And how many of those searches are initiated by MS spyware that watches what you type in the start menu?

(If you have a Windows computer with default privacy settings, press the Start key; type a few letters. You just "searched" Bing)

My mom has a Windows laptop which she uses without even really understanding what a web browser is, or what a search engine is. She uses Bing because that's what the Windows search bar defaults to and because the default web browser on Windows by default opens with MSN as its home page, and she doesn't understand she has a choice in any of this, and probably wouldn't bother to change anything even if she did understand and knew how to change it.

I strongly suspect that many Bing users are similarly borderline computer-illiterate, and just use Bing because it's the default.

The same probably goes for many Google users, a lot of whom were probably tricked by some software they installed that had a tiny checkmark and small print telling them it was going to install Chrome and make Google their home page.

Search is such an integral part of how we use the internet today and a vast improvement of the link sites and books from 20 years ago.

Competition in this space has never been more important, in particular in light of recent news of censorship from google and various big companies.

Although I personally use DDG I applaud anyone that tries to compete with google and I hope that Microsoft won't give up on Bing.

Edit: typos

Some things to note:

* The Amazon Echo uses Bing as it's default search engine, which almost certainly explains why the US has so much larger usage than other countries (since Amazon is so big in the US).

* Windows' search bar feature searches the internet by default with Bing. As an aside, it's interesting to me how bad the backlash was on Canonical for doing this a few years ago, but it appears most Windows users don't care.

* Edge uses Bing by default, and a not-insignificant number of internet users likely don't know (or care) to change their default search engine. Hell, some people probably just Bing "google" and then use Google. I've seen my grandparents do that before.

So really these statistics seem to be quite misleading.

Unpopular to admit here (unlike, say, reddit): Bing is useful for pornography, Google is not.

Hi, my name is thanatropism and on occasion I look at pornography. Throw eggs at will.

No duckduckgo is bigger than you think.

They'll be at a billion queries per month early next year most likely.

1/12 the size of bing may not sound like much, but I believe it's still run by just a few fulltime employees (fair amount of part-timers). Plus DDG isn't burning a billion dollars a year to compete with Google.

https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

This is because when I go to the start menu and start typing the name of the application I'm looking for, a large percentage of the time the Cortana search process is corrupted and my start menu is not searched, instead, I get an Edge window opened with a Bing search for "Photoshop"

I don't trust those numbers at all.

Here in Blighty, with a lot of companies still muddling on with the barest handle on web marketing, I've found Bing much more useful than Google for finding companies supplying materials or goods that aren't exactly 'exciting'. A lot of small - medium-sized industry output, for example.

Just this last year I've added Bing to my [hardcoded] homepage and found two 'things' that I've been hard-pushed for literally years to find a non-American/German supplier for.

It's fashionable and fun to bash Microsoft, but I can't say I'm much-amused by the utter stranglehold Google has on my internet usage otherwise (my fault, I know).

Let's give Bing a chance.

I like the bing video search and image search. I normally get much better results with google for text searches. Does anyone find bing the best engine for anything besides video and image search?

IE and Edge seem to make up about 10% of market share, while the rest goes to chrome, safari and firefox, which all default to google and yahoo respectively. I'm surprised that so many people would be changing their default search engine to make bing that popular.

Other commenters have commented on how the data is biased/cherry picked, and Google would have a different take on the market share numbers.

However, it might be more to Google's benefit to say nothing and use this as evidence of not having a dominant majority share if there is a monopoly lawsuit against them in the US. In fact, I suspect that losing the Firefox search default might actually be beneficial to Google for the same reason.

A few days (?) ago they also boasted that 70% of users are "ok" with their telemetry, or is it 30% haven't figured out how to turn it off?

Or in this case, haven't bothered to switch to Google on IE/Edge?

It is entirely possible Bing's market share is improving because Bing itself has improved.

