

Google loses 2.6% per year. At the same time, Bing gained 4.2% market share. - fear91
http://www.brafton.com/news/compete-bing-sees-surge-in-market-share-as-yahoo-struggles

======
ColinWright
Please can someone edit this title to correct the "looses" to "loses"?

No, I'm not being a grammar nazi, I'm just trying to reduce friction for
readers. Those who don't know the difference won't notice, but those who do
notice the difference will care, and will have a small "jar" of annoyance,
sigh about illiteracy, and be distracted from the main point.

This isn't spam, where bad grammar is deliberate and acts as a filter to help
focus on those more likely to be duped into clicking. This is submission to
HN, where the purpose is to share knowledge with similarly-minded people.

Do you get your web sites proof-read? Do you use correct grammar and spelling
on the pages intended to attract customers and sell product? Do you do
everything you can to improve the experience of your visitors, to make their
visit pleasant, annoyance-free, and funnel them into conversions?

Why should you treat your colleagues here on HN differently? Show them some
respect, and pay attention to friction-free communication.

I do recognize that not everyone here is a native English speaker. For them I
hold huge respect. Many times I've tried to communicate in a language not my
own, and I have some insight into the size of the task. This is aimed firstly
at people who don't seem to respect their audience enough to even try, and
secondly to point out that small things like this might very easily have an
effect on sales.

 _(Added in edit - probably according to someone-or-other's law there will be
a grammatical or spelling error in this comment. If you had to hunt for it
then you don't win, you're just missing the point. If you stumbled over it and
it spoiled your flow, please let me know so I can fix it. Thanks.)_

 _(Added in further edit - This comments has already had at least two up-votes
and at least two down-votes. I don't care about the karma, but I do care about
effective communication. Here's my opinion - instances of using "loose"
instead of "lose" (to pick one common example) damage effective communication
for some of your intended audience. If you don't care about that, fine. It is,
however, information for you. If you want to shoot the messenger then feel
free to down-vote.)_

~~~
willrobinson
Not sure bout you but I see this as an _extremely_ common misspelling on the
web. I would love to know how it arises. Phonetics? Soundalike? Lose and loose
certainly have very different meanings.

~~~
mibbitier
I'd guess that people assume it's "oo" from the way it sounds.

"lose" doesn't sound like "pose"...

~~~
ollysb
Ah english... bruise, muse, prove, proof

------
lawdawg
[http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-
monthly-200807-2...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-
monthly-200807-201208)

[http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=5&qpaf=&...](http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=5&qpaf=&qpcustom=Google+-+Global&qpcustomb=0)
(global, have to pay for US only data).

And as already mentioned, Comscore shows Google at an all time high in the US.

Bottom line, these types of things are _very_ hard to measure, so take every
statistic with a grain of salt. The only thing we really know is that Google
is the king and Bing is slowly growing, mostly taking marketshare from Yahoo.
Anecdotally, most people who run websites are seeing barely any traffic from
Bing, and on a global scale, Bing is basically a non-factor.

------
anonymous_mouse
Brafton's editorial reads like a press release from Mircosoft Bing. The
premise is that Bing is growing in the month of August and that Google is
losing market share. The analysis of Bing being a contender seems very
premature considering many technical people reviewing their analytics will see
a minute portion of their traffic comes from Bing vs. Google.

This kind of promotion is unlikely to make developers make the switch, but I
am interested -- maybe the short-term lose of Google could be explained by the
gain of Duckduckgo. That's the bias I would editorialize.

~~~
anonymous_mouse
<https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html>

~~~
magicalist
I think that's still under 1%, which is awesome it's getting that big, but
wouldn't be enough here. The other complicating factor is that yahoo is either
down a little (compete) or down a lot (comscore).

------
Jabbles
Is Compete's data reliable? If it is reliable, is it useful?

Does anyone know if Jeff Atwood's (2009) post about Google providing 99% of
their traffic is still relevant, or was ever relevant outside a small
community?

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-elephant-in-
the...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-elephant-in-the-room-
google-monoculture.html)

------
magicalist
or if you ask comscore, Google is up 1.6% year over year and Bing is up 1.2%.

This site seems rather sleazy (even) for HN, but these "market research firms"
definitely remain useless.

------
daniel-cussen
As ColinWright said, it's not "looses" but rather "loses." It's not a major
mistake—from the point of language design, this is something that's wrong with
English.

Looses: makes less tight.

Loses: fails to win.

------
islon
I hardly believe people are saying "screw google, I'm using bing", I think the
numbers have more to do about defaults, your grandpa/aunt opens IE and bing is
the default search engine.

------
fear91
Alexa reports rapid increase for Bing and a rapid decline for Google:

<http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bing.com#>

<http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com#>

I am curious what caused this.

~~~
Fletch137
IMO A lot of that decline/increase is probably where Bing has bought
integration into an existing product. I've seen it a lot lately, "powered by
Bing" and the like, but I've not seen a single person actually type Bing into
the address bar. It seems to me that this increase is coming from those people
who don't know/care and are just being directed to Bing, not making a concious
choice of which search engine to use.

~~~
michaelcampbell
I believe buying market share is a common pattern for Microsoft.

------
mtgx
This must be in US-only. Bing's market share globally is almost in-existent.

------
rorrr
Considering how much Bing advertises and Google doesn't, it must have cost
Microsoft a fortune to increase Bing by 4.2%.

