Sorry, Bing fans, but Microsoft’s new search engine seems to have stumbled before it even cleared the figurative gates.  Fresh statistics from two different sources indicate that visits to Bing are already dropping.

Bing’s first few days of existence were very exciting.  It passed Yahoo in the search rankings, and impressed 55 percent of one poll’s respondents to the point that they could see themselves using the Microsoft product instead of Google.

(Credit: Hitwise)
 

Hitwise’s Robin Goad has created a graph representing Bing’s share of Internet visits in the UK, however, and Bing apparently peaked on June 3rd.  Or if you prefer to go with StatCounter’s data, Bing hit its highest point on June 4th.

Either way, it’s rather embarrassing for something so new to top out so soon.  But Bing isn’t doomed.  A major advertising campaign has yet to kick into high gear, so the general public may still embrace what potential early adopters seem to have "meh"ed.

Also, Goad wrote, "one positive sign is that average visit time has increased to eight and a half minutes. This is half of Google UK’s number but only slightly below Yahoo! UK Search, implying that the people are actually spending time on the site and using it rather than just visiting out of curiosity."