Bing traffic in decline

Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, has been attracting the attention of surfers since its launch last week, though many seem to be losing interest.

According to statistics from web-monitoring firm Hitwise, Bing grabbed a significant share of web traffic when it launched.

"Traffic peaked on 3 June, when Bing was the eighth most visited website in the UK and the third ranked search engine, accounting for 10.8 per cent of the UK market," said Robin Goad of Hitwise.

"Since the initial launch hype, traffic to the site has declined," he continued.

Goad also said that 'facebook' was the most popular search on Bing and Google UK, though it accounted for 3.94 per cent of searches on Bing as opposed to 2.17 per cent on Google.

Hitwise's figures show that much of the traffic to Bing has come from other Microsoft sites and services.

"Looking at the upstream data, it is also clear that Bing relied on other Microsoft properties for most of its traffic: 45.8 per cent came from MSN UK, with a further 16.6 per cent from Windows Live Mail," said Goad.

However, there is some positive news; the average time spent on the site is eight-and-a-half minutes, suggesting that "people are actually spending time on the site and using it rather than just visiting out of curiosity" said Goad.