Hitwise reported recently that Bing is leading in "successful" web searches performed by Canadians, above Yahoo and Google. In a previous report, Hitwise had found that only 70% of Canadian searches are "successful".
What's a "successful" search ? According to Hitwise' criteria, its a search which leads the user to click a link in the search results within a specific period of time. Deeper look at their post suggests that Bing leads in brand-name searches while Google is competitive on non brand-name searches in Canada. Excerpt:
For example, the top searches in Canada in the past twelve weeks were “facebook”, “youtube”, “facebook login” and “facebook.com”...For those four highest volume keywords, Bing enjoys a higher success rate for all of them.
..on searches for “free online games”, Google enjoyed an 86.51% Success Rate compared to Bing’s 85.13% and for “jeux” (French for “games”), Google enjoyed an 89.02% Success Rate to Bing’s 81.27%. However, Bing led Google on “games” and “horoscope”.
Seems like Bing still is in the game, at least in Canada. How has your experience been with it ? Prefer Google or Bing ?
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Varun Mathur
Varun Mathur is the Techvibes Community Manager in Toronto, focused on covering local tech startups, news and events. He is also a Co-founder and Product Manager at Zytran, a Toronto-based web startup which developed and launched Alertle.com - a personal news aggregator (Alertle's version 1.0 got widespread global coverage, with reviews written about it...[more]
