Bing Bang Boing: The Sound of Early Clicks
June 7, 2009
I have been in the warm embrace of a wonderful airline and a Type A client. I relaxed when I read the flurry of articles about Microsoft’s spike in Web search share. Good news, I thought. After reading a number of posts I circled back to a write up in Search Engine Land called “Did Bing Leapfrog Yahoo? Not Exactly” here. There is a good round up of usage data from a number of azure chip outfits “generating” these data. That was useful. What I found lacking in this analysis and many others at which I looked was:
- A statement that new services get a spike in usage and at the GOOG a boost. The use of “new” in marketing has psychological and traffic benefits. The point is what will be the usage in three months?
- The data wander. The prudent approach is to crack that stats book and generate a normalized value. Bing gets a bounce but the outliers are corralled.
- The usage data themselves have margins of error. In some cases five, seven or more percent. This may mean Bing is performing better than the pundits opine or much worse.
My take on these data is simple: Let’s check out the data in 12 or 16 weeks.
Stephen Arnold, June 7, 2009
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
