

Bing Overtakes Yahoo as the #2 U.S. Search Engine - jagjit
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/bing-overtakes-yahoo-as-the-2-search-engine/

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mjfern
I'm having a hard time understanding the significance of this news given the
Bing / Yahoo.com partnership (Bing started powering Yahoo.com search in late
August). Going forward Bing's success will be measured in terms of its
performance vis-a-vis Google, so what's the relevance that it overtook Yahoo
in market share?

~~~
Psyonic
Most users aren't aware that Yahoo is powered by Bing, so the fact that Bing
overtook Yahoo in search shows that Bing has gained (or Yahoo has lost)
significant ground. This isn't searches powered by Bing, but searches actually
on Bing.com.

~~~
mjfern
But still, why is it relevant or meaningful to compare the market share of
Bing.com vs Yahoo.com since the two are now in a formal partnership going
forward? Isn't the central issue: Bing + Yahoo vs Google?

~~~
endtime
You're conflating brand with technology. Yes, the back end is the same, but
the point is that the Bing-branded site is now ahead of the Yahoo!-branded
site.

~~~
mjfern
Bing gained market share at the expense of Yahoo. Google's market share
remained flat for the year. The net effect is that Bing + Yahoo has not gained
ground on Google. So back to my original question, what is the strategic
significance of Bing overtaking Yahoo in market share?

~~~
rodh257
searches through Yahoo.com don't generate any revenue for Microsoft do they?
Ie they show Yahoo ads, not ones that give Microsoft $$? I could be wrong
about the deal specifics though.

Also, Microsoft doesn't really want people searching through Yahoo.com, in a
few years time they could power their results through Google and Microsoft
wouldn't be better off. They want brand recognition for Bing, so gaining
market share for Bing itself is better for them.

~~~
skinnymuch
i think the yahoo bing deal is for 10 years. so yahoo isn't going anywhere for
a while.

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jacquesm
That's good for BING, only 52% to go. (well, actually more like 26% to achieve
parity).

I don't see how google can go up 1% / month _and_ go up 1% / year at the same
time.

Bing growing 30% per year and two percent per month means that they're already
flattening out though.

In the article they note that since BING now powers Yahoo! search since August
that BING actually has a marketshare that is roughly 26% instead of the 14% it
has on its own domain.

~~~
jonknee
> I don't see how google can go up 1% / month and go up 1% / year at the same
> time.

That would work if they hadn't grown in the previous 11 months. Unless I'm
reading it wrong, which is always a possibility.

~~~
jacquesm
On a table listed in 1/10th of a percent I find that unlikely.

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chaosmachine
These numbers seem off to me. Does anyone here actually run a site where
Google is only 65% of your incoming search traffic?

Looking at traffic for a few of my own sites (mostly tech related,
admittedly), Google is consistently in the 92-96% range.

~~~
jacquesm
83% for google, 5% for bing, 5% for yahoo, 7% small fry. 100 K uniques on that
site per day

84% for google, 6% yahoo, 3% bing, 7% small fry, 1.8 M uniques / day on that
site.

That's according to analytics ;)

~~~
il
I'm curious to know who "small fry" is. DuckDuckGo? ISPs? That's significant
traffic share even if it's split between several second tier search engines.

How many of them are powered by Google/Yahoo?

~~~
jacquesm
As much as I like duckduckgo it's not even on the map.

Even Altavista is larger than duckduckgo and they're at 0.14% or so.

[http://siteanalytics.compete.com/altavista.com+duckduckgo.co...](http://siteanalytics.compete.com/altavista.com+duckduckgo.com/)

So if that holds true on the percentage then duckduckgo is at about 0.035%.
Which is really not bad at all.

Small fry: search.com 2.7%, ask.com 1%, < 1%: naver.com , aol , baidu , yandex
, altavista

~~~
il
Heh, I thought I could find a niche search engine I could advertise on that
isn't saturated with competitors but it looks like I'll have to wait for ddg
to start accepting ads. Search.com: google Ask.com: google Aol: google
altavista: yahoo

naiver, baidu, yandex are local search engines.

