A study by Chitika, a search-advertising network, was reported on by Tech Crunch on July 24th. Chitika’s report found that Bing users clicking an organic search result were 55% more likely to click an ad on the website they subsequently visited than Google users. Chitika has over 50,000 websites on their network which based their data on over 32 million ad impressions.

If you take the time to read the Tech Crunch entry, be sure to discount the part about the Law of Large Numbers — a probability theory concept which has zero applicability here because there’s no way to determine an expected value when we don’t know the reasons some users choose to use Bing and others Google.

As pointed out in one of the comments, Bing has spent a large sum on advertising — it would seem plausible to suggest that these users may be more open to advertising, granted many of them probably found out about Bing through advertisements.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the possibility of Bing powering Yahoo search — something which would give Microsoft’s search engine an approximately 28% search market share and position it as a much stronger competitor to Google than Bing or Yahoo currently are.

Related posts:

1. Goodbye Yahoo Search
2. Google’s Search Market Share Falling
3. Should Google Be Regulated?