» Microsoft’s Bing search engine is growing, but is it enough?

Microsoft’s Bing search engine is growing, but is it enough?

There has been a lot of discussion regarding the growth of the Microsoft search engine Bing this week. The question is: Is Bing growing fast enough?

Statcounter presents the following numbers for the US for July 9:

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) : 75 percent
Microsoft’s Bing (NSDQ: MSFT): 13 percent
Yahoo! (NSDQ: YHOO): 10 percent

However, these are numbers for one day only. On average Bing is slightly below Yahoo!

Hitwise’s numbers for June puts Bing behind Yahoo:

Google: 74 percent
Yahoo!: 16 percent
Bing: 5 percent (growing from 3.4 percent in the first week to 7 percent by the end of the month)
Ask: 3 percent

Mashable reports that the latest June data from Compete.com shows that Bing is now the 13th most visited site on the planet.

There is definitely a forward momentum for Bing: Its share of searches is growing.

And what is more important, in Bing Microsoft has managed to develop a search service that is well executed, easy to use and — even more important — innovative.

The fact that Bing now includes Twitter tweets from selected “prominent people” shows that they are ahead in some areas.

Microsoft needs positive press to continue climbing, and the buzz right now must be encouraging for them. It brings in new searchers, and what is more important: It gives readers the impression (a correct one in our opinion) that Bing is, indeed, a quality tool that deserves a try out.

And here is the problem: Microsoft needs to convince searchers to do more than just “try out” Bing. They need them to switch to Bing or at least use it as their number two search engine.

If they manage to do that, Bing may achieve an organic growth powered by the “word of mouth” principle: People talking to their friends about how good the new search engine is. That was how Google gained its hegemony.

In the long term it doesn’t really matter that Bing beats Yahoo! this month. What really matters is that Bing keeps on growing.

We will have to wait for a few more months to see if this will really happen.

photo credit: gadgetbubba