The fact that a full 42% of their traffic is originating from MSFT, and they’re still investing tens of millions in advertising, AND they have Yahoo wrapped up makes their relative gains look PATHETIC.
MSN is the default start-page in IE8 and that is being whittled away due to the anti-trust.
In the past 6 months that more and more of the links on the homepage link directly back to BING search results.
From a UI perspective, this is not ideal and to see such low gain #s despite these efforts is eye opening about google's dominance.
Is it totally out of the question that some people might type in bing.com or have it as their browser's start page? The 42% is MSFTs share of referring sites.
I don't know when it began, but I stopped using the address bar quite some time ago. I found it easier to type in the url into Google. If I make a typo, it offers a correction, and I don't accidentally end up whitehouse.com, if you know what I mean.
That said, I don't think people are searching for "search engines" on Google. I think people are like me in that they use Google as an address bar.
If you're using most modern web browsers, typing something into the address bar is almost equivalent to typing it into Google. Which, as another comment indicates, is probably where a lot of these hits are coming from.
It wouldn't surprise me if people are just forgetting to add .com, i've done it myself. In chrome i'll type bing (instead of bing.com) since google is my default search engine, I'm routed through google.
I'm using it because Bing has a great flight search and comparison, also their video search is pretty good too.
MSN is the default start-page in IE8 and that is being whittled away due to the anti-trust.
In the past 6 months that more and more of the links on the homepage link directly back to BING search results.
From a UI perspective, this is not ideal and to see such low gain #s despite these efforts is eye opening about google's dominance.