
Bing Now Bigger Than Digg, Twitter and CNN - nreece
http://mashable.com/2009/07/08/bing-numbers/
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jacquesm
So, 50 million people tried it, with the amount of press and money poured into
the launch anything less and it should be considered a total failure.

Now lets wait half a year before we're going to talk about how many people it
has attracted and how it is going to unseat google.

Also, and this is no small point, MSN traffic has dropped significantly
because of the re-routing of MSN search to bing.

That's not exactly a zero sum game but there is more to this than just going
from unknown to 13th spot in 30 days.

I know alexa should be taken with a grain of salt, but this graph:

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

Shows someting quite different than the compete graph in the article which
only focuses on the month as a whole, the day by day graphs paint a completely
different picture.

Extrapolation from too little data is fraught with peril.

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jm4
I'm tired of people conceding that Alexa is next to worthless and then going
on to use an Alexa graph to make a point. It doesn't work that way. It can't
be either unreliable or of some small value depending on when it's convenient.

 _Extrapolation from too little data is fraught with peril._

The author of this article made this mistake. How is your argument any
different? The Alexa stats you cite are an even smaller data set than what is
used in the article!

I do agree that we just need to wait this out. Even with good stats there's no
way to know whether Bing is a worthy competitor. It's obvious that Bing hasn't
been a complete flop in the way Cuil was. So far it's good enough that people
are going to try it out for a while, but what's really important is whether
they're still using it in 6 months or a year.

~~~
jacquesm
Alexa is good for relative figures and larger trends, not for detail. The
'compete' graph has exactly 3 data points, the 'alexa' one has 30 and shows a
completely different graph (and imho a more realistic one).

The lack of accounting for the influx of MSN traffic is a major omission, so
my point is - and I think this is a big difference from the original article -
that there is better data available than that used in the article which would
suggest a different conclusion and that no matter what source of data you use
you have to be careful to extrapolate at this point in time.

Better like that ?

~~~
jm4
I agree with most of what you're saying. MSN definitely should have been taken
into account and it's way to early to call Bing a success. Where I disagree is
with the criticism of the data used for the article and then use of equally
unreliable data to prove the point.

The Alexa data has more points, but it's looking at the same period of time so
I'm not buying into the idea that it's more realistic. Not to mention day to
day numbers are a microscopic view of a much larger picture.

We've got two measurements of the same thing that seem to be drawing two
different conclusions. I don't think anyone could reliably come to the
conclusion that one is more accurate than the other based on the information
we have.

~~~
jacquesm
A common trick to show an upward trend is to show just the first and last
point of something that has gone up in a certain period without showing the
data in between. Like that it always looks like you are going 'up', no matter
what.

If you look at the datapoints in between you get to see more detail, in this
case a meteoric rise over the first couple of days and then a fairly steady
decline, which is a more realistic picture. So, in this respect I'm more
inclined to believe alexa.com over compete, not because they give me a story
that I'd like to hear but simply because their data offers more transparency.
In the long run (over many month) there will be more convergence between the
shapes of the graphs, but for the moment alexa gives a more realistic image to
extrapolate from, simply because it shows you more intermediate points. If
alexa had just shown the first and last datapoints then the graph would have
been the same but the conclusion would have been completely different.

Of course you're entirely free to disagree with that :)

For the record, I use my own site (ww.com) as a benchmark whenever I look at
other sites to try to figure out the bias of the reporting agency but with
sites as large as msn, google and bing that is not a useful technique because
my own site is so much smaller that it is simply a flat line.

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DarkShikari
Wasn't MSN search already bigger than Digg, Twitter, and CNN before they
renamed it to Bing? How about a comparison of traffic between MSN search
before and Bing after?

~~~
jacquesm
it dropped...

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mahmud
News Flash: When combined, MSN and Windows Live are bigger than Digg, Twitter
and CNN.

CNN is the website of a 24/hour _television_ network; twitter and digg are Web
2.0 social networking things. None of which Microsoft is proud to be "bigger
than".

