I can't help myself to laugh out loud! Do they really think they can fool investors with such pathetic announcements?

Leaving the impression "are they kidding?" is really not the same as "stoking people's curiosity".

I ran some tests on some pretty exotic information from submitted searches that can only be found on my web site. Bing out of 15 phrase searches got all correctly. Google on the other hand was offering up brands, article sites, and literally all sorts of crap that made me say WTF is going on. I can see why now Google is going after so many sites money phrases. These fellows are playing way out in left field and they don’t get it except for the greed part. You don’t destroy the competition and pull stunts like that. It’s disruptive to all economies and it certainly isn’t a better way.

This reminds me of the final days of the Sadam regime when the US troops had already taken over Baghdad..

Iraqi Information minster: "They are retreating on all fronts."

Could there be more searches because 1 million odd sites that used to be on page1/2 are now ranked on pages 5, 6, 7+?

I gotta give it to Google. They are finally giving spammy/low quality sites their 15 minutes of fame at the expense of their search results. They are basically giving away users to Bing.

More searches or is it people looking for their sites?

Thats funny
I guess google can validate this data but I wonder how many extra searches are made by webmasters looking at positions or using automated tools to do so. A proportion of the profiles of people online are automated, blogs are automated so it would be interesting to know how many searches are automated

For some reason, when I ever search on Google now, it will auto complete and throw me into the search before I finish typing what I really wanted. I then have to go back up and finish what I was typing to get the correct search.

I imagine I'm not the only one it's doing that to so I can see why the search numbers are up. You have to search numerous times now to get what you want.

That's a real quality search experience.

My mom, a 65 year old, way more computer literate than most her age but by no means a adept.

"I can't find what I'm looking for on Google anymore. I was told that I can clear my cookies and that'll help. How do I do that?" she asks me.

She's just one person, I understand the stats (or lack thereof), but telling of the troubles the average person's having finding what they want.

A number of non-techie friends of mine have switched to Bing in the past 18 months, and not at my recommendation. They just got frustrated with Google during various updates, tried Bing and liked it better.

I'll throw more info in for an off rare chance that someone from Google actually listens.

Look at the "-XYZ" patterns in your logs.

I know it is not typical for a regular searcher to do it. But I now do it all the time, and show everyone around.

you do a search for "green widget info" , get junk , big brands, product offers and MFA . then continue adding "-BigBrand -ProductA -JunkKW1 -JunkKW2" until you get rid of enough noise to see something meaningful.

Used to not be that way.

If the SE's really cared about user experience, they would make it super visually easy for users to add those filters. Like, beside the ehow result there'd be a button that says "Don't want results from this site?" or something, and you'd just click it and be done. And then you could keep adding filters for other domains, and there would always be a big friendly button that says "Remove all filters" so you can start over.

Seriously, can you imagine how that would improve things? Suddenly, where you are in the SERPs carries less weight, and how much people like your site carries a lot more. Which is just how Google claims it should be. So why not train users to rearrange the SERPs to their own satisfaction? It would even give people more incentive to set up Google accounts, so they could save their filters from one search to the next.

I would imagine something like this has occurred to somebody at at least one of the SE's. I think it could easily be "dumbed down" enough for even the newest newbie to figure out what's going on, and I think people would really like it. The only reason I can think of NOT to offer things like this is if the search business model actually relies on arranging the SERPs to the corporation's liking rather than the user's.

Early indications are that people are interacting with it more

I'm not sure what "interacting more" means. Are people having to perform more actions in order to find what they're looking for?

I'm not sure what "interacting more" means. Are people having to perform more actions in order to find what they're looking for?

For the few times I use Google, that is the case for me. It auto completes my searches and drops me into the results it's picked. They are never the results I wanted so I have to go back and finish typing the search I started.

It really annoys me to search on Google now and I do it as little as possible.

I'll echo a lot of the opinions here. I just wish Bing UI wasn't so terrible. I would do more Bing searches if I could deal with their choice of colors, contrast, and layout. I really wish they would adopt a DDG look or at least something not so washed out.