has sucked at it, Apple definately has sucked at it.
But MS is the only one that has all the pieces now to put together that "just work".
And MS is the only one a business will trust to have everything combined and not go down for 40 minutes a day, or couple of days, or not having a an entertainment center that really works coherently.
Bing, would just be a feather in MS's cap and a huge shark bite out of Google ( to put them in their cocky place).
I love competition, and everyone should appreciate it. If it demises another company (legally and not with wailing bs cries of "no fair"), so be it. This is business and I'm glad MS is finally getting down to it.
Their latest "front page link"
was from a single anonymous blogger, unable to search "sex" from India.
AHAHAAaaa....
Ok with this desperation, yes apparently Bing is hurting Google!
First you list all these Internet enterprises (YouTube, Hulu, et al) and describe how they're not making a dime of money... then you point to Bing (which is also not turning a profit at this time), and claim it to be "a very profitable product".
So far, Bing hasn't really done much of anything at all, except take market share from MSN and Live (which are also Microsoft properties).
So, do tell... where is this profit that you see?
If you search Cnet, I would expect that Google, Yahoo, Bing all return the same thing.
Bings search box looks like Yahoo!s but they play vid clips in the search results. Not seeing anything compelling there.
When searching for a product, why would I not go to Amazon or ebay or one of the other online stores which actually sells that product?
After all, if I'm going to be looking, I'd like to know what the price is, what deals I can get, what the reviews are on that product. In other words, all the information I can get from the online stores.
Google does a great job at finding sites specializing in comparing products. That's what I need a search engine to do, find me sites with differing views.
Given that, and the fact the bulk of the world still uses internet explorer in various incarnations, i have to admit i'm somewhat surprised it didn't have a bigger market share than 10%
However, having used bing, I do have to admit is is a good search engine, with some neat features and pretty interface. It does beat Google and yahoo in some areas and not in others. All round it is a decent release. needs improvement but there is always room for improvement (even google and yahoo can improve heh)
ill still stick with google though becuase its central to my online life because i use gMail, gDocs, gCal, gReader etc etc
Stop using IE 6. Make the WWW a better place.
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Oh, yes. Let's watch Google saying "our basic goal for Chrome over the next year is to pick up 2 percentage points of share".
And that will put Chrome solidly in third place?
Wahahahaha.
Search for Yahoo is maybe 50% of their business.
If the other engines lose 2% of their share, maybe that's indicative of a new trend. If they lose in search, they're pretty much gone.
Of course, that's assuming Bing can actually get 2% more share and/or win the battle.
It simply REFUSES to find my ANYTHING about my wife, who's a well known film maker here in France.
I google her name, or one of her films, and she's all over the place.
With Bing, nada thing.
It has better pics than Bing, and you get Google results.
http://www.stunningsearch.com/
I'm looking into this aspect of search performance. I would really like to know an example of one or two of these film titles, that return Google results, but not Bing (and others). I'm trying to understand why this can be the case.
Thanks for sharing.
I don't hate Microsoft. But they so dropped the 'exploit the Internet' ball and have been looking for it ever since. Their fumbling attempts to be relevant in a medium they tried to monopolize are pretty hysterical. I saw their commercial yesterday. It was virtually unwatchable. They tried to be hip and trendy but give you so many fast scene cuts, they end up inducing seizures in epileptics. If their advertising agency stops mainlining speedballs, they may come up with something presentable. But from the current 80 million dollar campaign commercial, I got nothing. Actually I got less than nothing.
And that pretty much describes what I got from Bing as well. If I want to find something, I use Google. If I want a laugh, I use Bing. But I won't ever take it seriously.
People only change when something breaks, or is considerably better to bother changing.
Neither is the case, so I can't see Bing changing anything.
The only reason I've tried Bing searches in the past week is;
1)To laugh at how easy they've made it for kids to watch porn.
2)To see if the results were better than or equal to Google (neither was the case).
It's not any harder to watch porn using any other search engine
[Search Box] Type sexual term here [Search Box]
Porn will come up
- by cloudskye June 6, 2009 7:57 AM PDT
- I got a good laugh from the poster that said You Tube, Facebook, Hulu, etc... make no money. All of these companies provide awesome free services AND make tons of freaking money off of advertising!! I'm talking TONS on money off of Advertising... silly rabbit.
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- by UrgentMatter June 6, 2009 9:47 AM PDT
- http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=youtube+to+loose+$470&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=
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- by massfat June 7, 2009 10:17 AM PDT
- Those companies you mention are all losing money (but I'm not sure about Hulu, they MIGHT be making money, but if so, it's not much).
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (70 Comments)YouTube does not currently make any money and instead is loosing it. I would imagine Hulu is similar. Twitter and Facebook may have large audiences but they still have no great way of turning that into cash.
YouTube and Facebook lose a lot of money per year. YouTube has advertising potential, but it's not nearly enough to get them into the black. As for FaceBook, they've only just started to advertise, and it's nowhere near making profit.
Twitter has currently no means of making profit.
If you are an investor, then I suggest you contact some of these companies personally to make sure you are getting the right information. Or you can ask for the 10 year reports from Google to check up on YouTube.