Bing Continues to Grow in Traffic, But Fails to Overtake Yahoo

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July 13, 2009
Op Ed By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team

As the debate rages over whether Yahoo or YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine online, Microsoft’s Bing continues to fight for a chance to even contend. With an ad campaign approaching $100 million in marketing dollars, Microsoft has re-branded their 3rd tier search engine (with a market share of 6-7%) by creating a “decision engine” and suggesting that the days of using search engines are over. In the end, Bing still works just as a search engine would but doesn’t fail to entertain with humorous commercials about “search overload” and the catchy slogan “Bing and Decide.” Unfortunately, with a continuous focus on obtaining more market share in search they negate their goal of being something other than a search engine.

After many years of competing with Yahoo, Ask, AOL, Google, and now YouTube, Microsoft has remained steady with a 6-7% market share. After the launch of Bing, they spent a week hovering around 20% market share and are now back down to 9%. Regardless, gaining 2% market share in only a month is an accomplishment worth noting. It still begs the question: Why remain in the ring in the first place? If they are truly a decision engine, then they should own the market because no other company exists in that market. Apparently this idea is lost on Microsoft as they continue to compare themselves to everything under the sun in an attempt to show shareholders that the $100 million spend is not a total loss. A prime example is the latest report, showing that Bing had higher search volume in June in comparison to Twitter, CNN, and Digg. Blogger Jared Newman, of GadgetCrave.com, notes the irony of this by simply stating “…Bing is more popular than a few high-profile but completely unrelated websites.”

So while Microsoft’s ad dollars continue to deplete, many predict that their ramp in search traffic will as well. E-tailers should not jump the gun and spend a lot of time tweaking their SEO efforts in hopes of ranking on Bing quite yet. The best thing to do in this situation is wait until Bing has been around through the end of Q3. If Bing proves itself, then etailers should consider putting some Q4 revenue into futher analysis and optimization for it then. For now, most websites ranking in Google have similar rankings in Bing, which shows that optimizing for Google should still be number one priority.