Hitwise UK: “People Actually Using Bing”

Following up on last week’s post on Bing vs. Yahoo traffic, comes new data from Robin Goad, Hitwise research director in the UK. If it weren’t the middle of the night there, I’d try and speak to him about it.

Goad offers a range of observations and datapoints about how people are using Bing vs. Google. He explains the patterns and queries are similar (lots of navigational and branded terms). But what caught my eye, and potentially significant for Bing, was the following statement:

[O]ne positive sign is that average visit time has increased to eight and a half minutes. This is half of Google UK’s number but only slightly below Yahoo! UK Search, implying that the people are actually spending time on the site and using it rather than just visiting out of curiosity.

He also says later in the post:

However, the downstream data also paints a positive picture for Bing, as last week its top downstream site was MSN UK. Looking at the upstream data, it is also clear that Bing relied on other Microsoft properties for most of its traffic: 45.8% came from MSN UK, with a further 16.6% from Windows Live Mail (Hotmail).

Briefly last week Bing became the number two engine in the UK, to later fall back behind Yahoo.