Despite a large advertising campaign, the early returns don't look good for Bing. Granted, the hundred or so sites that I own or manage are statistically insignificant when compared to all of the sites on the web, but the data is still interesting to look at.

We have sites that on the low end get about 4,000 unique visitors a month and on the high end have over 100,000 unique visitors a month and interestingly enough no matter the traffic volume each one has about a 0.5% increase in traffic with Bing over MSN. If these results are typical across the web then Microsoft would have to be extremely disappointed to say the least. My guess is that in the first month they targeted an increase of 3%-5% and hoped to build on that.

Does anyone else care to share Bing vs. MSN traffic results?

I guess the bigger question is, "Why are people so enamored with Google?" Let's face it, when a search produces 5 million results there are probably hundreds of sites with enough relevant information to be #1 in the rankings so I don't think you can definitively say the quality of search results is the answer (especially with SEO's doing their devil work to push sites to the top).

In fact, I would say that in many ways Google's returned results over the past month or so are much worse than in the past.

Aesthetically Google is a piece of junk, so it's not like there's a WOW factor bringing people to G.

Why do the overwhelming majority of people prefer to use Google over any other search engine? Personally, I think we're all lemmings.

I don't use Bing and I guess the reason is down to my loyalty to Google and the reason for that is simple, I admire their business model and the Darwinian methodology behind the search Algo. 

Also, from a practical point of view, they account for 9/10 daily UK searches so I have to focus on them in my job.  In that respect I very much follow the trends rather than trying to set them.

Totally agree.

The no fuss interface does it for me, it's as good as a blank page, nothing to take the eye away from the task at hand, searching for what you actually need.

I know it might seem a small point to some, but due to page size, ads, images and god knows what else, yahoo and msn have always been slower. Bing is a little cleaner, but what does it offer me that google doesnt?

I use Google because...well, actually just because I always have

Even before I got involved in SEO I used Google and although I tried Bing when it first launched I quickly reverted back. I do agree with the Lemming analogy though.

Plus since Google is the most important engine for all of my clients, the majority of my focus lies there anyway.