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Bing's Continued Growth 'Rattles' Google

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing continued to sees gains in US searcher penetration and share of search result pages during the second week after its public launch, according to a follow-up study on its performance by comScore, Inc.

The qSearch analysis revealed that Microsoft Sites’ average daily penetration among US searchers reached 16.7% during the work week of June 8-12, up three percentage points from 13.8% during the May 25-29 work week prior to Bing’s introduction.

Microsoft’s share of search result pages in the US, a proxy for overall search intensity, increased to 12.1% during the period of June 8-12, and also climbed three percentage points from the work week of May 25-29, 2009.

An earlier comScore analysis conducted during the first week after Bing’s public launch found that the new search engine’s average daily penetration was 15.5% and its share of search result pages was 11.1% during the period of June 2-6, 2009.

“It appears that Microsoft Bing has continued to generate interest from the market for the second consecutive week,” said Mike Hurt, comScore SVP. “These early data reflect a continued positive market reaction to Bing in the initial stages of its launch.”

The New York Post reported that Bing’s early success has “rattled” Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who is said to be leading a team of top engineers in a quest to discover how Bing’s algorithm works and to complete performance upgrades to the Google system.