Last week I wrote a post on a couple new search engines. One of the search engines mentioned was Bing – Microsoft’s new “decision” engine. Matthew also added a post about Bing too.
A resent study by Catalyst Group as quoted by Website Magazine suggests that users of Bing stay on the results page longer than searchers using Google. This is preliminary data and there were only 6 subjects in the test. Website Magazine conludes that staying on the site is positive but I’m not sure that the results of the study are fair. Google has been in the market place for over 6 years and consumers are very familiar with the interface. I’m sure the subjects looked at the result pages very quickly. In contrast, Bing is brand new and the interface is different (I don’t mind it actually). My guess is that the subjects were also new to Bing and as a result spent more time looking at the interface and the results.
What are your thoughts?
Jeff