Usability Consultancy, Website Reviews, Website Optimisation

As many people, I paid a lot of attention to the rise of Bing (www.bing.com) last week and enjoyed using it a few times. I'm not ditching Google in favour of Bing, although I have set Bing as my home page in IE (I use Firefox most of the time).

What makes writing this article more interesting to me is that last week I was questioning a lot of data that a client had been sent - that suggested his site got no traffic and this other one got this much - blah blah blah. Obviously that was a sales pitch. We checked out the data and, sure enough, the 'authority' statistics sites got it totally wrong. We know the site gets traffic because they get sales and they get enquiries, but some people love to use and present inaccurate data...

Which brings be nicely to the rise and fall of Bing in just a few days.

Interesting Data from Two "Authorities"
It makes the question "who should we believe" even more relevant when 2 of the most 'repsected' statistics sources fail to agree on basic stuff like which Search Engine is the most popular. Surely, that's a question that's answered with statistics and rears it's ugly head in thousands of 'willy waving' arguments around the world every day. But which statistics should you and I believe?

Bing was 2nd Most Popular SE for One Day
Says StatCounter. They claim that Bing peaked in second place for just one day (on June 4th 2009) and then promptly slipped back to 3rd place behind Yahoo. In their 'worldwide' stats, Bing barely even sneaked past Yahoo at all - apparently.

Bing Outranks Yahoo Since Launch Date
But, according to HitWise, Bing soured above Yahoo on it's first day, peaked during June 1st to 4th and then drifted down in the rankings but stayed above Yahoo. Not  a lot, but above the nearest competitor nonetheless.

Now Here's The "But"
Anyone who has read my material over the years or has been to my workshops etc., will know that I'm not a fan of what I call 'willy waving' - the mega hyped up claims made by one website over another or statistics that are gently 'tweaked' to make one product look better than another. The bottom line, as always, is do people find it useful.

People are staying on Bing longer than they stay on many of their competing sites (in my opinion there is good reason to do so because of it's unique approach to 'search results'). This means that people are not just rushing over to Bing for a minute just to see what all the fuss is about, they're going there, trying it out, and realising it's actually a pretty cool product and they obviously enjoy using it.

Bing Is Yet To Get Into Top Gear
I anticipate a massive marketing campaign by Microsoft. I've read that they are throwing millions of dollars into advertising the new baby and will peak again once that advertising kicks in. Once it hits the mainstream Internet population, then we'll see how many people decide to set Bing as their preferred SE because that, I feel, is the true statistic that counts. I'm 50% converted but I see that Bing and Google each have slightly different purposes and each have their own unique characteristics that make searching a bit easier.

What I Love About Bing and Where Google Fails
For a long time I have frowned at the way people can beat Google. I hate the trend because I believe relevant search results is what gets people to keep coming back. And we've all seen search results that 'look' relevant, only to click a link and find it was a relevant title but the content is not so relevant. With Google, you don't know this until you click the link.

With Bing, you get a sneak preview of the text from the website before you click the link. I know it takes a second or so to appear but so useful. You get to see immediately if the content relates to the title and snippet, and decide if you want to actually click. That, to me, along with a few other really nice features, makes Bing my second choice SE and one that I will keep exploring.

As For The Data
Well, if the two big names in statistics can't agree. And I don't care about the reasons used like, one gets updated hourly and one reads data from only 2 million users (probably through toolbars and plugins) so their data will be different. So what's the point? We all know that Google is the Daddy with roughly 3/4 of the search traffic, and Yahoo is way down at anywhere from 3% to 10% depending on which data you look at, but what matters most is what we enjoy using and find most useful.

Try Bing, Try Google, Try Yahoo - You Decide
If you do the same search on the 3 SEs you will most likely get 3 different sets of results. But what matters is how these results relate to your search and how comfortable you feel with the way it is presented. Some may prefer the simplistic look of Google (which Bing has kind of 'adopted') and others may go for the 'everything in one place' approach of Yahoo.

Personally, I think there is room for a challenger to Google and hope Bing gets a bit more of a media push than just the Google hackers saying things like "here comes another Microsoft product".