Bing Bigger Than Digg? Twitter? Not Quite.
by Tony Hung on July 9, 2009
Ben Parr at Mashable says Bing, Microsoft’s latest search engine offering, is doing well. So well, in fact, that its bigger than Digg, Twitter and CNN.
But none of that matters if Bing doesn’t grow and find a way to compete with Google . So after a month, where are we? We knew that Bing was growing, but the numbers being released tonight tell a tale of success, as Bing is now the 13th most visited site on the web.
According to Compete.com, Bing was able to amass 49.57 million unique visitors in its first month as Microsoft’s official search engine. Bing’s traffic trumps that of Digg (38.96 million) Twitter (23 million), and CNN (28.54 million). We want to stress that this focuses on U.S. visitors, since Compete does not track international visits.
The problem is that all of those stats are quite misleading without attributing the fact that Microsoft’s previous search engine, Live.com, redirects directly to Bing.com. If you look at the stats for Live.com, you’ll notice that prior to Bing.com it hit an apogee of around 100 million visitors per month. In fact, I’d say that since traffic for Bing is “only” at around half of what Live.com was the month prior to its debut, its probably far too early to tell how popular it actually is.
Furthermore, when you take into consideration that MSN.com directly feeds into Bing (previously Live) at the top of its page (primo real estate if there ever was any), and that MSN.com is the default home page for millions of Internet Explorer home pages, its further reason to take it all with a grain of salt.
I think the jury’s out on how popular Bing is — and with all due respect to Ben Parr, that jury’s only due in several months I’d say.
5 comments
While you’re right that there’s SOME skew in there, it’s worth noting that Bing has captured more SEARCH market share than any other MS search engine in history. In just a month. So there’s more than just traffic transference going on here.
by Jeremy Wright on July 9, 2009 at 10:26 am. #
I’m not sure I understand your argument.
The fact that now Bing.com is separate from Live.com should give us a lot better indication of how popular Microsoft’s search service is, since the old Live.com numbers include both users who used Live Search and those who used the Windows Live services.
Now we know that people go to Bing just to do search, and we can then use that information to do an apples to apples comparison with other sites.
The MSN.com explanation is also not relevant, since that has been status quo all along. Even before Bing existed, MSN was redirecting search traffic to Live Search.
Bottom line is – the metrics for Bing.com now are clean numbers for users who are only using Microsoft’s search service, and it should be interpreted as such.
by Jonathan Wong on July 9, 2009 at 11:53 am. #
Jonathan, exactly. I suspect a similar historical analysis could be done in ~March 09 with the search-specific subdomains of the old live.com (search.live.com, images.live.com, maps.live.com, etc.) instead of *.bing.com and you’d still see uniques > than these big 3 (because MSFT search share as a % has only gone up 1 or 2 points, yet bing.com lead over digg.com in uniques is ~25%.)
by Wade on July 9, 2009 at 12:43 pm. #
Bing has excellent image and video search… no doubt big is here to say… but will it be able to out shine google? i am skeptical… but yeah Yahoo sure has a reason to worry…. and now ther is no need to thnk of ask.com (and others) as search enigines they are doomed!
by Mayank Agarwal on July 9, 2009 at 2:56 pm. #
Bing’s stats are impresive but nothing unusual.. This may be just the curiosity of the users and the hype created by Microsoft which may lasts may be 2-3 months.. I am just waiting to see how Bing shapes in next 6 months..
by Krishna Santani on July 9, 2009 at 4:25 pm. #