Is Bing everything that we hoped it would be? More importantly, is is catching on with the general end users? In terms of SEO, the answers to these questions can affect us dramatically. Now that the hype is starting to buzz off, we will take a look at how much of a footing Bing has taken in the last few weeks.
The Naysayers
First of all, depending on who you talk to, Bing is doing somewhere between pretty good and awesome. Naysayers will note that while Google and Yahoo still maintain their #1 and #2 spots on the Alexa Rankings, Bing is way down at #16. The misleading factor here is that Microsoft’s Search network is still divided between the domains Bing.com and Live.com while it’s competitors have the majority of their domains under one roof (think mail.google.com as GMail, news.yahoo.com for news). However, #16 is not a low number for any site that has only been around for a month. Only time will tell if Microsoft will end up having all of their related sites converted to the Bing branding.
The Bingers
As of yesterday, Bing announced that they have seen significant increases in several specific areas. While areas of specific interest might not interest your average WebDev or SEO Specialist, bear in mind that “areas of interest” or “making decisions within search” are what Bing is all about. Some of their findings are:
“On Bing Shopping, we’ve seen a nearly a 3x increase in site visits and a 5.42% increase in transactions to Bing cashback. Summer is typically not high season for online shopping, so this has been really nice to see.”
“Traffic to Bing Travel has increased by 90% month over month since launch, highlighting a strong reception to some of the great features designed to help travelers make smarter, more informed decisions…”
“We saw 8 percent growth in unique users to Bing.com in June, which is an important indicator that you are trying Bing and the word is spreading.”
While some people find 8 percent to be hardly worth celebrating, others see it as an important milestone. To me what this shows is that Bing might be on the way to a steady, linear, climb for the top search engine spot. TechCrunch wrote an article last month showing how Bing already might have surpassed Yahoo in usage. However, and article was published yesterday on Complete.com that stated that Bing is still under Yahoo in market share but gaining fast.
The Current Trend
While it is too early to tell whether Bing’s growth will continue to climb, I would like to point out that if there is going to be a takeover in the search market, it will most likely start like this. What we know for sure is that to come up with a search engine to rival Google, you need a lot of capital and resources. What company has more of that than Microsoft? What we also know is that search engine wars in the past have been won very gradually. In the days when Google overtook the search giant that was Yahoo, they rarely climbed more than a percentage point or two a month.
Once again, the following months will give us a lot better idea of Bing’s staying power and how much it will affect the SEO industry.
However, #16 is not a low number for any site that has only been around for a month. because it redirect its Internet explorer to Bing.com that is why it became #16 right away. However my disappointment with this browser is that it discriminate with the content. It put less priority on blogs… which is the bread and butter of google and yahoo
I wonder if it will be like the Google Chrome browser…. getting stuck at a little over 1 %.