When is bing the right choice and google the right choice? I figure with their market shares that it would be pretty normalized. Just curious why there's a big difference between the two search engines in terms of users.
I run lots of PPC for lots of clients, and Bing is very relevant. Their UI has been painful, and the quantity of their search traffic varies wildly compared to Google, but it is also much cheaper.
Bing traffic by and large tends to be older, more affluent, and less tech literate... people who don't tend to change their default search engine. For many types of businesses, this is ideal. Also we have had good results in tech B2B marketing with Bing. My theory is that most MS sysadmins don't want to run chrome on their servers but surf from their boxes and get lazy. Also porn.
The big story with Bing is its tight integration with Windows, XBox, Cortana, etc. Their research direction per Stefan Weitz has been to focus on making natural language search really work. Less effort has been invested in trying to keep up with Google and more has been trying to create a different search experience.
When Cortana really hits the main stage this summer/fall, we'll be seeing the manifestation of Bing at its fullest, and if they really get the Neural Networks nailed they could pull off a big shift in how people search, and also how people advertise...
This coincides with my theory explaining why bing is bigger in the US and not Europe. European regulators forced microsoft to make it easy to switch search engines/browsers, and users when given the choice tend to choose google. That means bing is successful due to being a microsoft product forced upon its users.
