Leaked numbers reveal size of Microsoft's Bing empire, shades Cortana

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Being a distant second place player, Microsoft has been reluctant to share exact numbers regarding the progress of their Bing search engine, except to report consistent growth in revenue and that the project is cash-flow positive (likely around $2.5 billion per quarter).

Now however an undated leaked slide posted by WalkingCat has given us some insight into the size of the Bing search engine and ad network.

The numbers reveal that Bing Search has 450M+ monthly active users and processes 10.5 Billion queries/month.  By comparison, Google Search reportedly delivers 168 billion searches per month.

According to the slide Microsoft News & Edge, IE also had approximately ~450M+ monthly active users. By comparison, Twitter has 320 million monthly active users.

Bing Ads has 300,000+ clients placing ads and 10,000 partners who use its API.

Microsoft has previously said the Windows 10 Search Box significantly boosted the Bing search engine, and now we can see why. According to the stat it offered nearly 50% as any monthly active users, serving 196 million users every month.

Interestingly Microsoft’s mobile products including the Bing App, Edge and the Microsoft Launcher delivered 51 million monthly active mobile Bing users.  Given how small this ecosystem is, only can easily imagine a point where Microsoft’s small mobile presence delivers more searchers than the desktop Windows Search users.

Microsoft Search in Bing is a new product that lets you get search results both from the web and from your organization from the Bing search engine, much like how Windows Search mixes up web and local file searches. That enterprise product has only 276,000 monthly active users, but one can again imagine this growing in the future with more enterprise adoption.

The one black sheep in the list of arguably impressive for their scale numbers is Cortana, which for some reason (probably related to embarrassment) does not rate any numbers.

While all these numbers pale in comparison to Google, which after all has 90% of the search market worldwide, meaning any competitor will almost automatically be 10 times smaller, they do in most cases mean Microsoft is Google’s biggest competitor.

What do our readers think of the stats? Let us know below.

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