We Are Organized Chaos

July 24th, 2009

Bing! You Are Now Free To Keep Using Google

So, on 6/3/09 Microsoft launched their latest and greatest search engine “discovery engine”, Bing.com. The term “discovery engine” seems to be very popular these days, as “Simpsons did it” Twitter used it back in April. But that’s neither here nor there, theft is the highest form of flattery they say. The previous two sentences probably isn’t news to you, Bing.com ads are everywhere thanks to an $80 – $100 million ad spend this year. So, I decided to check in with compete.com, to see if all those dollars are actually driving traffic. As you will see below, they are. One month in business and Bing is over 1/3rd of the way to Yahoo and Google’s traffic numbers.

Now, obviously, effectively monetizing that traffic brings a whole host of questions that the compete.com data can’t provide answers too, so we’ll just avoid it for now. But when you look at that data below, it’s interesting to see that yahoo and google’s traffic didn’t dip. That is, Bing’s 50 million unique visitors didn’t seem to really affect anyone else’s traffic. Which raises the question in my mind: Are people actually using (and going to continually use) Bing.com? Now, perhaps the Ask.com’s of the world are the ones losing out, but perhaps Bing’s traffic is “just looking”. That is, the media raised awareness, and people are checking out the site, but at the end of the day habits are not being changed. We know people love Google. Could it be that they don’t see anything special about Bing? That there’s no real differentiator and subsequently no reason to leave Google? Admittedly, that’s the experience I had when checking out Bing.

So what did you think of Bing? Do you think people are converting? When the media dollars stop (or slow), will traffic plummet? I’d love to hear your thoughts…

@jack_benoff