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Google Rules Search, but Bing Creeps Up Steadily

Bing increased Microsoft’s share of the US search market by 1% last month and continues to slowly but steadily chip away at Yahoo and Google, according to an analysis conducted by StatCounter.

Data for the month of June data reveal that Microsoft (whose search share includes Bing, Live Search and MSN Search) had 8.23% market share for the month, up from 7.21% in April.

Figures from early in the month showed that Bing temporarily overtook Yahoo as the #2 search engine, but the full-month figures put the new search engine behind Yahoo, which had 11.04% in June.  Google - which still remains the undisputed search leader - had 78.48% share for the month, down from 79.07% in April.

“At first sight, a 1% increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing, but the underlying trend appears positive,” said Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter. “Steady if not spectacular might be the best way to describe performance to date.”

Looking at weekly trends for June, Cullen noted that Microsoft had peaked at 9.21% following its launch the week ending June 7th. But after falling away in the following two weeks it had staged a comeback, to 8.45% during the last week in June.

Global Search Share

Globally, Microsoft appears to be making only modest headway to date, going from 3.08% in April to 3.30% in June. In the same period Yahoo has fallen from 5.48% to 5.15% on a worldwide scale. Google still dominates the global market with 89.80% search share.

StatCounter Statistics on July 9, 2009 put Bing at an 8.24% share of the US search market.

About the analysis: Data is based on an analysis of 1.316 billion search engine referring clicks (336 million from the US) which were collected from the StatCounter network of more than three million websites.