Marketing Pilgrim

While not the longest timeframe to be measuring in and considering all the Bing buzz surrounding its launch, Microsoft has got to feel that at least they are keeping everyone else out of the news with Bing having some early success.

In a case of “I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news” if you are Microsoft the bad news of search traffic pre-Bing in May ’09, well, pretty much sucked. PCWorld Canada reports that Nielsen’s search engine report for the month revealed a bitter pill for any search engine to swallow

Microsoft’s Live/MSN search engine was the only one among the top five that saw its search usage shrink last month compared with May 2008.

Nothing worse than search engine usage shrinkage (once again for you Seinfeld fans, shrinkage does occur). What makes this number worse is the fact that overall search queries grew by just over 20% for the time period.

But like a super hero it was “Never fear, Bing is here!” at the end of May just in time for the summer months. The results to this point? Pretty good for Bing according to comScore.

“It appears that Microsoft Bing has continued to generate interest from the market for the second consecutive week,” said Mike Hurt, comScore senior vice president. “These early data reflect a continued positive market reaction to Bing in the initial stages of its launch.”

Over at SearchEngineLand, Danny Sullivan goes a little further and sees that the celebration may be research specific. Amongst the charts and graphs of various research results is the data from Compete and

Compete’s figures show that the launch has created no gain in search share.

So who has the real deal? Which information is correct? Does it matter at this point in the race? It’s likely that this data will be fodder for everyone to predict the demise of Google or the revealing of a chink in the armor of the search monster. Truth is that it’s just ‘fun facts’ for now. Only a long term pattern of increased market share for Bing will tell whether the introduction of the decision engine was a seminal moment in search or just another blip on the radar of the good ship Google.

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