great news! glad to see yahoo moving up as well!

11.7 percent in March from 11.5 percent in February

Sorry, I get this picture in my mind of Homer Simpson declaring "OOOOH, I'm SOOO scared of Bing!'.

:).

wheel, 0.2 is a lot of OOOOHs and they convert/buy Much better on my sites that gooooos.

And we must consider the fudge factor of +/- a few points... which then makes such minor changes irrelevant... ;-)

I remember similar posts mocking Googles small gains vs. AV back in the day. Growth is growth and 10 months of continued growth from Bing no matter how small must be of great concern to Google.

After 10 years Google still has NO other meaningful revenue stream so any decline in traffic no matter how small directly impacts overall profits. MS on the other hand can pour money into Bing without worry as they have countless streams of cash pouring in.

We had a indexing problem with Bing so we emailed them and not only got a useful answer but real help and had the problem resolved within 24 hours.

Another site of ours was dropped from Bing due to someone link spamming it. We emailed them and showed them what we believed had happened and not only was the site reincluded within 48 hours but we got a email back saying they accidentally flagged the site as spam due to excessive backlink spam.

I have never seen that level of service from Google. Hell I am afraid to email Google on anything never knowing what the outcome may be.

It's the little things like that which make me believe that once Bing is serving search for Yahoo and a couple years go by we may see a 50/50 search landscape which is healthy for everyone including Google itself in the longrun. They will have to innovate, improve service at all levels...

A monopoly (which Google currently has) hurts everyone in countless ways.

We had a indexing problem with Bing so we emailed them and not only got a useful answer but real help and had the problem resolved within 24 hours.

THIS! Everytime you contact MS you get GREAT service.
Google is totally opposite.

I have never seen that level of service from Google. Hell I am afraid to email Google on anything never knowing what the outcome may be.

That's so true. IMHO Goog still thinks everything can be done by a machine and an algo and they seem to forget that on the other side there's real flesh and blood people. And that's not only for their search engine, goog has the worst customer service ever, I really wonder if they know what that means.

Let's see, with a 0.2% gain per month, we're talking a whopping 2.4% per year. They'd catch up with Google in about 10 years or so. IF they can keep up this pace.

I have never seen that level of service from Google.

Service & Google? They have 20K employees, yet the word "Service" is not a part of Google's vocabulary.

has anyone else noticed the font size change in bing search AFTER you have searched for something, or if you search for something out of the search bar? Its very noticable now.

Let's see, with a 0.2% gain per month, we're talking a whopping 2.4% per year. They'd catch up with Google in about 10 years or so. If they can keep up this pace.

Could be 5 years consider above stats also applies to Yahoo and yahoo completely merge the brand with bing may be with their search agreement with MS

Continuing growth but not closing ground on Google. As Bing grows Yahoo fades. So say MY very neutral and non-biased web stats.

Yahoo! and Microsoft unveiled a 10-year Web search and advertising partnership in July that set the stage for a joint offensive against Google.

Ahh, now I see why a Yahoo article would say Bing and Yahoo are both closing the gap on Google. I think I'll up my own personal effort to play defense with my web properties. I dislike companies that focus on other companies instead of concentrating on their own products.

edit: I wish M and Y would announce they've bought Chitika already too. So many mini-step "news articles" on the prowess of M is making me nauseous. Chit is already pumping Bing on their blog.

Let's see, with a 0.2% gain per month, we're talking a whopping 2.4% per year. They'd catch up with Google in about 10 years or so. If they can keep up this pace.

Q. How do you eat an elephant?
A. One bite at a time.

I found that on Bing.
-

After 10 years Google still has NO other meaningful revenue stream so any decline in traffic no matter how small directly impacts overall profits. MS on the other hand can pour money into Bing without worry as they have countless streams of cash pouring in.

Agree on all counts. Except I see this as Google's battle to lose, not Bing's to win. It's little different than MS's battle against linux. Rail all you want about the 'better' OS, MS is still dominant.

Currently, Google will continue to be overwhelmingly dominant in search, just as MS will continue to be overwhelmingly dominant in desktop OS. Something external has to change to make things shift. Maybe that thing that has to change is just groundswell webmaster support for bing away from google.

