Tag: Bing

Bing And Ask Increase Search Share In January

Bing saw the number of U.S. searches on its site increase 5 percent in January from December to 9.37 percent of the search market, according to a new report from Hitwise.

Ask also had a 4 percent increase in the number of searches from December to account for 2.64 percent of the search market.

Google still dominated with 71.49 percent of the search market but saw a month-over-month decline of 1 percent. Yahoo landed in the second position with 14.57 percent of the search market and also had a month-over-month decline of 2 percent.

Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, were up 5 percent between December and January. Searches of eight or more words increased 6 percent.

The same time period showed that shorter search queries, averaging one to four words, were down 1 percent from month to month. Searches of one word consisted of the majority of searches, accounting for 23.67 percent of all queries.

Search

engines remain the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing January with December, automotive, business and finance, entertainment, news and media, shopping, social networking and sports categories showed double digit increases in their share of traffic coming from search engines.

Among the top three search engines, Google sent the most visits to the automotive, health, shopping and travel categories. Bing saw double-digit growth among all four categories, including a 94 percent increase in the health category.

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February 10, 2010
Bing Makes Inroads Against Google, Yahoo In January

A few teasing emails may be on their way from Redmond to Mountain View and Sunnyvale this morning. New comScore statistics shows that Bing managed to increase its share of the search market in January, while Google and Yahoo both lost ground.

Bing’s share hit 11.3 percent in January, up 0.6 percent from its December standing of 10.7 percent, according to comScore. That’s a reasonably significant gain, especially given Bing’s smallish starting point.

What’s more, 0.6 percent is the exact amount of share that Google and Yahoo lost between December and January, so Bing appears to be catching up to its larger rivals (as opposed to just beating up AOL and Ask).

Specifically, Google’s market share decreased from 65.7 percent to 65.4 percent. Yahoo’s share shrunk from 17.3 percent to 17.0 percent.

So again, cue the teasing emails. And maybe even plan for a reordered search hierarchy. If these exact rates of gains and losses persist for another seven months, Bing will pass Yahoo, putting Steve Ballmer’s search engine in second place and perhaps in a position to start making Google sweat a little.

Related Articles:

> Microsoft Exec Talks Bing Success/Profitability

> Bing Now Offering More Finance Information

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February 10, 2010
Search Engines Impact Perception Of Brands
The search engine consumers use to find a brand’s website impacts both their perception of that brand and the decisions they make while on the site, according to new research by Wunderman, ZAAZ, and Compete.

"Search begins with the choice of search engine," said David Sable, vice chairman and COO of Wunderman. "What this means if you are managing a brand is this: you need to know how consumers relate to Bing, Yahoo! or Google and how that reflects on you."

Loyal users of Bing, Yahoo and Google were found to have distinct characteristics that benefit some brands more than others.

The search experience on different search engines offers different results, with some being more relevant to the consumer than others. This contributes to overall customer and brand awareness. If the search results satisfy the needs of the consumer, then the search engine has greater appeal to that potential customer leading to a deeper connection to the brand and the search engine.

"This research demonstrates that marketers have a real choice to make when formulating search strategies," said Shane Atchison, CEO of ZAAZ.

"The search engine acts as a kind of ‘train’ on the Internet. Each train provides a different set of unique results or ‘destinations.’ Consumer preference for a specific train demonstrates a unique demographic and psychographic profile."

The study found two reasons why different brands do better with different search engines:
- It’s About Who You Are: The demographic and psychographic profile of each loyal search engine user is different. Bing users, for example, tend to be mostly from the tip of the adoption curve (innovators and early adopters) where Yahoo! and Google’s passengers tend to be middle majority (see accompanying chart).
- It’s About the Road You Take: Each search engine delivers a different result, whether paid for or earned. In the brands and vertical categories studied (automotive, travel, retail, and wireless), each search engine demonstrated different degrees of consumer engagement ranging from visiting to finally purchasing.
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February 9, 2010
Microsoft Exec Talks Bing Success/Profitability

Here are a couple of simple facts: Microsoft’s online services business lost $466 million during the last financial quarter, and most research firms put Google’s share of the search market at least 45 percentage points above Yahoo’s. Still, Microsoft believes Bing can be competitive and profitable.

Yusuf Mehdi, the senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business, talked to Reuters yesterday, and expressed a mixture of confidence and optimism on several fronts. Much of that stemmed from his faith in a certain not-quite-cemented partnership.

"As soon as we close and implement the Yahoo deal, we have achieved a milestone: for advertisers, we are a credible No. 2," Mehdi said.

Later, Mehdi continued, "There’s no question we intend to make a profit. . . . Clearly there’s a huge return in the search marketplace that can more than make up the investments we’ve put in to this point."

Bing (and perhaps Yahoo) fans should be happy to hear all this. It doesn’t sound like Microsoft’s set its sights unrealistically high (note the "No. 2" comment), and at the same time, the company sees a way to make money off what’s generally been a losing proposition to date.

Now, of course, Microsoft and Yahoo just need to get regulators to approve their deal.

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February 3, 2010
Bing Now Offering More Finance Information

Bing said today it has added new features to make it easier for users to search for and find financial information.

