Bing Attracts New Searchers, But So Far Only For a Trial

Unless you’re completely new to the internet industry, or have been on vacation for the past two weeks, you’ve probably heard a lot about Bing, Microsoft’s slick new search engine.

On June 1st, Microsoft (MSFT) officially launched Bing with $100M ad campaign, including TV commercials, and started redirecting traffic from Live Search and vertical search engines like Farecast over to Bing.com.

So how’s it going? At first glance, not too bad.

One week since launching, Bing has raised Microsoft’s searcher penetration by 2.3ppts to 11.4%.

We trended the daily change in searcher penetration over the past week to show how marketing and buzz around the Bing launch has greatly extended the reach it inherited from MSN/Live.

A 2.3ppt improvement on a 9.1% penetration base is impressive. Yet this uptick hasn’t come at the expense of Google (GOOG) or Yahoo! (YHOO), which have maintained searcher penetration since Bing’s launch.

New searchers are exploring Bing, but they haven’t forsaken their preferred engines and made the switch completely.

That’s also evident in a critical engagement metric: queries per searcher. Bing has significantly dropped Microsoft’s average queries per searcher since launch.

Prior to Bing’s launch, Microsoft maintained an average 5.2 queries per searcher. Since Bing’s launch, the average has dropped by 1.3 queries or 25%, with millions dropping by just to perform a couple of trial queries.

Those trial searchers haven’t produced significant enough volume to impact the established market share of the top engines, which account for more than 12 billion queries, according to Compete’s panel.

Since Bing’s launch, the average daily market share of the top engines has remained essentially unchanged. If anything, the day of week fluctuations in Google’s massive query base has overshadowed Microsoft’s uptick from Bing’s launch.

So Bing has had great success in attracting new searchers, but these have been dabblers that have not given up on their old engines (yet) and not generated enough queries to move the needle.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be watching Bing to see where these dabblers are coming from (Google? Yahoo!?) and, critically, if they will return to Bing for more than just a trial run.

Comments

[Egg:]

Pardon my ignorance, but why do the percentages for Google, Yahoo, and Bing total 106.9%? And that's only for the Big 3.

Are some of the searches shared with two search engines both getting credit?

Jun 11 04:34 PM

[Egg:]

If you take the 2 weeks individual percentages and base line them for a 100% (since both weeks somehow total over 100%), you get a suprising number.

Week 1:
Google 69.7%
Yahoo 21.5%
MSFT 8.8%

Week 2:
Google 68.5% (actually down)
Yahoo 20.9%
MSFT 10.6%

Using those #s, Bing actually caused both Yahoo and Google to lose market share. At least temporarily.

Jun 11 04:38 PM

[PastTense:]

If you want to compare Google and Bing (with results side by side) try:
www.blackdog.ie/google.../

Jun 11 09:46 PM

[Edward, Lor...:]

I am, as the old often are, very skeptical of the new. New and Improved Computer technology, often as badly oversold and as useless as idyllic South Seas plantations in garden spots like Borneo, has earned my skepticism. Yet I am very impressed with Bing so far. I think it is superior to Google in many respects (at least as to the search engine component). In fairness, Google is superior to Bing in some respects (add ons like Books).

This is going to be very interesting. Professional arm-wrestling.

Somebody is going to get hurt.

But not you and I.

Jun 12 11:47 AM