Bing or Bust: Can Microsoft Cure Search Overload Syndrome?

The internet is a big place, and it is quickly growing. Last year, Google systems hit a milestone when they discovered their 1 trillionth unique URL - a staggering number when you stop to consider that only 10 years earlier, Google was a Silicon Valley startup with a 25-million-page index that, at the time, seemed impossibly large. And as the internet grows, so does our reliance on commercial search engines. According to cornScore, the five major U.S. search engines performed a total of 137 billion internet searches in 2008 - a 16% increase from the previous year. One could reasonably assume that this increase in internet search activity was driven by new users. In fact, it was primarily the result of existing users searching more often. While market ana- lysts may consider such an increase in the number of searches-per-user to be a positive signifier of brand loyalty, others have suggested that this trend is the re- sult of increasingly frustrated users constantly revising and refining