02
2009
Bing Leads in Successful Canadian Searches
A couple of weeks ago we posted data on the success rate of Canadian searches, noting in particular that only 30% of Canadian Internet searches are “successful”. A couple of readers asked us to share success rate by search engine. The following chart shows the success rate of the top 10 search engines in Canada in the twelve weeks to August 29, 2009. Note that Bing enjoyed the highest success rate among these leading search engines, with a 78.74% success rate, closely followed by Yahoo! Search Canada at 77.45%.
Hitwise Canada: Top 10 Search Engines (by share of searches). Twelve weeks to August 28, 2009
Hitwise defines a successful search as one where the consumer leaves the search engine after performing a search. As Matt McGee of Search Engine Land points out Bing.com beat out the Canadian specific search engines of Google and Yahoo! as well as the international (dot com) domains.
Once again, the relatively low success rate of Canadian searches offers an obvious opportunity for search engines to improve relevance but also provides search marketers an opportunity to use geo-targeting to ensure Canadian searchers are being presented with Canadian websites in search results.
Addendum
Thanks to those who commented on this post, challenging our definition of success rate. First, let me clarify our definition of success rate. A successful search occurs when a user, after having conducted a search goes on to visit a downstream website other than a search engine, within a specific time period. We also wanted to provide some additional data and analysis to address some of the concerns raised. You are right, for some searches, the goal isn’t to leave the search engine. However, let’s dig into the data a bit further to understand what’s really going on.
The highest volume searches are for brand names. For these high volume searches, consumers are essentially using the search engine as a navigational aid. For example, the top searches in Canada in the past twelve weeks were “facebook”, “youtube”, “facebook login” and “facebook.com”. While the overall numbers I provided in my post are a useful benchmark, it is perhaps more helpful to look at success rate by search engine for some individual keywords. For those four highest volume keywords, Bing enjoys a higher success rate for all of them. Same goes for searches for “ebay”, “canadian tire”, “air canada”, “walmart canada” and “kijiji edmonton”. There certainly are navigational terms for which Google leads Bing, such as “walmart” and “westjet”.
For the majority of the high volume navigational search terms I looked at, Bing beats out Google on the measure of moving people off of the search engine and over to the retailers’ websites. With commercial searches it makes sense to think of searches that leave the search engine to visit another site as being “successful”.
While navigational terms see the highest volumes, I also looked at some of the more common generic (or non-branded) terms. Google faired better than Bing on many of these searches. For example, on searches for “free online games”, Google enjoyed an 86.51% Success Rate compared to Bing’s 85.13% and for “jeux” (French for “games”), Google enjoyed an 89.02% Success Rate to Bing’s 81.27%. However, Bing led Google on “games” and “horoscope”.
These are only the highest volume terms and don’t take into account low volume searches for things such as phone numbers, conversions (currency, volume, etc.), or translation. However, this does help further explain how we arrived at the figures we published earlier this week showing that Bing enjoys the highest success rate among the major search engines.
I welcome additional suggestions and comments.
Your definition of success is a BIG and risky assumption.
Here are regular scenario’s where I find myself searching and NOT clicking to be a success…
- Looking for a telephone number of a company, find the number in the snippet
- Looking for a spelling suggestion, don’t have to click to an actual dictionary as the results are self-explanatory
- Quick “popularity scans”. Type in anything you are interested in, with “scam”, “fraud”, “waste” etc. and just gauge the results without clicking in to any. The number of results offer the answer, as do the snippets.
There are more scenario’s but they basically tell me that assuming a success only occurs when they click off the results page, well, that’s a bit shortsighted.
Better would be “Either clicks through OR searching something completely different next” though that still doesn’t cater for all scenario’s mentioned.
Bing Serves Up Most Successful Canadian Searches
Last month, Hitwise shared data showing the paltry number of Canadian searches deemed successful . Far
It sounds like Hitwise’s definition is “A successful search is defined as one where the consumer leaves the search engine after performing a search.” In another words, the user does a query and then goes somewhere else. That doesn’t sound the same as success to me; it just sounds like leaving the site.
Are you able to determine whether the user clicked on a search result vs. just left the search engine to go to another site? There’s a difference between an abandoned search and clicking on a search result, but both result in the user searching and then going to a different site. By Hitwise’s definition, wouldn’t doing a query on Bing and then going to Google or Yahoo count as a “successful search” on Bing? I’m also assuming that you can’t measure if the user got the information that they needed from the search results without needing to click to another site.
I think the phrase “successful search” is considerably less accurate than “left the site after searching,” because someone can leave a site for lots of different reasons.
This is interesting data. Bing and Yahoo are very close to each other. We will see what happens to Bing when all the advertising lets up a bit.
With the recent Algo changes in Google effecting UK searchers, i would be interested to see if Canada is having the same issues UK searchers are. That is being offered up inappropriate sites for local searches (eg Australian sites for restaurants in the UK etc)
Has Hitwise noticed an increased usage in appending “UK” to a search. Eg Plumber UK. rather than just “Plumber”. Is this the same in Canada?
I find it interesting that Matt Cutts has posted above. I would love him to answer this question to.
Interesting post from Matt, what would be even more interesting would be a measure of the success of an actual query. The percentage of users that found what they were looking first time vs. those that needed to refine the search query, use an advanced search option or leave the site (maybe for another search engine).
Not sure this is possible from the Hitwise data set but the SE’s will I’m sure have a handle on this?
Bing is currently dropping sites and pages like theres no tomorrow (just like MSN always has done)i’ve noticed this with several sites.. they do come back though in the majority of cases.
Bing is a joke.. the all new search engine, yet behaves exactly the same as MSN and returns the same results.
Cheers
Jessica
jessica@ forexsoftware-free.info