A month after Bing launched in May 2009, Chitika Research reported that Bing's click-through rate (CTR) was 50 percent better than Google's. We thought this wasn't much of a big deal, as Bing was only one month old, but new data from Chitika shows that little has changed even six months after the decision engine's debut, and Microsoft is still beating the two other search giants, Yahoo and Google.

Bing's CTR is now more than 75 percent higher than Google's; Microsoft's search engine is better at getting users to click an ad that companies pay to have placed in search results. This means publishers should be concentrating on driving more Bing traffic to their site, and Bing's success will last about as long as its advertising budget will carry it.

One must remember, however, that while Chitika's ads serve only on search traffic, these numbers are only based on a sample of traffic from the Chitika advertising network and are therefore not very representative of the rest of the Internet. Furthermore, Bing is still a distant third place in terms of traffic sent, so even if driving one Bing user (or AOL or Ask user) to your site can be more valuable than driving one Google user, there are far fewer such users in the first place.