In the first half of this year Microsoft killed off Live Search and built the Bing search decision engine in its place. While only time will tell whether Bing is truly the anti-Google, the move is proving a success, at least on some markets. According to statistics made available by the Redmond company, the number of Bing users has almost doubled in France, in 2009 compared to the past year. In the United Kingdom, the number of users turning to Bing for answers to their queries has also increased, although less impressively than in France, by only approximately a third.

“Starting with the obvious points, in the UK 35% more people used Bing in August than used Live Search in August '08. In France, there were 93% more users of Bing in August than of Live Search a year ago, and there were double the number of queries served. And it's not only in the growth of the user base that there's good news for advertisers - adCenter continues to provide the conversion advantage that it did for Live Search,” revealed Nick Drew, Search Research manager for Microsoft.

What is indeed impressive in the growth volume of Bing France and UK is that fact that not only was the new brand and search/decision engine introduced fresh just four month ago, but Microsoft is not even offering a complete product. Unlike the US, where the Redmond company has released to web the final form of Bing, both France and UK users continue to be stuck with the inferior quality Beta experience. However, the focus on English-speaking audiences is first and foremost with Microsoft, and the company has introduced some of the features of the RTW Bing variant in the US to customers in the UK.

“Looking at the engagement and conversion research that we regularly update, we can see that in particular, in the UK, searchers clicking through to a site from Bing are 25% more engaged than the average searcher, and 50% more likely to convert when on that site,” Drew added. “Similarly, in France, users of Bing are 54% more likely to convert on a destination site that they reach through Bing than the average search user.”

Bing is bound to get additional traction with end users, both on home soil and abroad, following the implementation of the search/decision engine throughout the web properties of Yahoo. Earlier this year, Microsoft and Yahoo announced an agreement designed to provide end users and advertisers with a valid alternative to Google.

“In summary then, Bing is reaching more people than ever before, and is building up a rapport with those users. Query volume continues to climb, and it still provides advertisers with a clear ROI advantage over its competitors; what's not to like,” Drew asked.