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.

Bing off to a good start