The latest Hitwise report reveals that one of Bing’s biggest drivers of traffic is also its biggest competitor.
According to Hitwise’s list of the top five ‘upstream’ sites (sites that drive web users towards the Bing search engine) Google is the fourth biggest external source of traffic for Microsoft’s ‘answer machine’.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of upstream traffic was the MSN web portal, with a 42.66% share. The report supports Microsoft’s claim that 50% of Bing’s search query volume is driven by the MSN web portal, made earlier this month by Bob Visse, General Manager of MSN.
It is perhaps slightly surprising that Windows Live Mail (hotmail) generates just 4.41% and comes in third place after Facebook (4.61%). On closer inspection however, the reasons are more obvious; Bing powers Facebook search, which is steadily gaining traction among the users of the intensely popular social network.
However, the most shocking result is undoubtedly Google’s position at number four, driving 4.09% of traffic. Though Yahoo! is the fifth largest upstream site, it only has a share of 1.90% - considerably less than Google and less controversial, given the close links between Microsoft and Yahoo! that have developed over the past year.
Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land provides a quick explanation of how this could have come about. Intriguingly, it seems as though Bing is actually conducting paid search engine marketing on Google – with PPC ads appearing for Google searches on ‘bing’, ‘cashback’, ‘search engines’, ‘flight comparison’ and ‘image search’.
Why would people be searching on Google for ‘Bing’? Sullivan believes it could be to do with TV Ads. “TV ads are known to drive search queries. So there’s a good chance that when someone sees a Bing ad, they decide to google Bing and discover what they’ve just seen!”
In his post Sullivan also uses Google Trends to demonstrate just how widespread the odd habit of searching for search engines is – from searches for ‘yahoo’, ‘bing’ and even ‘google’.
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