The latest U.S search rankings from media research firm Nielsen show that the search engine market is returning to stability after Bing’s rapid growth over 2009.
Bing’s rapid growth in the US market since it’s launch in June 2009 had made it increasingly interesting from a search engine marketing perspective. Many bloggers and commentators working at search engine optimisation companies and PPC agencies believed that Microsoft’s new search engine could offer a significant challenge to incumbent search engine leader Google.
Over 2009, statistics from Nielsen, Comscore and Hitwise suggested that Google was incrementally losing audience share in search, whilst Bing had a small but rapidly growing market share. However, the results for December suggest that this trend may have come to close.
Nielsen reports that in December, Google had a 67.3% share of the 9,945,576,000 searches made by users in the United States. This is a small but statistically significant growth on its November 2009 share of 65.4%.
For Bing, the new search engine saw its most significant drop in share since its launch in June. Though the new contender rapidly grew from 4% to 10% in just a few months, it seems that this growth has slowed significantly. In November, Bing had a market share of 10.7%, but in December 2009 this had fallen to 9.9%.
Although month-on-month changes in the search engine market are unlikely to be particularly significant in themselves, they offer an insight into how trends are developing in the short term. With Yahoo! Search share continuing to fall, Bing seems a likely replacement for second place in the search engine market in due time. Of course how the arrangement between Bing and Yahoo! affects this later in the year affects this remains to be seen.
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