We wrote last week about Bing jumping past Yahoo and grabbing a large chunk of search engine market share from Google and Yahoo. The big question was whether Microsoft could buy its way to the top, or at least use its deep pockets to pose a legitimate challenge to Google.
Apparently not.
While last Thursday saw Bing gobble up market share, StatCounter shows that Bing has slid drastically since then. At time of this writing, Bing held 5.51 percent of the US market share, compared to 10.94 percent for Yahoo and 81.31 percent for Google. Globally, Google holds a much more commanding lead at 90.27 percent.
So what happened to Bing? Have we seen the initial interest and curiosity wane and reality sink in? Will Microsoft’s reported $80 million to $100 million in ad spending on Bing not have the intended effect?
Bing doesn’t appear to be the next great thing in the search engine industry, but it’s not bad. The expandable content preview boxes are a nice touch, and the “decision engine” does a nice job of offering you related search links.
For example, a search for the singer Sheryl Crow turns up the expected results, but Bing gives you a link list on the side including lyrics, albums, fan club and tickets. Clever, but obviously not enough.
Google has managed to build itself and its name into near synonymy with search. In fact, while writing this post, I was on the Bing page and wanted to search for an article for research. My fingers automatically typed in Google’s URL to perform the search instead of just using Bing. Now that is successful branding.
I still think that Microsoft’s best bet to challenge Google in the search engine and online ad revenue industry is to buy or partner with Yahoo. It may very well still happen, but we’ll have to wait and see.
We’ll keep an eye on the market share numbers for Bing, but I don’t think we’ll see anything like we saw last week.
By: Zack S.
Tags: Bing, Google, Microsoft, search engine market share, search engines, Yahoo
Thanks for this and the other posts, I don’t have time to look up stats and punctuate.
It’s important for Google to have competition for the sake of a better internet. It looks like Bing! isn’t the chosen one that the prophecy had spoke of.
Regardless of stats - I heard if Google employees say Bing! too loud they get instantly vaporized
Hah! We did find it pretty amusing that the same day Microsoft announced Bing, Google announced Wave. I personally wanted to see a legitimate challenger to Google, but it looks like we’re going to have to wait.
[...] I still kind of think that Microsoft is just looking for a way to force Yahoo to sell. [...]