And how long can MS keep spending the mega millions of $ it is currently doing to achieve even this tiny increase?

@wheel:

When I just read this I felt the same way about 0.2% being almost nothing...but when I considered how big of a market search is (thus the 0,2% are statistically significant not just a measurement error hopefully) and that this has been happening for 10 s traight months (supposedly), this seems to indicate a trend.

Then again Google might have an ace in their sleeve to counter-act that trend if they consider it a serious threat..

Let's see, with a 0.2% gain per month, we're talking a whopping 2.4% per year. They'd catch up with Google in about 10 years or so. If they can keep up this pace.

Once they reach a certain marketshare, you may see an acceleration to 5-10% per year growth.

THIS! Everytime you contact MS you get GREAT service.

Definitely not across all their products in all market segments

Except I see this as Google's battle to lose, not Bing's to win. It's little different than MS's battle against linux. Rail all you want about the 'better' OS, MS is still dominant.

I have tried Bing systematically twice and decided Google was better. I tried Linux once I decided it was better.

Maybe that thing that has to change is just groundswell webmaster support for bing away from google.

1) Do you think webmasters have that much influence?
2) Why should we prefer Bing to Google? If we push things too far in their favour the end result could be a much worse monopoly (given MS's track record), cemented in place by their desktop monopoly. Also, as with web browsers, MS are likely to neglect the product (i.e. IE 5) once they are dominant.

I think the current situtation, Google as the market leader, but Bing big enough to worry them is pretty good.

graeme_p is on the money. If MS secures another monopoly with Bing by paying for major companies to turn on Google regular people end up with an inferior product they have no way of getting rid of. I've heard of at least one major company who blocks Google and encourages Bing in the workplace already.

I find it hard to believe that MS hasn't gotten into Federal trouble yet with tactics that include paying others NOT to use Google.

I find it hard to believe that MS hasn't gotten into Federal trouble yet with tactics that include paying others NOT to use Google.

Well if ISPs can demand what are effectively bribes to stop them blocking requests from their customers to sites such as YouTube I don't see anything much different about this.

Why should we prefer Bing to Google? If we push things too far in their favour the end result could be a much worse monopoly

if anything like this happens you can only thank google, they fired the 1st shot at MS (and everyone else)

if they stayed in search and "did no evil" none of this would be going on right now.

1) Do you think webmasters have that much influence?

how don't we? we run the sites, we spend advertising $$. Google is very unfriendly to webmasters, we just take it cause we think we have to.

I have already voted with my wallet, my ad spend with google 3 years ago was $,$$$! a day, now its 0.

folks, you all miss the point. MS or Google - makes no difference at this point, as both showed monopolistic predatory behavior. there has to be a 3rd player. I am ok if it's open source.

^ I agree but nobody is stepping up to the plate.

either way google needs to be kicked down a few notches.

Lately I've been trying to use Yahoo & Bing consistently in stead of Google, to break the habit and to get a feeling for how good they are.

I must say that both offer very good search results.

Also, with Bing, you avoid all the "fluff" that Google insists on polluting the SERPS with (eg. video, images, blogs, maps, shopping, so on and soforth). The BIng SERPS are "just SERPS", plain and simple. This is really great, IMHO.

More consumers are unhappy about windows' support. I was perfectly happy with Windows XP, I had to upgrade to windows 7 that came with unnecessary changes of interfaces. 'You have to pay me so that we can make your life more difficult' - that's what people hear about those upgrades.

This may be the reason why more people refuse to use Bing from Microsoft.

that is werid, i have a computer running windows XP in the corner and at no point has MS told me I MUST UPGRADE.

I missed this (ie, ignored after first few messages) then caught it late (today) and marvel at how the thread morphed into something different... as it always does. :)

I Bing these days, have been for months. I MS... and recently built a Linux box. I still like Win better, but Linux is more than okay. I guess we pick which monopolies we like to support.

At the level of "all the web" there aren't going to be many players. Too expensive. Take big bucks to get there. At that point we decide which one we like and go from there.

I use Bing almost exclusively now, and am very pleased with it. I find what I'm looking for, as well as a lot of sites you don't see listed on Google.

I don't miss Google. Not at all.