Bing Bing Bing – Clicks Mount – Maybe
June 18, 2009
PC World, despite its dwindling ad count and shrinking editorial hole, remains eager to whip up reader interest. “Bing Makes Gains, But Is Google Actually Suffering?” started with a good rhetorical question which begged for an answer. The Google haters would shout internally, “Yes, yes. Suffer you Googlers.” The Google lovers would smile and think, “Not a chance, dudes and dudettes.”
Now Bing Kumo, Microsoft’s most recent effort to whittle down Google’s 65 to 75 percent share of the Web search market, is not yet a month old. New services get service spikes, and the GOOG boosts the PageRank of new sites, so asserted one nameless rumor monger in 2005. Who knows? “New” is catnip in toothpaste and in search, now that search is consumerized.
JR Raphael wrote:
Microsoft is gaining new ground with its freshly rebranded Bing search engine, some recently released data suggests. Bing, the research finds, grew 0.8 percent during its second week online, adding onto a 2.2 percent jump it saw during its debut week. One question that has yet to be answered, though, is how that growth is affecting other search engines — namely Google. The answer, in short, is that Bing may not be harming Google at all; in fact, it may actually be helping.
Wow. Microsoft helping Google. That’s almost as good a story as Bing.com taking share from the hapless Yahoo, a company torn between becoming an open source champion and a commercial buzz saw.
I quite liked the wrap up to the article. Mr. Raphael said:
Hopefully, that serves as some consolation to poor Sergey Brin, who’s apparently been inconsolably “rattled” — “gripped by fear,” you might even say — since Bing’s birth. Then again, it might just be a case of “DATA OBSESSION OVERTAKING PC WORLD REPORTER.” I’ll check with the Post’s headline writers and let you know.
I want to capture my thoughts before I hunt for bugs on the surface of the stagnant pond the addled goose calls home:
- Cuil.com, Powerset.com, Hakia.com, WolframAlpha.com, etc. Each with spikes when new. So, roll out may translate to a usage spike. Then the traffic falls back into its predictable pattern. I think this type of information is useful to those who think that spikes persist in the big, bad world of online traffic patterns.
- I quite like the idea of a dazed and confused Sergey Brin. I don’t think it is true, but I live in rural Kentucky, not the Big Apple where the capital letter info originated. I have a hunch Mr. Brin is able to look at usage data and make objective assessments, not histrionics required unless it is over something like a bed on the corporate jet.
- Usage data from third parties is usually in the plus or minus 20 percent range. Again, I think this is useful information because small gains are often wide of what’s happening.
Just my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, June 18, 2009
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The real story here is not whether or not Google is affected by Bing’s success, but rather that both Ask and especially Yahoo saw declines in their shares as Bing’s has increased. More at http://domusinc.blogspot.com/2009/06/ppc-marketing-bing-gains-yahoo-loses.html.