1) Microsoft had two horses in the race, MSN and Live, both redirecting to Bing now.
2) Microsoft owns the largest botnet in the world; forcing a browser update and setting the home page to a Bing query is a good way to improve your ranking ;-)
3) I trust "statcounter" as much as I trust Compete, Alexa, and the other user-side traffic analysis and statistics services taken individually. Let's get data from a bunch of them and let's average them out, etc.
I work for Microsoft. Before bing 80% of internal search engine traffic was to google. The reason MS employees used google instead of live search was pretty much the same across the company - live search sucks.
However, MS employees finally have a decent search engine made by Microsoft. Bing is good. There are 100,000 employees that likely just switched from whatever they were using before to Bing. That might affect the stats a bit. Plus, those employees will tell their friends and families.
Does it have to dethrone Google to be a success? I don't think so. If they can take away 5 points in marketshare from from Google that is a huge success and will draw in a lot more money for Microsoft. If they take five points from Google, they are also likely to take away 5 points from yahoo and that is a huge gain. I think Bing is a good search engine, nothing revolutionary, but every product doesn't need to be revolutionary to be successful.
Also keep in mind Bing is a start. It's a change to the brand name timed with some fairly significant technical refreshes and some obvious ideological changes about search.
There is a lot more to the space of "search" as we move forward into the next decade, much of which Google, Yahoo and Microsoft haven't even tried to move forwards on. Hopefully the kind of technology and infrastructure related to search will start to be re-purposed for other uses.
I de-Googled my browser at work for the sake of trying out Bing and so far I've only needed to use Google once.
Overall I'm very happy with everything except a few search annoyances. Bing Image search vs. Google Images is no comparison, the Wikipedia "enhanced view" is simple but great, Live maps > Google Maps with the birds-eye view, so pretty much all my regular usage has been slightly improved by Bing.
That's a win and I'll probably stick with it for now. Right now I'm using Google just for comparison sake to see if Bing is "on track" with searches.
I think a lot of people are to the point where they are willing to give "Google competitors" a test drive, and most of them fail instantly (Cuil, etc.). Bing hasn't done that, so we're all pretty surprised.
I'm doing the same. For search results, Bing works. I prefer Google's prominent ranking of Wikipedia, but I've been able to find what I need on Bing in all but one case.
However, before this week, I was completely unaware of how frequently I use Google for non-search queries. Things like "-40 F in C" or searching for "Place X to Place Y" and clicking on "Maps" to get directions. Bing doesn't even come close to matching my expectations / muscle memory in those cases.
I am doing the same too. Bing is a perfectly good search engine for most things. I do need to go back to google to loner search terms, but for almost everything else Bing does a good job.
One thing to note though, I have not found any of the Bing features such as caterorization etc of any use.
Comparing results on the scientific domain I'm working on, my conclusion is that google result is still far more pertinent. For some unknown reason the result obtained from bing are strongly biased toward very specific institution.
Bing is not going to replace google any time soon and throwing millions in marketing campaigns won't turn it into a more useful and efficient search engine.
But there is room for improvement though, and more"competition" and valid alternatives would be beneficial for everybody. We are totally dependent on the answer returned by google who can the strongly bias the data we "find" on the web.
One of my favorite parts of Bing is the "Popular Now" items at the bottom. Very cool to add that "real time" feature, reminds me of the twitter "trending topics".
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=safari...
Come back in a month once the press frenzy has died down and we'll see.