Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Fancy Charts of the Week: It Might Be Bingtastic, but Users Heart Google the Way Gum Loves a Sneaker!

As a new weekly feature, BoomTown is calling all those who make cool graphs, charts and stats done prettily about tech to send them to me pronto.

I am–truth be told–a secret stats fanatic. A bargraphaholic. Yes, even a closet pie-charter.

Last week, it was graphs comparing app stats for the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and the Google Android smartphone.

This week, I decided to mash up two different and interesting surveys, both from comScore (SCOR), about the search market.

When you do this, you find that while the new Bing search engine from Microsoft (MSFT) is showing some impressive growth–up a half-point in July from June to an 8.9 percent share, as you see below (click on images to make them larger)–the software giant still has a long way to go to get some true love from consumers.

That’s because, according to an earlier report, while some think Google (GOOG) is just a habit, it turns out to be an obsessive one.

As you can see from another bunch of recent comScore data in the table below–comparing search penetration, share of searches and searches per searcher in the U.S. in June–even combining Microsoft and Yahoo (YHOO) is unimpressive compared to Google.

The search share for Google is much higher and its users do double the searches, even though penetration levels are closer among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Plus, the Googley ways seem to prompt more loyalty, as the next table shows. In fact, even users of Microsoft and Yahoo sites conduct double their searches on Google.

And, while Microsoft search execs will tell you off the record that this kind of stickiness is hard to dislodge–sort of like gum on your sneaker–given Bing’s recent search gains, it’ll be interesting to see them try.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik