Tuesday, Nov 17, 2009    Text size: 

Since making its debut in June, the adult-friendly search service has received positive reviews while continuing to claim more market share. As of this month, Bing commands 9.9 percent of the market.

The conventional wisdom surrounding Bing has long held that what’s good for Bing is good for adult. Its video search has received accolades for its dynamically loading thumbnails that play samples when users mouse over them. In addition, Microsoft established a porn-only subdomain at Explicit.Bing.net that lets system administrators filter out adult content at the server level.

But despite the increased traffic for Bing, it’s still no threat to Google. The search engine king just grabbed another half point during October while Bing was growing.

So who’s the casualty? Yahoo search, which dropped 0.8 percent over the same time period. In July, Yahoo cut a deal with Bing to combine their search engine traffic. According to the deal, Bing will power Yahoo search. All told, the two companies control the remaining third of search engine traffic.

That said, Bing continues to get good grades from the tech punditry, which praised its recent addition of real-time data from Facebook and Twitter. That means that Facebook status updates and Twitter entries, aka “tweets,” will enter into Bing’s search index.

In addition, Microsoft has improved the Bing video player. Instead of a simple search, users can now search and organize videos into a unified player.