Google vs. Bing: Is That Even a Question?

“Who was the Prime Minister in India from 1947 to 1964”?* “I don’t know, but hang on and I’ll Bing it.” What? Have you ever uttered the words “I’ll Bing it”? If you’ve seen Bing’s latest campaign, the Bing it On Challenge, you may have been led to believe that people prefer Bing nearly two to one. You may also be cynically looking for the disclaimers or the scam that could possibly make this true, but I digress. People ask me on occasion if we even care about Bing, generally with regard to SEM strategy. With Google’s market share reaching up to almost 70%, my critical introduction paragraph and images floating around the internet like these, you may think the answer is “no.” Even with these compelling comparisons, the answer is sometimes a resounding “YES, we do care about Bing!” Why, oh why would we care about a search engine that has just been shown to be inferior in three separate cases? Because of one reason: it’s the default search engine on Internet Explorer. Maybe you’ve moved from the classic “E” internet browser, but not everyone has. Clients’ website analytics show Internet Explorer as one of the top-used browsers for those sites in nearly every case. And the people who are using internet explorer also often use the handy search bar in the top right corner. And that handy search bar defaults to Bing. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why we care about Bing. If a significant portion of our clients’ customers are using IE, it stands to reason that at least some of those people are also using Bing. While we may not be totally convinced by the Bing it On challenge, we have to consider whether or not we’re reaching our target if we were to totally ignore Bing. In most cases, our clients do choose to dedicate most or all of their budgets to Google. There are some cases where we have experimented with both and found Google to outperform so significantly, that we shifted budget away from Bing. Everyone who knows my Google-loving background knows I’ll be the first to advocate Chrome, Gmail, YouTube, etc., etc. but sometimes, I do have to say, “Yes, we care about Bing.” *I used this particular question because Google suggested it to me when I was thinking of an obscure search to use in the introduction. Eternally useful, folks.