The fluctuations in search engine market share is generally only of interest to those in the industry. However the latest report from ComScore on the US market has reached beyond the normal audience of SEO consultants and PPC advertisers to make headlines on BBC News, as Bing’s first full year comes to an end with an impressive rate of growth.
Comscore’s latest figures show that over the past year, Microsoft search – which was relaunched as Bing in June 2009 – has expanded its share of the US market from 8.4% to 12.7%. Out of the ‘big three’, Microsoft was the only company to expand its share of search over the past year.
Google has retained overall dominance of the market yet its share has seen a statistically significant drop from 65% to 62.6%. Meanwhile Yahoo, soon to be integrated with Bing, has dropped from 19.6% to 18.9%. These figures include all partner searches and cross channel searches though they exclude custom searches on user websites.
However the BBC reports that Bing’s executives still say there is a “long road ahead” for their service. Speaking to BBC news at a Microsoft Summit discussing the search engine’s progress, Satya Nadello of the company’s online division said “There is something that we are doing that is clearly resonating but that said we are a low share player. We have barely gotten into double digits but we want this to grow into a significant business for Microsoft.”
ComScore’s figures also revealed that the US search market has continued to expand over the past year, growing 17.2% from 14 billion searches in June 2009 to 16.4 billion in 2010. This year Google, Yahoo and Microsoft respectively accounted for 10.3bn, 3.1bn and 2.1bn searches.
Related posts:
