Did Bing Just Leapfrog Yahoo Search?

I think TechCrunch has discovered their preferred linkbait title format.<p><a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&#38;lr=&#38;client=safari&#38;rls=en-us&#38;q=allintitle%3Adid+just+site%3Atechcrunch.com&#38;btnG=Search&#38;aq=f&#38;oq=&#38;aqi=" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&#38;lr=&#38;client=safari...</a><p>Come back in a month once the press frenzy has died down and we'll see.

1) Microsoft had two horses in the race, MSN and Live, both redirecting to Bing now.<p>2) Microsoft owns the largest botnet in the world; forcing a browser update and setting the home page to a Bing query is a good way to improve your ranking ;-)<p>3) I trust "statcounter" as much as I trust Compete, Alexa, and the other user-side traffic analysis and statistics services taken individually. Let's get data from a bunch of them and let's average them out, etc.

I work for Microsoft. Before bing 80% of internal search engine traffic was to google. The reason MS employees used google instead of live search was pretty much the same across the company - live search sucks.<p>However, MS employees finally have a decent search engine made by Microsoft. Bing is good. There are 100,000 employees that likely just switched from whatever they were using before to Bing. That might affect the stats a bit. Plus, those employees will tell their friends and families.

Does it have to dethrone Google to be a success? I don't think so. If they can take away 5 points in marketshare from from Google that is a huge success and will draw in a lot more money for Microsoft. If they take five points from Google, they are also likely to take away 5 points from yahoo and that is a huge gain. I think Bing is a good search engine, nothing revolutionary, but every product doesn't need to be revolutionary to be successful.

Bing recently garnered lots of press with its release. That lead to lots of people looking at it and a sharp jump in viewers. It'll fade.

Bing is nice. I don't think it is such an evolutionary leap as to dethrone Google, but I could see it keeping Google from becoming complacent.<p>MS seems to have subdued their biggest dragon: the results are much more relevant. In fact, all three have gotten really good in that regard.<p>That was what always killed me about MS' search offerings: nice bells and whistles, but it was so poor at its basic function.

Comparing results on the scientific domain I'm working on, my conclusion is that google result is still far more pertinent. For some unknown reason the result obtained from bing are strongly biased toward very specific institution.<p>Bing is not going to replace google any time soon and throwing millions in marketing campaigns won't turn it into a more useful and efficient search engine.<p>But there is room for improvement though, and more"competition" and valid alternatives would be beneficial for everybody. We are totally dependent on the answer returned by google who can the strongly bias the data we "find" on the web.

One of my favorite parts of Bing is the "Popular Now" items at the bottom. Very cool to add that "real time" feature, reminds me of the twitter "trending topics".

Microsoft should have released Bing separately, only slowly leaking out that Microsoft was actually behind bing.

I forgot Yahoo <i>had</i> a search engine, so this doesn't impress me much.

In short, no.<p>One swallow and summer and all that.