Unless you’re completely new to the internet industry, or have been on vacation for the past two weeks, you’ve probably heard a lot about Bing, Microsoft’s slick new search engine.

On June 1st, Microsoft officially launched Bing with $100M ad campaign, including TV commercials, and started redirecting traffic from Live Search and vertical search engines like Farecast over to Bing.com.

So how’s it going? At first glance, not too bad.

One week since launching, Bing has raised Microsoft’s searcher penetration by 2.3ppts to 11.4%.

We trended the daily change in searcher penetration over the past week to show how marketing and buzz around the Bing launch has greatly extended the reach it inherited from MSN/Live.

A 2.3ppt improvement on a 9.1% penetration base is impressive. Yet this uptick hasn’t come at the expense of Google or Yahoo!, which have maintained searcher penetration since Bing’s launch.

New searchers are exploring Bing, but they haven’t forsaken their preferred engines and made the switch completely.

That’s also evident in a critical engagement metric: queries per searcher. Bing has significantly dropped Microsoft’s average queries per searcher since launch.

Prior to Bing’s launch, Microsoft maintained an average 5.2 queries per searcher. Since Bing’s launch, the average has dropped by 1.3 queries or 25%, with millions dropping by just to perform a couple of trial queries.

Those trial searchers haven’t produced significant enough volume to impact the established market share of the top engines, which account for more than 12 billion queries, according to Compete’s panel.

Since Bing’s launch, the average daily market share of the top engines has remained essentially unchanged. If anything, the day of week fluctuations in Google’s massive query base has overshadowed Microsoft’s uptick from Bing’s launch.

So Bing has had great success in attracting new searchers, but these have been dabblers that have not given up on their old engines (yet) and not generated enough queries to move the needle.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be watching Bing to see where these dabblers are coming from (Google? Yahoo!?) and, critically, if they will return to Bing for more than just a trial run.

May search term biggest movers are here! What terms drove the greatest monthly query volume spike? Let’s take a look at the fastest growing (and declining) terms since last month to get a better idea of the trend in consumer search interest.

Findings:

• Rumors have surfaced around the divorce of Jon and Kate Plus 8 parents Jon and Kate Gosselin
• Photos of the car crash that killed Nikki Catsouras on Halloween 2006 continue to plague her family
• Kris Allen is crowned the winner of American Idol Season 8!
• In preparation for Mothers Day, loving children were looking for poems and flowers for mom

Findings:

• As we get further from the most feared day of the year (Tax Day - April 15th), searches for the IRS and tax related software continue a steep decline
• Susan Boyle wowed watchers of Britains Got Talent, but she lost her second in the spotlight
• While fear of the swine flu hasn’t subsided, it’s started to take a back seat in terms of search incidence

With a new engine coming into play (Microsoft’s Bing launched in early June), what will be the impact on search term? Will top TV show searches still influence a good portion of the search term movement? Check back next month for the Fastest Moving Terms of June.

Last month, we posted on how paid clicks (or “sponsored referrals,” to be a bit more precise) dropped precipitously on economic concerns and improved targeting. I received a couple of inquiries about what exactly this meant, so I’d like to take a quick minute and explain.

First, Compete uses the term “referrals” instead of clicks because we track both queries and referrals. You click your mouse twice when you search: once on the search bar and once on the result. (Yes, you can also press enter, but that still makes a clicking noise, at least on my keyboard.) We think of the first click as a query and the second as a referral.

Then, as most people know, there are two types of referrals: sponsored vs. natural. (Also known as paid vs. algorithmic.) Sponsored referrals are how search engines make most of their money.

So, the rate of sponsored referrals (=sponsored/total) is probably the second or third most important search metric, after volume and share of queries. (That’s from the competitive perspective we take here in the Search Market Share series. If you’re talking user experience, search fulfillment would be a better metric.)

To reflect that importance, we’ve added some data to our monthly Market Share data. Now the Sponsored Referrals section includes the rate from a Year Prior.

As you can see, Sponsored Referrals look very different than a year ago. Last month, Google’s rate of Sponsored Referrals maintained 6.2%, which was down from 6.8% vs. a year ago.

Theories abound for why this took place. Some argue that Google has become better at targeting which Sponsored Results appear after a query, and is thus able to charge more per referral while serving less ads. Others claim that marketers have scaled back due to the economy and the ad inventory simply isn’t there.

The argument for the latter certainly looks to be true when we take a look at a trended rate of Sponsored Referrals over the past 12 months. Note the big spike and drop-off for Google, Yahoo! and MSN before and after the holiday shopping season, when search marketers spend most heavily.

