Is Bing Finally Going to Challenge Google?

There's been a lot of buzz about Bing, the search and decision engine that Microsoft unleashed last year. Unfortunately, a lot of things that have come from Microsoft in the past few years have really not lived up to their hype (case in point: Microsoft Vista). But unlike some of those other 'failures', Bing seems to be picking up some steam.

I was reviewing traffic on one of my drop ship websites last week. Over the past few months I've noticed a lot of customers coming from Bing searches, so I decided to do an analysis of the orders over the past 90 days and compile their source. Much to my surprise, this is how they stacked up.

41% Bing / Microsoft
27% Yahoo
18% Referrals and Other
14% Google

The site was mostly optimized with Google in mind but you can see that Google is not our main referrer of orders. Note that these figures are based on completed orders and not on traffic in general. But this might the only place you see Google in last place!

I suddenly like Bing a lot more! Of course now I have a reason to like it. But I am not the only one. According to TechCrunch, Bing's share was up 3% in December of 2009. As I said, we never optimized for Bing but there is something to be said about good site optimization. If you optimize your site based on quality of user experience, your site should do well in any search engine.

So what has been your experience with Bing? Good, bad or indifferent? Share your remarks in the comments.