It's amazing how much the search market in the US has consolidated. You would
think with the declining cost of computing power someone out there would be
building their own index.

It's also interesting that cuil doesn't appear in your stats at all.

Free startup idea: Build a niche search engine covering a curated list of
sites(like google custom search but with value adds like ddg). Sort of like
what blog search engines are doing, but in another area.

~~~
jacquesm
For ddg to be of any use to you though, you'd have to have sufficient searches
in your keywords of interest that it would be worth their while to take your
money.

Or you'd have to go overbroad.

Cuil is dead, they've tried to re-invent themselves in april as an
encyclopedia, I think they must have missed the memo about WikiPedia's
continued success.

Their search results suck too...

Duckduckgo.com is larger than cuil!

~~~
il
Nope...as long as 1. There is little competition, no quality score, and low
click prices and 2. Traffic remains high quality and there is solid fraud
detection I could probably monetize a good percentage of searches on ddg with
affiliate offers, I wouldn't even need to arbitrage to higher paying ads like
AdSense.

If the price is right, almost any search can be monetized.

This is how 2nd tier engines like 7search make money, except they have too
much low-quality international and bot traffic to give steady conversions.

ddg could easily monetize and attract lots of advertisers if they published
their exact search data, keywords and counts. Wordtracker is making a mint,
millions and millions of dollars simply publishing dogpile.com search data,
which has a tiny (1%) share of the search market. SEMRush is scraping Google
for search data and has over 70,000 customers.

Nobody else currently does this. Privacy concerns aside, if there were a
search engine that had a good keyword tool designed for advertisers, it would
attract ad money in droves.

------
danilocampos
Hat's off to Microsoft on this one - they've earned it.

I don't use Bing for my day to day search but I've used their travel search
and it's not too bad. It's definitely no Hipmunk, but it's clean, minimal and
pretty snappy.

They've made some effort to take a dull product, make it useful, improve its
design and differentiate it from the competition. Yeah, the logo is hideous
and embarrassing. Yeah, they've also spent a lot of cash on the advertising.

In the end, though, they've expended more effort in making their search
product worth using than Yahoo has recently. So bravo.

Meanwhile: Boy, has Yahoo just lost its fighting spirit or what? What are they
doing over there? There's never any interesting news from their corner. Stuck
in the mud. They don't even own their search results or PPC product anymore.
It's a shame, they've got a good and trusted brand.

~~~
brandonkm
Yahoo, within the last five years especially, seemed to fall victim to the
economics of the search engine space. That is, they failed to properly
differentiate their product in any meaningful way and never once had a very
strong focus on the experience of search. Web search just became too important
and they were relegated to continually play catch-up while Microsoft crafted
their strategy which, from this bit of news, seemed to have been fairly
effective.

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m3mb3r
Bing has a tough battle especially because most people (including me) equate
the notion of a comprehensive search result for a query to what Google
produces for that query. That is expected considering we have used it for so
long.

Bing is my default search engine because I'm paranoid about Google's tracking
practices. In my experience, I still see cases where I do not find (all
results, enough results, related results, etc) what I want on Bing and then I
try Google and find it.

They've done a decent job nevertheless.

------
il
They certainly built a great product, but it's easier to gain market share
when you have a $300 million marketing budget.

Aside from heavy branding, they also built an absolutely brilliant, perfectly
executed long-tail SEM campaign.

According to my internal data, Bing is one of the largest advertisers on both
Yahoo and Google, approaching eBay and Amazon in volume.

SEMRush shows 50,000 paid keywords for Bing- but that's a tiny fraction of
their actual ad spend.

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RJF
So, does Bing finally allow restricting your search results to specific
period? The lack of this crucial feature was why I wouldn't even bother using
it, and it still doesn't seem to be available (I just had a quick look out of
curiosity).

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muxxa
Another data sample (5 billion pageviews per month) that doesn't exactly
confirm the Nielson data [http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-
weekly-200931-20...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-
weekly-200931-201037)

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redraga
All that aggressive advertising looks like it has paid off. And competition is
always good for any market.

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itistoday
Is it that big of a deal considering Bing powers Yahoo search anyway...? The
two companies have a partnership.

