Couple of months ago, i discussed the traffic distribution (or in other words the clickthrough rate) in the search results page of Google and now, a new study from Slingshot SEO has compared it to Bing’s search results page CTR. The results were quite interesting:

The first thing that it is very visually obvious is that total number of users that are clicking on the first page (organic) search results in Google is much bigger than in Bing’s page- About 52.3% in Google compared to 26.3% in Bing, about twice as much!

Another obvious thing is the similarity of the users search behavior- The overall CTR between positions in either Google and Bing is almost exactly alike.

My Thoughts About The CTR Gap

Although that the study is clearly stating that the CTR gap doesn’t necessarily mean that Google’s results are more reliable and it can relate to different demographic behavioral issues, i think otherwise. I think that it is exactly means that Google results are more reliable.

Even though that the demographics may be slightly different, the search behavior is pretty similar as we saw before. Another proof (as mentioned in the study) is that there are about 117 million monthly searches in Bing for the query “Google” where there are only 4 million “Bing” monthly searches in Google!

The reliability or quality differences shouldn’t come as a surprise because it is also reflects very clearly in the search engine market share– Google holds for a very long time the 65%-70% US market share, while Bing barely scratches the 15% (without Yahoo). If we examine it worldwide, the gap is even bigger…

Yet, i wouldn’t disqualify Bing completely. After completely taking over Yahoo just recently, they have a combined share of about 30% in the US, which is definitely a powerful referral force that can contribute a lot to your work from home.