Good VS Bad

...they were up;
And when they were down, they were down,
And when they were only half-way up,
They were neither up nor down.

OK, first the good news! Efficient Frontier is reporting that Microsofts Bing.com is seeing an 8% increase in the number of clicks on paid search results. Theyre also reporting a 20% lift in the number of overall search queries conducted on the search engine since the re-brand.

OK, now for the "when they were down, they were down" news.

Compete is challenging the reports that Bing is seeing an increase in market share"certainly one that can last. Key to its argument:

this uptick hasnt come at the expense of Google or Yahoo!, which have maintained searcher penetration since Bings launch.

New searchers are exploring Bing, but they havent forsaken their preferred engines and made the switch completely.

OK, but heres where we get to that part where 3rd-party data is open to interpretation by the reader. See, Compete suggests that Bing.com has seen a reduction in the amount of search queries per searcher since launch:

Competes interpretation of this:

Prior to Bings launch, Microsoft maintained an average 5.2 queries per searcher. Since Bings launch, the average has dropped by 1.3 queries or 25%, with millions dropping by just to perform a couple of trial queries.

Im not so sure, and I suspect Microsoft might have something to say about this too. You see, one of the key messages behind Bings launch is that searchers are spending too much time searching for what they need. Bing is intentionally designed to reduce the amount of searching needed, before the searcher finds what they are looking for, hence the whole "decision engine" push.

So what we do know is that paid search clicks are up, search queries per user are down, but market share may be neither up nor down.

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