Bing, Microsoft’s newly rebranded search engine, has experienced an eight per cent rise in unique visitors during June, its first month since launch, according to internal data.
The figures have been collated by the company’s internal data centre, and compare the usage levels of Microsoft’s search function in May 2009, when it was called Live, to June 2009, when it relaunched to Bing. However, the statistics do not break out how many people were just checking the search engine out because of curiosity and how many were using it on a daily basis.
Microsoft relaunched and rebranded its search engine to Bing in early June. The data also shows that three times as much traffic landed on Bing Shopping during its first month and there was a 28 per cent increase in clicks – which will be positive news for advertisers.
However, figures from Compete, an external ratings service, show that Bing’s gain for Microsoft during June was minimal. Its market share was up from 6.2 per cent in May 2009 to 6.5 per cent - an increase of 0.3 per cent.
Additionally Compete's data shows Bing has not started to dent Google’s share of the search market, which also continued to rise in the same month by 0.6 per cent, from 73 per cent to 73.9 per cent.
Compete also recorded that Bing has attracted nearly 50 million (49.57 million) unique users since launch, making its traffic bigger than that of Digg (38.96 million), and Twitter (23 million) in the US.
Industry pundits believe a longer time needs to elapse until the real success of Bing can be truly measured.
Bing is still in beta phase in the UK and which will finish by the end of September.
Microsoft launched its first range of UK “hotspots” on the Bing homepage yesterday, July 14. These are four links dotted around the Bing daily image which either teach the user something about the country the photo is from or the area within which the shot is taken. For example, there was a photo of London Bridge on the search engine’s home page yesterday, and each of the “hotspot” links related to a piece of London content.
Peter Bale, executive produce of MSN, Microsoft’s news and entertainment portal, told The Telegraph: “The launch of local UK hotspots, as opposed to US driven links, is an important stage for the UK version of Bing coming out of beta.
“Hotspots helps people to learn about things they didn’t know and discover the rich functionality Bing has.”
