Surprise: Bing is doing quite well
Microsoft published information on Bing on the company's Bing Ads account yesterday that show Bing's market share in some parts of the world.
According to the Bing Network market share graphic, Bing has a global market share of 9% of the search market.
If you break down the market share, you will notice that Bing is doing quite well in North America, and other English speaking countries.
Bing's market share according to Microsoft is 33% in the US, 26% in the UK, 17% in Canada, 19% in Hong Kong, 17% in Norway, and 19% in France.
The data comes from Comscore; Bing Network data includes Bing Search, as well as Yahoo Search operations powered by Bing, and Aool Search Network. The measurement period was March 2017, and included only searches on desktop systems.
Bing Network market share
While Bing is doing well in some regions of the word, mostly in English speaking ones, it is not doing so well in others.
If you look at continents, you will notice an overall market share of 3% in the Asia Pacific region, and a 5% market share in Latin America.
Microsoft did reveal the number of monthly searches as well in the graphic. The Bing Network gets over 12 Billion monthly searches according to Microsoft worldwide. Over 5 Billion of those come from the United States alone.
The Comscore figures are a bit higher than those by third-party tracking services such as Statcounter. Statcounter sees Bing at a market share of 2.96% in March 2017. If you add Yahoo Search to that, which had a market share of 2.2% in the same month, you get an accumulated market share of 5.16% worldwide.
Microsoft's Bing Search engine is doing well when it comes to revenue as well according to Steve Sirich, General Manager of Bing Ads (via MSPoweruser). Bing is closing in on the $5 Billion per year revenue mark, and has seen more than 30% growth over the last year. The growth of Bing is fueled mostly by the growth of Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system, as Bing is integrated in Windows Search and also the default search engine for both Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer.
Closing Words
One reason why Bing is doing well in most English speaking regions and not so well in most non-English speaking regions is that Microsoft still seems to focus much of the development on the US version of Bing.
New features are usually introduced on Bing US first, and there is always a chance that they are not pushed to regional versions of Bing at all.
I can only speak for Bing's German search results; they are not great mostly.
Now You: What's your take on Bing?
Well no kidding. You have to use their stupid Edge or IE and Bing just to get Chrome or Firefox in the first place. If these were bundled with Windows (which they’ll never do) to start with you’ll find those searches go way down.
By the way, who funded the report?
Bing and Google because they are the defaults in respective browsers.
Not by choice … by default … lets get real
And MS are boasting about the revenue, that does not doing anything for the consumer.
For technical info and shopping I use DDG
Wife uses Startpage and she cannot see she is being spoon fed what a biased algorithm thinks she should have.
I can find “stuff” faster with DDG while my wife is still scrolling past the shop-fronts (buy-me’s.)
She uses ‘Startpage” because it was/is the default in her browser, and she is allergic to change. Of any sought. !
Bing has three things going for it…
1) Looking up the news headlines for the day. You can find a lot of great articles on the homepage.
2) Microsoft Rewards. Search for whatever and rack up points to get free prizes.
3) Looking up porn. :p (Surprisingly not a joke.)
After nearly two decades of using Google as my default search engine I now use use Bing for text searches, purely because the Microsoft Rewards program pays me a relatively small amount to do so. I’m happy with the results, although I still prefer Google for Image searches, Map searches, News searches etc.
Cortana=Bing so the more you use Windows 10’s crappy search, the more you are not using Google. The smart option is to install some classic start menu and use Google.com.
Bing has never been very good at searches. I don’t see the point of using it when startpage exists.. W10 will probably inflate their numbers. They have more reliable translations though, for Japanese in particular, since Google went with their GNMT bs.
Bing works fine for me, they also pay me for using it, how can you beat that! The Amazon gift cards really have been useful.
Bing Rewards, yet another feature in a long list of US-only features.
3% in Brazil still seems way to high.
Most here, like me, either use bing when open IE/Edge for some reason and just dont have time/will to change it or (and they are everywhere) use bing to search google because they dont know how to do it another way.
I’m responsible on IT for a few hundred machines, on about 50 small business, and cant thing of ONE PERSON who says anything like “bing is OK”
19% in France because of the Microsoft hard lobbying with corrupt deputies, senators as well as ministers.
I still use Google search 99% of the time from https://encrypted.google.com/advanced_search , but when I am not satisfied with the results, Bing has come through with a previously undiscovered result.
I’m using DuckDuckGo, however, on IT forums in my country people often say that Bing is great for looking for, let’s say, XXX stuff. Not sure what’s up with that.
Self-reported marketshare that is solely due to pushing Bing through an operating system monopoly… thats worth a pat on the shoulder I think.
Maybe, but still not at the same level as Google.
Google have the majority browser market share on desktop with figures varying between 53% and 60% browser market share, meaning Google have a monopoly on web browsers. In addition Google also have 85% market share of mobile, meaning they have a monopoly in mobile with Android too. With the latter, Google uses that to it’s advantage by sharing ad revenue with its partners. I.E. If a customer buys a Verizon Samsung phone, performs a Google search and clicks on an ad, Verizon and Samsung get a portion of that ad revenue, meaning they will likely be more favourable towards Google.
Although I’m currently still using Google, Bing actually isn’t too bad now. I’ve just been playing around with it and noticed that they’ve finally added the ability to search with custom date ranges, which was one of the main reasons why I kept going back to Google from DuckDuckGo.