14 Ways Microsoft Is Juicing Bing's Search Traffic

Microsoft's Bing search engine has gobbled up a pretty impressive share of the search market since launching last May.
In February, Bing accounted for 11.5% of the U.S. search market, according to comScore, up from 8% last May. Microsoft's success has largely come at Yahoo's expense: Yahoo fell down to an all-time low of 16.8% of the search market in February, down from 20.1% last May.
So, how is Microsoft doing it? In part, no doubt, by growing organically via a better search product. In particular, people seem to like Bing's shopping, travel, and maps products more than they used to.
But Microsoft is also employing a bunch of paid and non-paid measures to get people to make Bing searches that they may not have ordinarily made. These including buying up toolbar deals, advertising, and building Bing search queries into other products, such as the wildly popular MSN.com homepage.
Are we missing anything? Let us know in comments and we'll add to the list.
1.Organic search traffic growth is arguably most important: Making a more interesting, more pleasant search engine than Live or MSN search were

2.Installing Bing toolbars on PCs through companies like HP has been a big driver for Bing

3.Building Bing searches into word games at ClubBing.com, giving people prizes and other incentives to play games, which generate Bing searches

4.Flooding the popular MSN portal with links to Bing search queries is a big driver

5.If you click in the MSN homepage's "Popular Searches" box, for instance, it takes you to a Bing search results page



6.Clicking on one of the links on the MSN homepage's "Trend Watch" takes you to a Bing search results page of Twitter searches

7.Clicking on one of the Local Events links on the MSN homepage takes you to a Bing event search results page

8.Clicking one of the Shopping links on the MSN homepage takes you to a Bing shopping search page

9.Bing Cashback also gives people an incentive to do their shopping searches at Bing: A few percent cash back on purchases

10.Microsoft has been advertising Bing on TV, as part of an ad campaign estimated up to $100 million. Bing ads will start airing in the U.K. next.


11.It's also advertising on mobile apps, including Apple's iPhone



12.And it's advertising on social networks, in places like Farmville


13. Making mobile apps, including this one for the iPhone


14.Throwing parties, hoping people will remember to use Bing to research hangover cures the morning after too many "Bingtinis"