In August 2010, MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search overtook Yahoo as the number two search engine in the US for the first time, according to new data from The Nielsen Company.
Bing Search Share Rises 30% from ’09
MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search held a 13.9% share of US searches in August 2010, narrowly beating Yahoo, which slipped to third place with a 13.1% share. From July 2010, MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search increased its share 2% from 13.65%, while Yahoo’s share dipped 8% from 14.3%.
However, looking back to July 2009 gives a fuller picture of the divergent paths being taken by MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search and Yahoo. While Bing increased its US search share by an impressive 30% from 10.7% between July 2009 and July 2010, Yahoo decreased its share by a substantial 18% from 16%.
Google Remains On Top
While longtime leading US search engine Google is no doubt paying close attention to Bing’s fast ascent since its June 2009 launch, Google still dominates the US search market by a comfortable market.
Google held 65.1% search share in August 2010, up 1% both month-over-month and year-over-year. It is also worth noting that Microsoft Bing officially started powering part of Yahoo searches starting in August 24, 2010. If Bing-powered search in August were combined pro-forma, it would represent a 26% share of search.
On a year-over-year basis, Ask.com significantly increased its search share growth rate while AOL experienced a substantial negative growth rate, but both providers still only account for about 2% of the total US search market each.
Bing Makes July Inroads
Google lost slight monthly US search market share to Bing in July 2010, according to recent data from Compete. 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.
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.
