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by sinaiman 5543 days ago
Microsoft inflates their search share statistics with sites like this: http://www.clubbing.com

Where they bribe people to play games that "search" on Bing in exchange for points they can use to buy things.

Additionally, this site is really easy to automate bots for (there are whole communities that work on this) in order to automate the prize winning process.

Even still, that's all good for Microsoft as far as I can tell, since even playing with bots brings up their share in the search market.
2 comments
sinaiman 5543 days ago
For anyone that can't tell what the site is about at first glance: it's a collection of word-based games (think text twist) and every time you guess/figure out some word correctly, a search to Bing is fired off in a separate frame.

The reasoning behind this Bing-fueled gaming experience is so that you can "research" words as you play...or something.

It's all very shady/hilarious.

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kyp 5543 days ago
Google is doing the same thing with A Google a Day: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383379,00.asp
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natmaster 5543 days ago
I'm not sure if hitwise includes this, but there are separate metrics tracked that do not include this (including it is silly). An interesting point however, is that the clubbing traffic is small, and never really goes up. So the basic idea of the article - that bing is still growing in share - is true, regardless of clubbing.
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sinaiman 5543 days ago
Hopefully it's separate.

I'm not sure how accurate compete.com is, but here are the stats for clubbing.com:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/clubbing.com/

They were pulling over 1 million uniques/month until January (not sure what happened in January). And now their traffic is indeed insignificant at about 200k for February 2011 (who knows how accurate this is).

However, if you factor that many of those unique hits are playing a game that fires off between 10-100 searches per play, well that's a lot of searches, especially if people play more than one game. Or maybe I'm wrong, as this is a bunch of guesstimating on my part.

Of course, I can see your point...in the grand scheme of things, Club Bing is probably just a drop in the bucket.

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