So the latest news is that Microsoft’s Bing search engine has nabbed 10% of the US search engine market and is now the fastest growing search engine. If Jason Calacanis is right, and every 1% of the search market is worth US$1billion then this is a nice chunk of change for Microsoft.
However I contest that these results should not be encouraging for Microsoft, for a couple of reasons.
- They’re still in a bit of a honeymoon phase with Bing. They’re still releasing new functionality (You need to switch to United States to see that) and people are experimenting with it.
- But more importantly I think, a lot of IE6 users had their default search set to Bing (and for a while there, couldn’t change back). But none the less a significant proportion of the browsing public still use IE6. Around 25% at last count, and a significant proportion of these will have the default search engine set. Defaults matter. Also, a fairly large chunk of these IE6 users will be corporate users who cannot change what browser they use due to (often misguided) corporate IT rules.
What this means in practice is that a lot of those using Bing aren’t choosing to do so (or are just giving it a shot), and if & when they are able to choose, they’re likely to go for Google. As corporate environments ever so slowly upgrade, they’ll allow users to at least move to better versions of IE, and possibly other browsers. When you install IE8 it asks you what search engine you want to use, and browsers like Firefox just set it to Google.
So while the month-on-month growth that they’ve seen over the last few months may be real, I’m not convinced the base numbers are really representative of persistent usage. If overnight people dumped IE6 for something better (oh please, Dear Lord, make it so) I think you’d see Bing’s usage numbers go through the floor.