I totally understand the reason why Microsoft wants to push Bing, I do. However, unfortunately (for us Finns at least) Bing search results are simply awful, almost incomprehensibly so. I could swear Google offered a better search 15 years ago (not that the situation is fully comparable).

Add the total lack of additional features (not too long ago it lacked even a simple calculator, or at least failed to reliably show it) results in what is simply a very poor user experience for any user. My very much tech-illiterate relatives can only articulate to ask why the “search in their new computer” is so bad they always have to manually go to Google after almost any query.

I trust nothing Microsoft says. They have a history of fudging numbers and hiring PR firms to publish studies that show them as cheaper or better than they really are.

Bing is my go-to search engine when I'm in China, and don't have access to a VPN. Most of the time, it gets the job done just as good as Google. Sometimes the results are even a bit better, but sometimes much worse, with the results not relating to the thing I'm searching for at all. It's hard to describe and I don't have an example at hand, but it's these failures that make it really frustrating. Sometimes I wish you could report a search as particularly bad, so that some human employees would have a look and manually move the for humans obviously correct result to the top.

When I am cyberstalking (or want aggregate information about any particular topic) I use Bing.

On the other hand, Google makes waaaaay too many assumptions about what I want. When I really want to scour the internet.

Yahoo is only used in the US, in Europe it's all about Google.

I use Bing, its nice to support someone that competes with Google to avoid that company getting a complete monopoly.

They also give rewards so I get my $5 voucher every few months which is handy.

I have seen analytics data for dozens of big sites and I have never seen numbers to even remotely support 33% to Bing. I have little doubt that MSFT is basing this on some form of data, but I'm guessing there is a twist or caveat in here somewhere. EDIT: For content sites and e-commerce sites, I see ratios that are between 18:1 and 50:1 for Google:Bing. Long way off from 33%.

I've consistently seen searches coming from Google at >95% of search hits on all my blogs. Where are these invisible Bing searchers?

So to aggregate assertions in this thread, Bing powers:

  * Bing.com web searches
  * Yahoo.com search engine backend
  * DuckDuckGo.com search engine source
  * Windows Start Bar results
  * Default search engine for IE/Edge
  * Default search engine backend for Firefox
  * Amazon Echo web searches
  * Siri web searches
  * Facebook search bar web searches

Probably a large part of that is because they are much more permissive to bots/crawling than Google searches.

Someone please explain how to search for exact phrases on Bing like you can with quotation marks on Google. I've seen some claim that quotation marks work the same way on Bing, but it isn't true.

Has anyone seen numbers with bing search ads that make this at all likely?

I know that my experiments with bing search ads were cheap but so low volume that it wasn't even worth bothering with.

What percentage of those are people typing "google"?

Are there any substantial blogs out there covering the technology behind search engines, including hypotheses about how Google works?

(I'm talking about real research, not SEO)

I'm not surprised - you'd be amazed at how many 'regular people' have their browser set to return Bing or Yahoo results

Bing / Yahoo make up 1.6% of our organic serp traffic and ranking is not an issue. add: for the past week, according to ga.

Bing search results are similar enough to Google's these days (for non technical searches) for this to not be a surprise

huh, Wait to get a load of Microsoft research. Microsoft combined its research branch with its search branch last year if I remember correctly.

And Microsoft research is far superior compared to others. Just look how many people with h-index 50+ does work at Microsoft and compare it with Google.

Why are countries like Paraguay, Uruguay, Russia, and Panama not on their maps?

what is defined as a search? searching within social networks is most definitely a 'search' but probably not counted. I would estimate almost half my daily searches are on a social network.

Bing doesn't seem to have SSL enabled by default. That's weird.

Is Siri search counted in the stats?

I switched to ddg and know lots of others who did too. DDG uses Bing.

Only bigger than you think because of the massive population of people who don't know how to change their web browser search provider, or their web browser altogether.

Before google they were running higher than 33%. They fell down flat on their faces because of the union of greed, technical illiteracy, and market illiteracy among managers/leaders.