Bing says it has developed a "stock and funds pages" which covers most U.S. stocks and funds.

The Bing Search Blog offers more details. "To see the stocks and funds you are interested in simply enter a ticker in the search box e.g MSFT. Note our ‘Instant Answer’ on top which provides basic data about the firm. If you click on the "Investor Data" tab on the left you go into our finance page."

"The finance page gives you detailed information about key finance metrics of the firm. It also shows an easy to digest summary of the main analyst covering the stock. A personal favorite of mine are the lists on the left, which allow you to easily navigate to similar stocks or other leading stocks in the industry."

Bing says it plans to add new information and functionality to its stocks and found pages in the future.

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January 28, 2010
Bing Gets Localeze To Augment Local Biz Listings

Thanks to a new deal, Bing’s results for local businesses should soon get much better. A report’s indicated that Localeze, which specializes in local search, is going to provide something like 14 million business listings for Bing Local and Bing 411 to use.

Leena Rao wrote earlier today, "As part of the deal, Bing will use Localeze’s premium business content, including more than 500,000 business-verified and managed listings, which have been edited directly by local businesses. In addition to name/address and contact info, Localeze’s listings also include hours of operation, products and services offered, credit cards accepted and more."

That’s pretty useful information. Indeed, it’s the sort of stuff that not all search engines provide (business’s profiles can be incomplete even when they happen to exist), so this development could give Bing a leg up on Yahoo and maybe Google.

Speaking of Google, though, there is one awkward thing about Localeze’s relationship with Bing: as the picture to the right shows, it seems that Localeze picked Mountain View’s search giant to power the search function on its own site.

Microsoft and Localeze might want to do something about that sort of mixed signal.

Related Articles:

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January 27, 2010
Google Still Rules The Global Search Market

The U.S. remains the largest search market worldwide, while Google holds on to a commanding position in the global search market, according to a new study from comScore.

"The global search market continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, with both highly developed and emerging markets contributing to the strong growth worldwide," said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president.

"Search is clearly becoming a more ubiquitous behavior among Internet users that drives navigation not only directly from search engines but also within sites and across networks. If you equate the advancement of search with the ability of humans to cultivate information, then the world is rapidly becoming a more knowledgeable ecosystem."

The total global search market had more than 131 billion searches conducted by people 15 or older from home and work locations in December 2009, representing a 46 percent increase in the past year.

Broken down, it represents more than 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour, and 29 million per minute. The U.S. is the largest individual search market in the world with 22.7 billion searches, or about 17 percent of searches conducted globally. China landed in the second spot with 13.3 billion searches, followed by Japan with 9.2 billion and the U.K. with 6.2 billion. Among the top ten global search markets, Russia had the biggest gains in 2009, growing 92 percent to 3.3 billion, followed by France (up61% to 5.4 billion) and Brazil (up 53% to 3.8 billion).

Google sites were the top search property worldwide with 87.8 billion searches in December, or 66.8 percent of the global search market. Google sites saw a 58 percent increase in search query volume over the past year. Yahoo sites ranked second globally with 9.4 billion searches (up 13%), followed by Chinese search engine Baidu with 8.5 billion searches (up 7%).

Microsoft sites saw the largest gains among the top five properties, growing 70 percent to 4.1 billion searches, on the strength of its new search engine Bing. Russian search engine Yandex also saw solid gains, growing 91 percent to 1.9 billion searches.

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January 22, 2010
Bing Might Replace Google As iPhone Search Engine

Allow us to save you a couple of moments by verifying that today isn’t April 1st and that pigs haven’t taken to the sky. Now, there’s little left to do aside from break the news: Apple and Microsoft are supposed to be in talks to make Bing the iPhone’s default search engine.

BusinessWeek’s Peter Burrows and Cliff Edwards spoke to "two people familiar with the matter," and found out that Google might get bumped from its position as default provider.

The pair reported, "The talks have been under way for weeks, say the people, who asked not to be named because the details have not been made public."

Assuming this is true, it’s likely that the increasing popularity of Android is one of the biggest factors to influence Apple’s decision. Microsoft, which spent at least $100 million launching Bing and has Google beat by $90 billion in terms of market caps, probably offered Apple more money, too.

Still, even the unnamed sources of this rumor haven’t declared that a new arrangement is far from a sure thing. So for the time being, we’ll just have to watch, wait, and hope that a deal between Apple and Microsoft wouldn’t be a sign of the apocalypse.

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January 20, 2010
Microsoft Pulls Bing Maps Site Out of Beta

Microsoft has removed the beta tag from the Bing Maps Silverlight site. This means, at least according to Microsoft, that users can expect greater reliability, supportability, and further innovation.

"First off, if you go to the Bing Maps AJAX site and have Silverlight installed chances are you will be redirected to the Bing Maps Silverlight site (note this change only affects users in the US)," explains Microsoft’s Chris Pendleton. "We’re rolling this out with a small percentage of users increasing up to 100% of all users in a few weeks. If you don"t have Silverlight installed you can hit the AJAX site and will be prompted to install Silverlight (which you can opt out of, but WHY would you??). Well, to make the AJAX site a bit smoother we’ve introduced some new transitions in the tile loading process for panning and zooming. So you can have your Silverlight and AJAX too. If you don’t want to stay on the Silverlight site, you can opt out and return to the AJAX site (aka Bing Maps Classic) via the link on the Silverlight site."

