comScore: Bing May Have Had Promising First Week

Consistent with some what we’ve been seeing and hearing from other measurement firms, Bing appears to have developed a bit of momentum since launch. Out this morning is comScore data:

Microsoft Sites increased its average daily penetration among U.S. searchers from 13.8 percent during the period of May 26-30 to 15.5 percent during the period of June 2-6, 2009, an indication that the search engine is reaching more people than before. Microsoft’s share of search result pages in the U.S., a proxy for overall search intensity, increased from 9.1 percent to 11.1 percent during the same time frame.

What’s missing here is some context and comparison with Yahoo and Google. So we’re not sure exactly how to interpret these numbers. Danny has followed up with comScore and hopefully we’ll get more data soon and update this story accordingly. Here are some other posts on the Bing traffic data we’ve received to date:

• Google’s Anti-Trust Argument: We’re Part Of The Advertising Galaxy, Not The Search Solar System
• Hitwise UK: “People Actually Using Bing”
• Did Bing Leapfrog Yahoo? Not Exactly

See more on Techmeme.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: I’ve talked with comScore a bit more about the figures. They’re not providing an early look at the usual “share of searches” figure that’s released on a monthly basis, as this is something they want clients to have a first look at. The “Share Of Search Results Pages” figure above runs closely akin to that, they say – so Microsoft’s Bing might have picked up 2% share of the searches “pie.” However, keep in mind that if the pie itself gets larger because of new searches, other players can lose share even if the overall raw number of searches increases. To me, the more interesting figure is the “Searcher Penetration,” which shows of everyone searching on the web, what percentage at some point made it to a particular search engine on a daily basis. Microsoft managed to get 15.5% of searchers over to check it out, up from 13.8% the week before – a 1.7% gain. comScore tells me that Google and Yahoo also had penetration gains, but that Microsoft’s gain was on the order of double of the others. And how could everyone gain? Penetration for any particular search engine can be up to 100%, as people use more than one search engine. So (purely for example) Google could have a 80% penetration, Yahoo 60% and Microsoft 30% — which would show most people use Google, but plenty also use Yahoo and some use also Microsoft.