Bing Search Engine More Popular Than Yahoo?

The top three search engine websites over the last few years have been fairly consistent – Google have been out in the lead with Yahoo and MSN trailing quite a way behind, not that they haven’t been trying to make up some of the ground between them.

Recently we had Ask’s attempt to claw back market share with the re-introduction of Ask Jeeves (which as of yet hasn’t done anything remarkable) and now its Microsoft’s turn to revamp the search engine that has so far been only semi-successful: Live search has now become Bing.

For those not up to date with the recent change I’ll just give you a quick overview of what’s actually different. It’s also worth noting that this isn’t the first time that Microsoft has rebranded their search service, before it was ‘Live’ search it was ‘MSN Live’ which itself succeeded ‘MSN’ search.

For a start it looks pretty different, gone is the cluttered layout that put many people off and in its place is an easy to use layout that suspiciously resembles that of Google with the key difference being that Bing has a large colourful picture as a background which changes daily – a surprisingly pleasant feature.

It also has ‘significant’ upgrades with regard to the way in which it searches helping you to refine your options having searched, which will (hopefully) help them to challenge the more ‘semantic’ engines like that of Wolfram Alpha, and of course make your life easier when searching.

There are also a couple of additions to the ‘options’ available, the most notable being ‘Bing Travel’ which essentially Bing Travel combines some airfare and hotel tools from Microsoft’s early 2008 acquisition of Farecast as well as some of the editorial and news content found through MSN Travel. This all-in-one travel adviser/searcher/booker aims to tap into the incredibly lucrative travel market by making it easier for people to book all their flights in one place and thus attracting traffic.

But does this actually work? Despite the results of my quick and very un-scientific straw poll of a few of my friends only (where only one out of about 20 had heard of Bing) it is in fact gaining in popularity and has in fact overtaken Yahoo with regards to the number of worldwide searches.

Obviously Google is miles ahead (with 87.62% in case you’re interested) but second place now belongs to Bing with 5.62% of all searches, slightly ahead of Yahoo’s 5.13%. Whilst it may be a little early to credit this to anything other than a combination of media coverage and novelty, it is understandably a big milestone in the eyes of Microsoft, and I am sure the irony of the situation is not lost on them (that Microsoft did not need to buy Yahoo for $40 billion to take second place, merely improve and rebrand what they already had for much less hassle and cost).

So is Bing actually better than Yahoo, or even Google as a search engine? Well that is a matter of opinion and it would be unfair for me to comment as I have had years on Google and only a week on Bing, but what can be said is that it is a major improvement and that if it continues adding features and ironing out the faults it could secure second place for good.

Via – PC Pro

Related Pages:

1. Microsoft and Yahoo Finally Strike A Search Engine Deal
2. Google To Lose Murdoch’s Newspapers To Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine?
3. Bing TV Advert
4. Microsoft and Yahoo In Talks…Again!
5. Google Labs Adds Similar Images and News Timeline Search

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