Comscore’s monthly ratings are out and Bing continues a slow but steady gain in share, to the slight expense of Google and Yahoo. Bing has a massive marketing push on right now, but also, I think the service is starting to gain footholds with users who see it as a regular alternative to Google. I am also a fan of the recently unveiled visual search interface – I think it augurs some serious new – and useful – approaches to sifting through massive amounts of related data.
From the Thomas Weisel’s analyst coverage, sent to me in mail:
Google maintains dominance within “core search” but Bing Nudges Up m/m at Yahoo’s and Google’s Expense: Core search excludes searches conducted on video, local and map portions of the companies’ websites. Google’s U.S. query share of core search queries was down 11bps m/m to 64.6% in August but increased nearly 1.3 percentage points from August 2008. Yahoo’s share was flat m/m at 19.3% in August and decreased 39bps y/y. Microsoft’s share increased 35bps m/m to 9.3% in August and up 89bps y/y. Ask.com’s share were was flat m/m at 3.9% in August but decreased 45bps y/y. AOL’s share decreased 14bps m/m to 3.0% in August and decreased 133bps y/y.
Our take: Google continues to dominate audience market rankings in the U.S. while Microsoft has shown some signs of stabilization and a modest uptick with the launch of Bing in June. Yahoo, while having shown signs of stability over the past 12-18 months, has recently started to lose market share again, declining from 21.0% in January to 19.3% in August. Taken together, Yahoo and Microsoft represent 29% of the core search market in the U.S., flat with the previous month. Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, was launched at the beginning of June alongside an $80-100mn advertising campaign. This is the third month of data reflecting Bing’s impact. While the data indicates a very modest near-term bounce, we will be watching closely to see if any query pickup is sustainable.
I always take these stats with a grain of salt. I’ve seen the stats for nearly 100 websites in the past 12 months and Google is typically 80% or more of all search engine referred visits.
It’s great to see Microsoft driving developments like visual search and creating some sense of competition. Regardless of the outcome in terms of growth in market share, it should result in a wave of innovation that should be good for all.
I was at the visual search launch – a few data points and a link to the launch video here – http://bit.ly/np8r6.
Will keep watching it. Thanks for the post!
Surely Bing’s rise is due to the fact that Internet Explorer pushes any urls it can’t understand into Bing?
Can’t we get statistics without these referrals?
I like the fact that someone is starting to eat into Google. One problem, is this as a novelty… i didnt find the search results quite up to scratch. I just liked the interface!
Mind you, it’s going to need a rethink about SEO strategy!!
my comment on this as an alternate headline”
Microsoft brings advertising cost of Bing search down to 0.1 cents in advertising costs per search” http://bit.ly/41peX
How much does Microsoft pay for their 1.1 million searches per month ? What is the cost per search ? Is it possible they are trying to buy the market ?
Does such a small rise justify a 100mill advertising campagin? It seems to me that Microsoft and Yahoo are still fighting it out for second place despite their agreement, rather than trying to really challenge Google’s dominance. Although, I agree with Alex that innovation can very quickly see power shift.
Speaking as a web designer desperately trying to get my sites into the Bing index, it is unfortunate that the actual quality of the search results is not up to Google’s standard. The whole Bing user experience is very pleasant, but when searching for my own sites it is very apparent that the index is incomplete. Their crawler bot seems less enthusiastic than Google’s.
The long term success of Bing will be down to the quality of the results, which for basic searches don’t seem to have improved much over Microsoft’s previous attempts. I suspect that Google will stay way ahead of the pack for some time to come.
Microsoft is doing everything they can to create the impression of momentum from bing, including using ‘canned’ searches on their portal to increase the volume of searches on Bing.
Beyond the hyperbole, they haven’t improved the search experience.