A WebmasterWorld thread has grassroots reporting from parents in the UK about Bing's market share.
It seems like many UK children are really loving Bing, Microsoft's search engine. From the parent's perspective, the kids are coming home and talking about Bing, not Google. They are also telling their parents that Bing is what the home pages are set to on their school computers.
Here are some quotes from the thread:
My 11 year old was using my computer at the weekend and I noticed they used bing.com without any prompting from me for or against. A friend said that is because bing.com is the default search engine in schools at the moment. My kid seems perfectly happy with it.Watch out google, this is how the revolution begins!
I think I can help here. Many years back, I am pretty sure I heard on the BBC that Bill (Gates) made a deal with the British government to give computers to every school in the UK. Now i don't think they are in any way mandated to use Bing, but I expect they are set up that way by default.But on top of that (not that I count for much) all five of the PC's in my house have Bing as the home page, and certainly, my kids (aged 9 and 10) use it by default. they certainly KNOW Google and use it alot as well, but they are the next generation - and the pretty picture counts.
As the moderator of the forum says, Bing is "Winning the hearts and minds" of these children.
Something for Google to worry about or this is just a few schools with Bing set as the default search engine?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