MSN/Live’s Sponsored Referrals also slipped a bit last month, falling to 3.1%. Since MSN/Live transformed into Bing on June 1st (we’ll post more on Bing’s launch tomorrow) early tests show that Bing is better at attracting eyeballs to search ads than Google. In the coming months, we’ll see how Bing performs on Sponsored Referrals in Compete’s behavioral data.

Finally, not much changed in May in terms of query volume and share, so I hope no one missed our usual Market Share coverage. Not to worry, we’ll be back next month to cover Share changes, with special attention for Bing.

Today I lost a bet by wagering against the web savvy of the average American. While generally a safe gamble, the people proved me wrong. Only 5% of searches are for strings users could have just typed directly into their browser. I had guessed much higher.

As most search analysts know, the top drivers of search traffic to your domain are basically always the domain name and its common misspellings. It has always served as good online analytics small talk over how frequently one of the top 10 search terms is literally the exact URL of the domain. The second biggest driver of search traffic to compete.com is the search phrase “compete.com.”

To figure out how often this happens across the Internet we analyzed all of the search queries made across all the major search engines in April. We found that 5% of queries were for URL strings that the user could have typed directly into their browser. Specifically, we queried what percentage of searches had no spaces in them and included either “.com”, “.net” or “.org”. Since our panel is U.S. based we didn’t look at searches for international sites.

I had bet that fully 15% of searches were going to be navigational.

We call these kind of navigation searches ‘mom searches’ after our beloved mothers, who are exceptionally proud of us here at Compete, but frequently baffled by what we do. That said, there are a plenty of good reasons for typing a URL into a browser. The 5th most searched for domain is hotmail.com, which no longer exists and instead currently routes you to live.com. No doubt hotmail users are still wondering where their domain went. My favorite reason, not surprisingly, is that it’s a quick way to search for meta-information about that site (though coming to Compete.com is faster).

Also of note is that domains are not necessarily searched for in proportion to their overall popularity. The most searched for domain, myspace.com, is 10th in terms of unique visitors to the domain itself. Many of the searches for this site are actually people searching for specific pages or bands such as myspace.com/DataRocks.

American Idol fans doubled down in Adam Lambert searches as the “glam-rock sex god” delivered one hit performance after another last month. Lambert’s query share grew to over 1.3 million queries as fans flocked to see his “leather and spandex glory.”

Earth Day was April’s other top mover – skyrocketing nearly seven-fold to 800k searches. Earth Day also improved share by .006% — no small feat given April’s 13+ billion queries.

Rounding out the rest of the list were the familiar signs of Spring with the MLB, Kentucky Derby and Mother’s Day all taking terms in the top slots.

Last month, searchers also said goodbye to Natasha Richardson, the English actress who died tragically in a ski accident. Her death captured enormous media and popular attention, reaching 4.7 million queries in March. Searchers also moved on after The Bachelor season ended with another happy long-term couple. Queries for the show fell from 1.4 million to 40k.

The Watchman movie, NCAA March Madness and AIG rounded out the list of search terms that lost the public’s interest in April.

Search market share and query volume didn’t change much in April, 2009, but sponsored referrals at some of the leading search engines took a big hit.

Last month, query volume dipped a slight 5.4% at the leading search engines, and nearly all maintained their March market share. Concerns over Swine Flu, Opening Day at baseball parks across the country and buzz over Twitter weren’t enough to move the query dial into black.

However, amid discussions of a slow growth in sponsored referrals relative to query volume, Google’s rate of sponsored referrals dropped a sharp 0.6% in April, possibly attributable to search marketer cutbacks given the uncertain economy, as well as improved targeting from the search engines. Google maintained impressive 9+ billion queries or 73.3% of share.
Yahoo! also saw a sharp decrease in sponsored referral rate, falling to 6.3%, while query volume and market share were essentially flat. Again, improved targeting and economic conditions appear to be the cause.
Lastly, Ask saw a dramatic fall of 1.7pts to 4.5% rate of sponsored referrals, bringing it back to levels from a couple of months ago. Ask’s query volume and market share were essentially flat.

To recap, not much new in terms of query volume and market share, but sponsored referrals took a good lick in April, 2009.

• Google query volume dipped a slight 5.0% and market share stayed essentially flat at 73.3%. Meanwhile sponsored referral rate fell to 6.2%
• Yahoo! query volume and market share were essentially flat, while sponsored referral rate fell to 6.3%.
• MSN/Live hovered at 6.2% market share, while rate of sponsored referrals actually grew slightly.
• Ask maintained 2.4% share and a second tier rate of sponsored referrals at 4.5%.
• AOL slid slightly to 0.6% market share, continuing to 82 million searches in April.

*Search market share includes web search only for the Adult US Online Population and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.