Many top websites today include additional features on the site’s pages. One of those is a Google search box, which is integrated with the site-specific search box. You can easily type in a keyword phrase and choose whether to search the site or Google for that information.
A new WebMasterWorld thread though has some webmasters considering a switch to Bing’s search box.
Each has their reasons with one of the big ones being the ease at which the change can be made. One contributor says he’s interested in changing because Google’s “AdSense for Search” already has a plethora of information about his visitors. While he understands Microsoft will get this information too, he feels it will slow the amount of information Google collects in a day.
Another webmaster gives his initial impressions:
- Easy to setup
- Results are excellent
- Results look good
- Search box books better than Google
- Likes the pop-up results window
- Loads in all browsers except Opera, which only displays it periodically
All of our sites currently contain the Google search box. Would we consider changing?
Perhaps – from the sounds of these comments, Bing’s site search functions work pretty well.
But Google remains the top search engine and actually gained market share in September. Bing is listed #3 by comScore and while they have an ongoing partnership with Yahoo, both of them put together still take less than half of the market share Google does.
See the chart below:
| Explicit Core Share* of U.S. Searches Among Leading Providers, September 2010 vs August 2010 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Share of Searches (%) | ||||
| Domain | August 2010 | September 2010 |
Month-over-Month Point |
|
| Google Sites | 65.4 | 66.1 | 0.7 | |
| Yahoo Sites | 17.4 | 16.7 | -0.7 | |
| Microsoft Sites | 11.1 | 11.2 | 0.1 | |
| Ask Network | 3.8 | 3.7 | -0.1 | |
| AOL Network | 2.3 | 2.3 | 0.0 | |
|
Note: Data is based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers. *Excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with search results. |
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| Source: comScore 2010 | ||||