According to analytic reports, Bing has been sustaining its early growth and maintaining decent traction since it launched in late May. With over $100 million of marketing budget at stake, Bing started off bombastically well, leapfrogging Yahoo! two times and has been constantly getting positive reaction from every corner of the web.

Last month, the only search engine, except Google that had a significant rise in search market share was none other than Bing. It kept making the blogosphere binging all month long.

Whitney Burk, director at Microsoft Bing said…

“Microsoft believes people are not overly loyal to their search engines, and many are more than willing to switch to something new”

Adding Live.com, which is now redirecting to Bing.com , and MSN Search, which is now  ‘Bing Search’ , the combined search engines have grown at an average of 16 percent during June 2009.

Mike Hurt, senior vice president, ComScore quoted…

“It appears that Microsoft Bing has continued to generate interest from the market for the second consecutive week. These early data reflect a continued positive market reaction to Bing in the initial stages of its launch.”

The fact that Microsoft has secured a five-year deal with ‘Verizon Wireless’ to support its subscribers with preloaded default search engine on mobile phones and another presumption that Apple is probable to get into a bi-yearly agreement with Verizon after agreement with AT&T expires, the audience for Bing has great possibilities in the future.

Recent efforts to further accelerate Bing’s usage has been its integration with Hotmail service. Notable Bing services such as Maps, Shopping, Travel, News, Videos are getting positive response from the users as well.

According to Alexa, Bing.com has skyrocketed to 38th worldwide rank and Compete.com ranks Bing.com as the 13th most popular website in the U.S.

After Bing’s debue, many users are also preferring to use two search engines on a preferential basis.

Although Bing has been getting natural buzz due to its product quality, the challenges for Bing will never end as its presence will only push Google to advance further. Anyways, its good to see search monopoly being challenged.

It’s getting close to two months since Bing made its debut but many folks are still not bothered to submit their site to Bing. We recently reported about the new bot for bing but we can still see many people ignoring an opportunity of getting plenty of traffic from a new and rising search engine, backed by Microsoft.

If your website or blog was well indexed by Live search engine bots, there are good chances that bing may have already started sending you organic traffic but if your blog is relatively new and you haven’t been updating your blog with fresh content, there may be a case that Bing bots may not catch you blog or site until you make the first move and get your blog crawled properly.

And we must admit that submitting your blog or website to bing couldn’t be easier than this. You just need to go here and submit your website or blog url there. That’s all about it.

If you’re acquainted with Google Webmasters Tools then Bing Webmaster tools is something you should ponder about.

Submitting your site to Bing has plenty of benefits such as:

• Getting quickly indexed in Bing search, if your site is relatively new.
• Getting additional search traffic, apart from Google
• Diversify your reach as it will only supplement your current search traffic

Although Bing had a decent and abuzzed launch but Microsoft isn’t getting carried away with this moment of success, simply because the dynamics can swing either way any moment. Bing leapfrogged Yahoo! twice so far but consistent win over Yahoo! in search battle is still to be achieved.

And now, it appears that team at Bing is focussing on a more critical factor that can influence the end users to actually make a Switch(from Google, of course): Search Engine Crawler efficiency using new Bing bot

The problem

Generally, if anyone who owns a web property(a website or a blog) on internet would need to judge how the abuzzed search engine(bing) stands in front of the De facto search destination(Google) then the first few searches are most probable to be ‘Ego‘ searches.

And if, the user realises that his website or Facebook/Twitter profile is making into the top ten search results then he may rate the search engine, much higher than normal and may also suggest his family and friends to switch to that search engine.

Now, as the majority of the websites or blogs aren’t as big and frequent as NYTimes or Wired, it’s probably one of the the toughest challenges for any search engine to keep everyone happy with the crawl rate and faster indexing of hundreds of millions of small and occasional-to-rarely updated websites/blogs, together with maintaining the Search relevance.

And i must admit that Bing, although step ahead of Google in many dimensions, is still a poor performer than Google when it comes to crawling and appreciating fresh and relevant content in its search results.

The latest Bing update addresses the above issue as they have finally worked out a new web crawler for Bing (or Bing bot).

The new Bing bot user agent string will be msnbot/2.0b, compared to the old msn crawler, which is  msnbot/1.1. Bing has decided not to change the name of the Bing bot (for no specific reasons). The crawler work is on priority for Bing now as it’s a critical factor for Bing and still needs a lot of work before standing competitive in front of Google in this regard.

Although Bing has a new crawler now but the old crawler(msnbot/1.1) will continue to persist.

One reason why we literally hate using Yahoo! search is because of the Stale search results it presents. We would be pleasantly surprised to see Bing bots indexing websites and blogs, faster than Google’s. (Are you hearing Bing bots?)

Here’s what Techcrunch has to say about this !

Bingsters…A term that defines a person who heard about Bing, the Decision engine by Microsoft, tried it..Loved it and started using it on a regular basis…

If you’re a “Bingster”, you’re definitely the one who gotta hang in here !!
We’ve just started off Bingsters.com, a blog that will talk about Bing, Bing and only Bing (and its competitors, of course).
Keep coming back !!!

Note: Bingsters has been started by Prashant Sharma, a Tech Blogger at TechPluto. Catch him at Twitter.