No Bing bang for Microsoft's Yahoo! marriage

Bing's marriage with Yahoo! will be a phased affair not a big bang, Microsoft has revealed. Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's online services division, said Tuesday that Yahoo!'s switch to using Bing's search algorithms and its ad serving platform will happen in two steps in September and October. The search …

[GrantB]

People actually downloaded Bing for an iPhone?

Amazing that people actually tried it, but would be interesting to see how many people actually use it on a regular basis (MS would have the stats.

Now sure how they can promote Bing as growing though. Stats I see makes it look like Bing + Yahoo will remain relatively static, and so far behind Google it all seems a bit pointless.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-ww-monthly-201001-201006

[Leo Rampen]

"From a base of zero"

That's hardly correct. Bing replaced MSN search, which was (and still is) the default search for Internet Explorer. If they're actually increasing marketshare, then I give them credit, but it's not coming from zero.

I know that the only times I've ever used bing have been when I've had to use IE and the search box has defaulted to bing. The results are rarely as good as Google's (in my single man highly scientific poll).

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends how you look at it

They are not saying Bing started from a 'base of zero' but Bing Mobile started from a base of zero. They are stupidly claiming Bing and Bing Mobile are two separate products, which essentially they are not.

At the end of the day even if it does have 23 million 'users', and I use that term lightly, quite a lot of these were bought when Microsoft paid Verizon to change the default search for Blackberry users which now cannot be changed back. Typical Microsoft in that it can only get users by force!

[optimusfisher]

I like Bing

Forgive me for not playing the part of MS hating technodweeb, but if you take a fair look at Bing it is a good tool. It is better in many ways than google. Google has started copying the Bing layout, so that should tell you something. I've found Bing's image and video search far better than Googles. The quick preview in search window is a nice touch so you don't click into the youtube video that has the one screen to make it look like what you want only to be some drunk shmuck blabbering in his underpants. The two will yield different results, but I don't see that you could actually call one's results better than the other. Google's seem to me to be more shopping based results (probably due to paid placement).

[The Original Steve]

I agree

Use Bing as my default now as I prefer the layout, results seem on par with Google and the image/video/maps is much better than Google's offering. Still use Google as a fallback, but once you take politics out of the equasion then Bing is a reasonable offering.

If Bing was a FOSS offering from Red Hat or Canonical then commentards would be all over it, promoting it heavily to any non-geek who can fake interest. IMHO the overall searching experience is as good as Google. Factor in that competition is a good thing for any market... why not give it a try with a bias hat on?

[Tom 13]

Badda Bing! Badda Boom!

Bad Boom!*

*Not sure if this should be hand grenade or black helicopter. But since Korben was special ops I have to go with the helicopter.

[Robert E A Harvey]

whot?

"160 per-cent year-on-year growth in queries – from a base of zero "

can you list all the search engines that did not start from a base of zero? or, indeed, any other business that had customers before it was trading?

if the year-on-year increase includes the start of trading, then either it can't be year-on-year or it must be infinite.