Microsoft’s new Bing search engine has gained nearly 1% market share in the US since its launch in June, while Google has lost ground, according to new research. The data, from comScore, indicates that Microsoft’s search engine still remains a distant third in the US, which was the main reason for the search ad partnership with Yahoo set to start next year.
Bing ended July with a 8.9% share in the US, up from 8.4% in the previous month. Just before Bing’s debut, Microsoft’s search market share stood at 8%. Google retained a commanding US lead at 64.7% through July, down from 65 percent in June, comScore said. Yahoo’s market share dipped to 19.3% in July from 19.6% in June.
Ask.com remained the fourth-largest US search engine with a 3.9 percent in July, unchanged from June. AOL, which is supposed to be spun off from Time Warner Inc. later this year, held a 3.1 percent U.S. share, also unchanged from July.
Search requests
Bing attracted 29 million more search requests in July than it did in June, a 2.4% increase to 1.21 billion, comScore said. Total US requests at Google declined by 352 million, or nearly 4%, from June to 8.78 billion in July, according to comScore. Yahoo’s month-to-month query volume dropped nearly 5 percent, or 130 million, to 2.63 billion requests in July.
In its last two fiscal years, Microsoft’s online division lost a total of $3.5 bn, and the hardware and software giant is now spending $100m to promote Bing.
Summer search lull
Search requests typically drop during the summer as more people go on vacation and spend time outside away from their computers. Total search requests processed by the Internet’s five most popular search engines fell from 14.06 billion in June to 13.58 billion in July. The July volume was 15.5% higher than at the same time last year.
Source: www.comscore.com
18/08/2009