Google Loses Monthly Search Share to Bing

September 15, 2010

Google lost slight monthly US search market share to Bing in July 2010, according to data from Compete.

Bing Makes Inroads
Google maintained its dominant hold on the US online search market in July 2010 with 10.46 million queries, good for 72.9% of 14.34 million total queries. While this marked a 0.6% year-over-year improvement from 72.5% in July 2009, it was a 1.1% month-over-month decline from 73.8% in June 2010.

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Third-ranked Microsoft (which primarily reflects the Bing engine) appears to have stolen some of Google’s monthly traffic. Bing recorded 1.52 million queries in July 2010, earning 10.6% market share. This was a 3.1% month-over month improvement from 10.3% share in June 2010 and more impressively, a 21.1% year-over-year improvement from 8.7% market share in July 2009.

Second-ranked Yahoo appears to have lost yearly share to Bing, although its monthly share increased. Yahoo reported 1.87 million queries in July 2010, 13.1% of the total market. Yahoo’s share rose 3% from 12.7% in June 2010 but fell 16.8% from 15.7% in July 2009.

Overall in July 2010, the search market continued its recent trend, with Google losing slight market share to Bing. The one notable shift in recent trend is that Yahoo, for the first time since January, increased its share of search queries in July.

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Ask Gains Unique Queriers
While Ask remains mired in fourth place with a 2.9% search market share, it has seen a dramatic increase in unique monthly queries between January 2010 (53 million) and July 2010 (69 million). In that same time period, Google went from 183 million unique monthly queriers to 159 million.

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As Yahoo and Bing both slightly increased their number of unique monthly queriers and AOL stayed flat, the assumption is that Ask is taking away unique queriers from Google.

However, Google is becoming far stickier for its users, rising from an average of 59 queries per unique user in January 2010 to 65.9 in July 2010. The other four leading search engines stayed relatively flat in terms of average queries per unique user, explaining how Google has retained its substantial market dominance.

Nielsen Tracks Dramatic MSN Search Share Growth
Using different metrics and criteria, The Nielsen Company also tracked dramatic growth in US search market share for MSN/Windows Live/Bing between July 2009 and July 2010. Nielsen reported MSN/Windows Live/Bing’s share of the US search market has grown from 9% to 13.6% (a delta increase of 4.6% or a relative increase of 51%). This follows a 50% relative increase in its US search market share between June 2009 and June 2010.

Despite its dramatic year-over-year growth, MSN/Windows Live/Bing remained in the number three spot among major US search providers as ranked by Nielsen, with Google and Yahoo ranking first and second.

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