I haven’t been paying much attention to Bing, Microsoft’s new entrant in the search engine race. After all, taking on Google in search …
It does go Bing
I get to see analytics for quite a few different websites. I’ve noticed that for a lot of sites, Bing seemed to have either caught up to Yahoo or overtaken it. A check of about 70 sites revealed Bing equalled or exceeded Yahoo in terms of traffic sent 48% of the time (according to Google Analytics).
When I had a look at Bing’s search results, they were fast and correlated closely to stable rankings I knew from Google.
By co-incidence, Google just started running a regional one box (map with 3 pack of related sites) on a moderately competitive search term that I monitor. Google has got it utterly wrong, and is displaying a map from a totally different place. On exactly the same search term, Bing is displaying accurate, relevant results.
This is a micoscopic sample, of course. But from my perspective, Bing is off to a much better start than anticipated.
I think the fact that Microsoft is able to force the usage of Bing on popular Microsoft websites such as NineMSN and Microsoft.com helps gives them a head start.
Also, people that were already using live.com as a search engine are now forced to use Bing instead.
Attempting to take on Google in the search engine market is a brave move, and hopefully the extra competition will mean that both search engines improve due to the extra competition.