Bing continues to slowly gain search market share while Google sees a drop
Summary: As the months pass, Bing continues to gain market share over Google in the search market. Here are February 2011's numbers.
Compete has reported their numbers for February 2011's search market share and the results are interesting. To quote their post:
- With fewer days in February, search query volume across the 5 engines was down nearly 12% MOM.
- The trend for search market share continues with Google losing incremental share (-0.7ppt), while Bing continues to gain share (+1.0ppt).
- All engines except Bing experienced a decline in unique visitors in February, with Bing seeing a 7.6% increase in UVs MOM.
- Bing Powered engines (Yahoo! and Bing) continued to increase its share of market to 30.8%.
- Both ASK and AOL’s share remained flat from January to February.
Other companies may provide sets of data that paint a different picture, but if these numbers are accurate, we may well start paying more attention to Bing as SEOs in the not-so-distant future. I'm all for competition and I've maintained time-and-time again that Bing only continues to better itself (which this data clearly supports).
Psst. Hey, Google! Looks like no matter how much or how well you copy Bing's UI ideas, they're still doing it better than you! I kid, I kid. ;) Be sure to visit their post to see a screen shot of the data they provide and feel free to harp away with your opinions below!
Do you think Bing will ever overtake Google as the premier search engine of choice for searchers? What can Google do to get themselves out of the market share slump they're currently in?
Update: It appears as though Compete's numbers are in line with comScore's numbers. Thanks to Mary Jo Foley for the link.
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Talkback
RE: Bing continues to slowly gain search market share while Google sees a drop
nonsense
you use it because it's from microsoft. you can try to fool us but it's not healthy trying to fool yourself.
RE: Bing continues to slowly gain search market share while Google sees a drop
I use it because it has better results.
RE: Bing continues to slowly gain search market share while Google sees a drop
Bing uses Google search results in their ranking... How low can you get... Typical MS.
RE: Bing continues to slowly gain search market share while Google sees a drop
They do not. That was a bunch of upset Google engineers trying to pin their failings on Microsoft, almost like a set up. No one believed them anyway.
Microsoft confirmed that
RE: Bing continues to slowly gain search market share while Google sees a drop
Do you have proof for it? I accept anything other than Google's rant.
RE: Bing continues to slowly gain search market share while Google sees a drop
That blog I quoted is *bing* not *Google* blog, and his statement confirms it:
"A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users. "
And the AOL scandal which showed that search results are not anonymous:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_scandal
What a bunch of crybabaies
@What a bunch of crybabaies
Although you may see this solely in terms of Google, it makes little difference whether Bing is copying Ask's searches or Google's.
It's using the private search data, done on another site, *without* their consent, and I do say *without* because their claimed consent is for anonymous data and search data is not anonymous.
Thus there is a serious problem there, that no amount of misdirections and non-denials mitigates.
Bing continues to slowly gain search market share while Google sees a drop
RE: Bing continues to slowly gain search market share while Google sees a drop
Thanks for the links. Sure I am going to bookmark those.
competition?
and it won fair and square. people chose to use it.
so tell me, since microsoft is willing to lose unimaginable fortunes to "compete" how is that competition? is it competition if you can never lose? if the others had billions to lose to stay "competitive" then i'm sure they'd be growing too. but they have that pesky little thing called a bottom line. microsoft has the cash cow twins.
you call that competition? it's buying their way into a market. there is nothing competitive about it. they lost they just won't go home.
as ballmer said, ms may not be the first or the best but they just keep coming and coming and coming.
translation: they'll pump money into it until the "competition" dies.
Ha.
really
and that 700 mil microsoft lost last year on bing? how does that fit into your "no deep pockets" argument? name another company, one will do nicely, that can lose that kind of money and stay in the game. and it's "moot" because... why? that money they're losing is somehow less relevant today than it was yesterday?
in fact, look at the over a decade history of msn, msn search, hotmail, etc. and microsoft has never made a single nickel from it. ever. that's competition?
buying one's way into a market usually consists of r&d and product deployment and hoping you get a return on it. if not it usually disappears from the shelf. it is not pumping fortunes into it year after year after year until the competition gives up.
hey, thanks for the marketing lesson but unless you have a degree in marketing giving advice like that is, well, i'm sure you know.
Google has made enough money off of search that they can afford to match
btw
RE: Bing continues to slowly gain search market share while Google sees a drop
Yes, Microsoft has deep pockets. So does Google. If you want another company with that kind of money who could stay in the game, try Facebook who is known to be working on a search platform. Likewise, rumors of Apple getting in the search game would introduce yet another company with that kind of budget. There, I gave you two. Happy?
Right now, the search market is wholly dominated by Google and Microsoft -- Google, much more so. History has shown, as you've pointed out, that Microsoft has tossed exorbitant amounts of money at search. No one's arguing that. But where has that gotten them? You correlate their gain in market share with their perpetual flow of cash, but you really have no clue what the gain can be attributed to. From what you're presenting, it's solely a matter of how much money someone has to throw at something. That's an old belief no longer applicable today. Sure, it works, but it's not the sole dominating factor like it used to be. If it were, Google's making such a ridiculous amount of money from their ad-based model that they could easily *QUADRUPLE* how much Microsoft puts into search marketing and just be done with it!
Clearly, no matter how much money Microsoft allocates towards Bing's marketing, the competition isn't giving up. Heck, the competition isn't even CLOSE. At the end of the day, it's about what people *WANT* to use. And the numbers are showing that people *WANT* to use Bing just a little bit more right now. If you choose to believe that has everything to do with the amount of money Microsoft has put into search, so be it -- I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise. I won't deny that Microsoft putting that much money towards it hasn't done something for it, but if you want to question competition, go look at everyone breathing down Google's neck for what they view as unfair advantages.
And one doesn't need a marketing degree these days to have a sound opinion of marketing. I didn't get a job writing for ZDNet about SEO and Internet marketing-related endeavors because I'm clueless, you know.
-Stephen
sportmac: All I can say is that it is good that Google can match Microsoft
BTW
Search is an insanely lucrative market, as Google has proven. Insanely lucrative markets warrant exorbitant amounts of money spent by companies who can afford the high risk. You seem to think Microsoft is the only company in the world who does that.
-Stephen