Lately we are seeing more and more evidence that Google maybe loosing its grip on the search field. Personally the UK results are the most shocking I have seen for years http://www.seotops.com/is-google-losing-its-touch_1061/
In northern California (where Internet trends begin) --- Google continues to build its market share. We get about 80% of our search traffic from Google. (only 10% from Yahoo, about 4% from MSN) Google losing touch? Hardly, its been dominating the US search traffic with no letting up!
I still get about 75% of my traffic from google so I don't think so but I have also started seeing increasing number of hits from Bing on some of my bigger sites...
If you read the post I am talking about the state of the current UK results... These are the type of results that we were seeing years ago Obviously I know Google is delivering the most traffic been in the industry for years Personally Bing/live is delivering better results at the moment since Googles shakeup
This is kind of a slippery slope. Its all in the eye of the beholder who is returning better results. I think the best way to determine who is doing better is through market share like others have suggested. And Google still dominates. I figure that is 80% of searchers are using Google, then they are obviously returning the best results for the broadest cross section of users.
Have you looked at your stats and searches since bing has been introduced i am getting more traffic now from msn than it was live its up over 50% compared to live. Which google has dropped in searches in my stats and mainly the stats I look at has a google page 3 ranking.
I agree with your summary of the UK results. For searchers I think the results have gone downhill with lots of US and Australian sites in the SERPs. For the keywords I've looked at, UK sites still dominate the top 4 or 5 slots then more irrelevant US etc. sites fill positions 6 down. If you're a UK site in the top 5 this might be good for you as everyone else is selling in dollars: for searchers though it's definitely a poorer service.
there's been something odd about UK results for the last month or more -something about the last update - the 'vince' update? - did something really peculiar to geo-targeting.
too much spam in the index now. I'm seeing lots of gateway pages popping up for a few days for several high keywords. They pop up for a day, than they disappear on the second third pages before getting removed eventually. But some last for weeks - only to be replaced with other spam pages once they are removed. Google needs to tighten up because gateway and landing pages are on the rise.
I really do not think the K Google traffic and search volumes are dropping. You can find a lot of UK based webmasters and sites having quite the opposite idea. Bing can be great but since the same folks are working on it as they once did about Live, I doubt it will become that popular.