Today’s reader question concerns the popularity of search engines. I was asked: “According to a recent training seminar, there are now more people using Bing search than Google. This is due to the fact that most new PCs have Bing as the default search engine and many users are unaware that they are using Bing rather than Google. Should I be looking more carefully at Bing?”
Wow. My world was turned on its head for a moment. How had I missed that change? So I looked at some clients’ website analytics. And fortunately, I wasn’t going mad. Again and again, I saw the same thing: thirty, forty or fifty times as much traffic from Google search as from Bing, and no significant changes over the last year. Below is one example of website visits from the two search engines, from a UK company which supplies products all over the world. I realise that the situation could be caused by this company doing well in Google results and not in Bing, but I found similar results for other companies too. So the answer is no, there’s no need to look more carefully at Bing; it sends useful traffic, but isn’t worth spending a lot of additional time on unless you’ve done all you can with Google (and that applies to advertising too).
Spot on Chris! I have tried Bing several times when starting on a new PC but always found it so infuriatingly deficient compared with Google.
Chris, thanks for the data. Always good to have facts for the discussion.