Right after Microsoft launched Bing, we already saw some indications that users were quickly warming up to this new search engine. Just a few days after its launch, Bing had already passed Yahoo as the #2 search engine in the U.S. according to StatCounter. On StatCounter, Bing is now back in the #3 position, though with almost double the market share that Microsoft’s Live Search ever had. According to the latest data from comScore, however, Bing’s daily ‘searcher penetration’ has slowly moved up in the last three weeks since the launch and is now at 16.7%.
In addition, comScore found that Bing’s share of search results pages in the U.S., which it sees as a proxy for overall search intensity, climbed to 12.1%, up from 9.1% from where Live Search was just before Bing launched.
When Bing moved up quickly in the rankings just after launch, we wondered if this was due to a lot of interest in the launch, but it looks like Bing can stand on its own and that Microsoft is doing a good job at retaining new users. Of course, Microsoft’s multi-million dollar advertising campaign is surely helping here as well, but the general quality of the search results on Bing is quite impressive. In most cases, it rivals what users can find on Google.
