A large number of people, at least in the US, have recently made the switch to Bing. Part of this is because of Microsoft’s active efforts to promote its search engine.
Statistics do confirm that its market share is slowly on the rise.
And this much is sure that Microsoft is investing a fortune to make its search engine the number one contender for the illustrious throne of Internet search engines.
A minor part of this plan was to turn Bing into a verb — so that people could use it as a synonym for search. But while end users are all too pleased to say that they will “Google it”, the same is not the case with “Bing it”, at least not now.
A new report details this, saying that Microsoft actually thought that its search engine had chances to, shall we say, verb up. It didn’t quite pan out that way, but Redmond claims that it does not really care about this — as long as consumers use Bing instead of competitors like Google and Yahoo.
The general manager of influencer marketing at Bing, Adam Sohn, said in a statement for Fast Company.
“I think we’re conflicted but happy if someone said ‘Google it’ but they were going to Bing and giving us the query. The thing about Kleenex is once you pull it out of the box, it looks exactly the same, whereas with online products, the brands are a bit more forward.
So if you say, ‘I’m going to Google it,’ and you go to Bing — cause that’s what you have set as the default — over time, you’re going to understand the brand that you are using.”
And while no one really uses Bing as a verb these days, it appears that usage of the word in this sense is rare even Microsoft employees. As Mike Nichols, corporate VP and chief marketing officer of Bing put it:
“Some people say the verb — sometime they say, ‘Hey, Bing this’. But it’s rare.”
All said and done Bing is still playing a very key role for Microsoft and its future strategy.
The latest numbers from comScore reveal that around 18 percent of the searches performed in July were made with Bing, though Google maintains its search lairdship with a hefty 68 percent of the market in the United States.
And if these figures do not sound outright impressive, then they will when taken in context. Bing has recorded an impressive increase of 15.7 percent from the same month in 2012. For comparison purposes, Google has managed to improve its market share by only 0.2 points in the same period.
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They need to get Bing into movies and music. Have rappers and movie stars say “Bing It” or “Bing Me” in the things they put out.
They should probably do a Bing it Up campaign or contest.
Before MS had settled on a name they asked for input of suggested names. At that time I said the name is not as important as whatever name being easily used as a verb to indicate using it to search. To illustrate, I jokingly suggested the name “Goose” – so people could say ‘just goose it’. Silly name but it showed what I meant. They did NOT listen to such advice about usage as a verb… and settled on Bing, which is why it will never become a household name like Google or Kleenex.