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Bing on the rise, or the diversification of search?

By razib on September 22, 2009.

Bing Keeps Gaining Ground:

For August, Bing's share of the American search market came in at 9.3 percent, up from 8.9 percent in July and 8.4 percent in June. Perhaps more importantly, Bing's growth didn't come at the expense of Yahoo (YHOO), which held steady at 19.3 percent. For the first time, Bing took market share away from Google, which dropped a tenth of a point to 64.6 percent of the market. (AOL was the big loser here, losing a tenth of a point to fade to a dismal 3 percent share.)

I actually stopped using Bing. I liked its UI for many tasks, but Google's breadth and relevance of results was just superior, and I got tired of having to use Google as a backup when Bing can up with nothing.

That being said, this seems a real issue:

In fact, Danny Sullivan has a new HuffPo piece on all the challengers taking shots at Google, offering new and unusual kinds of search that appeals to different elements of our online life. Did the power just go out in your neighborhood? Twitter will tell you why a lot faster than Google can. What's that movie your friend was raving about the other day? A quick Facebook search will get you the answer.

Pagerank is great, the customization of preference allowed by social media is really convenient. It seems a structural issue for Google, it has to serve so many different needs (I don't notice a huge difference when I am logged into my Google account).

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I had the same experience you did. For a while I even made Bing my primary search engine. There is a lot I like about it. When I need a quick graphic for a blog post I found Bing pretty nice. But overall Google just provides better results. I also found Bing slow at times.