Comscore’s latest report on the market share for the net’s biggest search engines has shown record figures for Google’s two biggest competitors.
Whilst month-to-month changes in the search market are generally of little significance, November 2009 was a different story for Bing! and Yahoo!. Last month each hit an all-time record share of the potential audience for search engine marketing, but for one it was an all-time low.
Bing was the more fortunate of the two search engines. Whilst it remains in third place for total share, its audience finally passed the 10% mark – growing from 9.9 percent in October to 10.3. As Doug Caverly on WebProNews remarked, this figure is a two-year high for Microsoft and is an impressive gain for a new entry into a market dominated by Google – and a remarkable gain on Yahoo!.
Comscore was less positive about Yahoo!’s performance. After months of incremental audience losses, the company has finally hit the all-time low share of 17.5 per cent. This is a 0.5% drop since October 2009 (18% to 17.5%).
These latest results are bound to be of interest for search engine marketing companies who operate SEO and PPC advertising outside of Google. Though the ‘search giant’ reported yet another incremental increase in its own share (65.4% to 65.6%), search engine marketing is far from a monopoly right now.
What these results call into question isn’t the strength of Google – it’s what it could mean for the future of search engine marketing beyond it. Yahoo! and Bing are set to become fairly interdependent in 2010, as part of a partnership that will see an exchange of technology, ad sales and content networks. With the former company fading slowly, and the latter rising gradually, will there be any dramatic change when they combine forces next year?
Related posts:
