Stats show that more people are using Bing these days

Aug 20, 2013 09:05 GMT  ·  By

More people have made the switch to Bing apparently after Microsoft’s efforts to promote the search engine, as a new round of stats indicate that its market share is growing up.

comScore claims that 18 percent of the searches performed in July were made with Bing, while Google continues to be the clear leader with 68 percent.

While these figures might not sound quite impressive, they do represent an increase of 15.7 percent from the same month of 2012. Google, on the other hand, improved its market share with only 0.2 points.

It’s no secret that Microsoft is investing a fortune to make its search engine a much powerful rival for Google and part of this plan was to turn Bing into a verb so that people could use it as a synonym for “search.”

That’s already happened with Google, and Microsoft actually thought that its search engine had chances to verb up.

Well, that didn’t happen and Microsoft admitted last year that its plan to replace Google as the synonym for online search had failed. And still, it claims that it doesn’t really care about this as long as consumers use Bing instead of Google.

“I think we’re conflicted but happy if someone said ‘Google it’ but they were going to Bing and giving us the query,” said Adam Sohn, general manager of influencer marketing at Bing, in a statement for Fast Company.

“The thing about Kleenex is once you pull it out of the box, it looks exactly the same, whereas with online products, the brands are a bit more forward. So if you say, ‘I’m going to Google it,’ and you go to Bing — cause that’s what you have set as the default — over time, you’re going to understand the brand that you are using.”

The thing is that nobody uses Bing as a verb these days. Not even Microsoft employees, that is.

“Some people say the verb — sometime they say, ‘Hey, Bing this,’” Mike Nichols, corporate VP and chief marketing officer of Bing, added. “But it’s rare.”

Bing, on the other hand, is playing a key role for Microsoft’s long-term future and has quickly become the company’s main weapon in the fight against rival Google.

The Scroogled campaign, for example, was launched to bring Bing in the spotlight, with Microsoft claiming that its search engine pays much more attention to user privacy.