Bing takes off better than expected

In case you still don’t know what Bing is, Bing is a new search engine introduced by MSN. If you read my last post about live search then you’ll probably know how I started thinking of windows live search as useless. However, the buzz about Bing started building about a week ago.
Prior to this, a coming soon page was displayed. But yesterday, they released it’s ‘preview’ version. No comments about how it’s working because I’m still not going to use it anyways, although I did give it a few tries. They have kind of jacked up their algorithms and their search is better than before.
But thinking from a marketer’s point-of-view, then here are the facts:

• Live search sent me a maximum of 5 hits per month.
• The search terms were so stupid that made me wish that my website never existed.
• The bounce rate never got below 90%!
• Bing sent me 12 hits on the first day of it’s release.
• The hits were from popular keywords hence giving me useful and targeted visitors.
• The bounce rate is 10%!!

The hits I got from Bing can then again be seen from two perspectives.

1. It’s probably the first day so it did not send me as much hits as it will send me in the future.
2. The buzz is all about Bing. Everybody’s using Bing and there is extra-ordinary buzz about it. Once people realize that it sucks, they might never use it again. Hence, the traffic goes down!

As for the launch, my stats tell me that it is going great :-P. However, the new found success of windows will only be proved once we see a consistent flow of traffic (assuming that we do optimize for bing in the future). My current rating of Bing would be ‘not bad’ from the eye of a search engine user. Although I have no idea why they have windmills on the main page.
Tip: If you ever start a search engine try not to display your knowledge of renewable energy resources like windmills and solar panels. This is a very serious advice.