Because this company is involved with SEO, we pay close attention to what’s going on in the search engine industry. Everyone knows Google reigns supreme, but Bing has drawn a lot of attention and made a lot of noise for itself.
Meanwhile there’s Yahoo, AOL, Ask, Lycos, and a whole slew of others…from Altavista to Zapmeta.
I’ll admit this post was spurred by the fact that I’m tired of hearing about Bing. Microsoft has done a nice job with re-branding Live and MSN Search and I truly enjoy the home page for Bing.
But many Web sites have written articles about Bing overtaking Yahoo (officially 4 times in the past 51 days), that I felt obligated to clarify the status of Google -> Yahoo -> Bing -> AOL -> Others.
It has been 51 days since Bing officially went live on June 1, 2009. The average daily U.S. search engine market share for the top four is as follows:
Google: 78.32 percent
Yahoo: 10.98 percent
Bing: 8.44 percent
AOL: 1.27 percent
Standing alone, those number really don’t tell us too much about Microsoft’s search engine and it’s relation to everyone else. So I looked at the 51 days preceding Bing’s launch as well.
For the 51 days leading up to June 1, I combined Microsoft’s two search engines (Live and MSN) and compared that total to the other top three.
Google: 78.86 percent
Yahoo: 11.07 percent
Live + MSN: 7.57 percent
AOL: 1.35 percent
There was only one day I could find prior to June 4 where Microsoft’s offerings beat out Yahoo for number two in the U.S and that was May 28 – the day the news broke about Bing going live in a few days.
So while we can congratulate Microsoft on putting together a very nice looking engine, and providing quick, accurate results, there really hasn’t been too much of a change overall.
Yes, every tenth of a percentage point counts – particularly for Yahoo, who is tenaciously holding onto its number two ranking. But Bing’s appearance online hasn’t exactly sent shockwaves across the industry.
It’s only been 51 days, so much is left to be seen – but we can quit it with the “Bing will become the next Google” garbage. It isn’t going to happen.
I still kind of think that Microsoft is just looking for a way to force Yahoo to sell.
By: Zack S.
Tags: Bing, Google, Microsoft, search engine market share
This really doesn’t surprise me at all. It is going to take a lot to pull a significant market share away from Google.
I agree - but what surprised me is the scant amount of market share Bing has so far pulled from Yahoo. At the time of writing, Yahoo had given up only 0.09 percent of the market share.