Last December toolbar startup Conduit announced they were bailing on Google search in favor of Bing.
In January Bing surged in search market share, up over 2 points to 12.8%.
You wouldn’t think Conduit was the main force behind the rise. But the data suggests it is.
Conduit didn’t just bail on Google in favor of Bing. They also changed the way they do search. They previously put Google results onto their own domain. Now when someone searches from the Conduit toolbar the user is results are shown on Bing.com directly. So Conduit is losing all those page views and sending them to Bing.
Look at this comparison of Bing and Conduit from Alexa:
Comscore shows much the same mirror effect. Bing added 138 million more page views worldwide in January than December, and Conduit lost 165 million in the same period.
Coincidence, or cause and effect? That Conduit search deal may have been a lot more important than anyone realized at the time it was announced.
Conduit empowers web and mobile publishers to engage their users across multiple platforms. From Community Toolbars and mobile apps to notifications and web bars, the company’s products enable publishers to constantly connect with their users wherever they are. Conduit’s innovative solutions have made it the fastest-growing network of publishers in the world, with more than 260,000 publishers of all sizes generating billions of monthly interactions with their 250 million users. Major League Baseball, Groupon, Fox News, Travelocity, and The...
Bing is a decision (search) engine from Microsoft officially announced on May 28, 2009. It combines technology from the Farecast and Powerset acquisitions, as well as new algorithms and a more colorful page design, to attempt to understand the context behind the search, which Microsoft claims gives users better results. Bing as a brand is also an attempt to eliminate the confusion caused by Microsoft’s “Windows Live” branding. Bing is now everything “search” related, whereas Windows Live encompasses the remnants...
Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured. Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market. Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and...
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