Within a week, Bing gets more searches than Yahoo

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine (www.bing.com), launched last week, has already overtaken Yahoo! in the number of ‘global searches’.

Bing.com is positioned as a ‘decision engine’, which aims to serve up results that help users to make better decisions in four key areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.

Visitors able to explore images, videos, shopping, news, maps and travel content from the site. Already, a beta Arabic version is available for Middle Eastern countries; try it.



The launch of Bing followed Microsoft’s failure to acquire Yahoo last year at $40bn. With Bing, Microsoft seems to be realizing it’s search engine ambitions now, even exceeding Yahoo, at a cost that is probably much less.

According to StatCounter, Bing has gained 5.62% of the global search engine market which is a considerable market share that it has grabbed from Google.
In the first week of June, Google’s market share declined to 90.45%, while Yahoo had 5.13% and Bing had the rest.

Of course, any market analyst will tell you this is due to the “novelty effect” and it remains to be seen if Bing will retain and grow its first-time users. For now, the feedback Bing is getting is good. Reviewers say it works fairly well as a general-purpose search engine, outperforming competitors in some areas and improving the usability of mobile Web searching. Search results include a ‘clever bonus’, which is a preview of each page's text that appears when you float the cursor to the right of each result. The advanced search options on Bing are more accessible than Google's, because selecting them doesn't take you away from your current search results.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made a statement that summarizes Microsoft’s new approach to the search engine space. He said that “Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” said
Backed by a $100 million marketing campaign, it seems that the only company who could realistically take on Google, even in a recession, is Microsoft.

In the past, Google was the upstart and ‘lovable brand’ while Microsoft became the evil money-grabbing empire. Google’s total dominance has seen it lose some of that popularity. So, it’s ‘game on’ now between two giants, as consumers take sides in the next battle of search engine supremacy.

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