Comments for Bing Continues to Grow, But Yahoo Loses Market Share

Bing Continues to Grow, But Yahoo Loses Market Share

2009-08-25T18:46:29Z

Since the launch of Bing, watching the developments in the search engine market is finally interesting again. According to the latest data from Compete for July, Bing continues to grow slowly but surely. At the same time, though, Compete notes that Bing has not been able to convert its growing search share into a rise in paid clicks on ads on the site. In July, Bing's sponsored click rate fell slightly to 5.5%, even though in June, it still saw an impressive growth in paid clicks.

]]> As for the other search engines, Google continues to hold steady at around 73.75% market share (down from 73.90% last month), though Yahoo lost a full percentage point and is now at 15.6% after seeing its search volume drop 3.3% compared to last month. In total, Compete estimates that a total of 12.5 billion queries were served by all the major search engines combined in July.

Interestingly enough, Ask, a search engine few of us think about anymore, continues to grow rapidly. Compared to last month, the number of searches on Ask grew almost 48%, though the company still holds only about 3% of the search engine market.

All eyes are obviously on how the partnership between Bing and Yahoo will work out. Chances are that Bing will continue to grow over the next few months, but, as Compete's Marko Madjarac points out, Yahoo "will need to bring high-quality advertisers whose sponsored search results generate more paid clicks." While Microsoft's data shows that users are quite happy with Bing, we will also have to wait and see what happens once Microsoft slows down its $100 million marketing campaign for Bing.

Comment from WillC on 2009-08-26

2009-08-26T16:01:56Z

I think Bing should be fairly happy with this result. Microsoft needs to be persistent in its advertising and at least try to grab the attention of new users who aren't yet stuck in their ways and brainwashed that Google is the only way to go. Bing has gained so far, even if it's just a small bit. There must be something going right. Microsoft knew it was in an uphill battle and after two months, they have basically gone up - which is the right direction no matter what you want to forecast.
There is certainly a lot of work left to be done with Bing and the Yahoo merger could help to speed some of that up. But it's not like Google is just going to stop working on its search, so in that regard Bing's climb figures to get more difficult.
www.eZanga.com

Comment from Recruiter on 2009-08-26

2009-08-26T14:54:04Z

I'm not surprised; I don't think I'm the only one witnessing the gradual decline of Yahoo search over the past few months.

Whereas in the past Yahoo SERP rankings were pretty steady and MSN's were erratic, the tables are turned and from one week to the next I don't know what Yahoo will deliver.

Competition in the search market is pretty essential; it's not favourable that one company can make or break an on-line outfit. But the way the present competition is acting there won't be any real change soon.