Microsoft has also launched two new Bing Maps Applicaton Gallery apps. These are "Destination Maps" and "Local Events". The former shows vector-based route geometries on new map background, and the latter lets users find things to do in their own towns.

From the sound of it, Bing Maps users should expect much more in the way of apps. "These apps are only the beginning," says Pendleton. "You see it coming? A massive wave is upon you. Get ready."

More detailed information on the two newly launched apps can be found here and here respectively. On another Bing-related note, Microsoft has started improving its autosuggest feature. Time will tell if it proves to be an improvement over Google’s much criticized Google Suggest.

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January 20, 2010
Bing Improves Its Autosuggest Feature

Microsoft has improved its autosuggest feature on Bing to provide more timely results.

On the Bing Search Blog the company says that its research found 45 percent of search queries result either in a user conducting an immediate re-query, or quitting the page altogether.

As an example Bing cites the Golden Globe Awards and says its autosuggest now provides the latest news and information about recent winners.

The Bing Blog offers more details. "We at Bing are continually improving the performance of autosuggest to reduce these problems. In fact, we recently incorporated breaking news and hot trending queries within autosuggest. Updated every 15 minutes, trending queries balance timeliness and relevance to connect you with the most prominent or topical events happening now."

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January 20, 2010
Microsoft Changes Bing User Privacy Methods

Microsoft is making some updates to Bing privacy. The company sent a letter to the Article 29 Working Party, notifying them of its intention to make a change to Bing’s data retention policy. The company is reducing the amount of time it stores IP addresses from searchers to 6 months from 18.

"Generally, when Bing receives search data we do a few things: first, we take steps to separate your account information (such as email or phone number) from other information (what the query was, for example)," explains Bing Privacy Manager Reese Solberg. "Then, after 18 months we take the additional step of deleting the IP address and any other cross session IDs associated with the query."

"Under the new policy, we will continue to take all the steps we applied previously – but now we will remove the IP address completely at 6 months, instead of 18 months," he continues. "We think this gives us the right balance between making search better for consumers (we use the data to improve the service we offer) and providing greater protection for the privacy of our users."

The company considers this a "strong step forward" in the protection of customer privacy.

"This change is the result of a number of factors including a continuing evaluation of our business needs, the current competitive landscape and our ongoing dialogue with privacy advocates, consumer groups, and regulators – including the Article 29 Working Party, the group of 27 European national data protection regulators charged with providing advice to the European Commission and other EU institutions on data protection," says Microsoft Chief Privacy Strategist Peter Cullen.

Microsoft will implement its new privacy policy for Bing over the next 12 to 18 months.

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January 19, 2010
Bing Makes Out Well In Search Spend Report

A little bit of data from the Efficient Frontier Q4 2009 Search Engine Performance Report has been made available, and it’s completely un-shocking in that it shows search marketers are still more than happy to spend their money with Google. The interesting thing, though, is that Bing seems to have gained a little ground on the search giant.

To give credit where it’s due: Nathania Johnson is the one who got an early look at Efficient Frontier’s report (which is supposed to be released tomorrow). It’s thanks to her, then, that we know Google’s market share in terms of search advertising spending fell 1.0 percent on a year-over-year basis to 74.5 percent.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s share stayed steady (at 20.4 percent), and Bing’s increased by 1.0 percent (to 5.1 percent).

From Microsoft’s perspective, that represents a move in the right direction, at least. And it’s interesting, too, that Bing managed to draw revenue away from Google instead of its partner-to-be in Sunnyvale.

As for the future, Johnson wrote, "Bing is expected to grow 30% in 2010, giving them a 6-7% share of paid clicks." The outlook for the whole industry seems fairly bright, too, given that she stated, "SEM spend will grow 15-20% in 2010."

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January 18, 2010
Bing Gets New Health Search Features

Today Microsoft announced some new health search capabilities for its Bing search engine. The "decision engine" is now providing more content from new partners and instant answers with "hard-to-discover data", the company says.

Users can find instant, specialized information about illnesses, treatments, medical facilities, etc. when entering health-related queries.

"Bing discovers a relevant document in its library of health resources and presents a smart summary related to the query," explains Bing’s Alain Rappaport. "In addition, Bing uncovers key related topics by analyzing an index of medical sources and extracting meaningful data automatically. In this case, the user receives instant guidance through short lists of other conditions related to the query (for example, “obesity”), medications that are important to know about (for example, “insulin”) and US medical centers that are active in the field. Users may select any of these points of interest to continue their search in a new area."

A user can click on a medical facility and find more information about it, like patient ratings and other nearby facilities.

In addition to the new features Bing Health is simply covering a broader range of health and "better living" subjects. Users can find information for queries like "holiday weight gain", "baby milk allergy", etc.

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January 12, 2010