Despite having been launched only one month ago, Microsoft’s new Bing search engine is proving to be a popular one. It is already the 13th most visited site on the internet.
Bing saw nearly 50 million visitors in its first month, trumping many of the big-name websites including Digg and Twitter. The numbers were recently released by Compete, a US-based research firm. The visitor numbers reflect US visits, not worldwide.
Figures from Hitwise show similar successes on Bing’s part. At the beginning of June, Bing had a 4.3 percent share of US searches, and by the end, this number had risen to 6.71 percent – representing a 25 percent gain in popularity.
Bing was released in May by Microsoft to replace its Live Search. It was originally code-named Kumo. Though it still has a lot of work to do to catch up to Google, it’s getting closer in strides, and many say that it beats Google on important aspects.
It differs from Google by crawling review sites like Yelp.com and CitySearch, and then summarizing the results and displaying a scorecard for each. In this sense, it can be more convenient than Google for those looking up travel and restaurant services.
However, despite its gains, Business Week reports that Bing is not really gaining on Google. According to BW, the gains are not nearly as big as the buzz might indicate. Bing has increased Microsoft’s search market share only to a minimal degree, the business magazine explains, and has not really shifted Google’s position at all.
The buzz stems back to research done by StatCounter, which showed Bing taking half a percentage more of US searches in June, and Google dropping in popularity by just as much. Half a percent, explains BW, is really nothing to write home about. Month-to-month comparisons are not really representative of a bigger picture.
BW also reported that Google may have even seen gains as a result of Bing’s arrival. Research company Compete theorized a few weeks back that while many are trying out Bing, they are not abandoning their search engine loyalties to prolific Google.
What we have to learn from all these competing theorizations and guestimations are that it’s far too early to call the Microsoft vs. Google race. While Microsoft has released Bing to compete in the search engine market, Google has just announced plans for a new operating system to compete with Windows. Both companies are trying to specialize in what the other has already perfected.
Bing has a lot of work to do to catch up with Google, but as a young search engine of only a few months, perhaps we need to give it time to grow before we compare it to monolithic Google.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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