San Francisco — Microsoft continues to spell progress against Google with its search engine Bing, but unfortunately for Bing is nibbling at Google’s crumbs rather than taking large bites out of its pie. Microsoft’s Bing captured 5.25% of the U.S. Internet search market in the four weeks ending June 27, while Google secured 74% of the market, according to data released by Hitwise Thursday.
Hitwise, branded itself as delivering “insights on how 10 million U.S. Internet users interact with more than 1 million Websites.” However, it is still in budding stage and remains to be seen whether Bing can maintain its momentum against Yahoo and Google once Microsoft begins to moderate its massive advertising budget for the project.
Meanwhile, Yahoo managed to secure 16.2% of the search market last month–up from May, but down from the 20% last June, while IAC/Interactive Corp.’s Ask.com sharply dropped to 3.2%. The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis accounted for 1.36% of U.S. searches.
According to MarketWatch, Hitwise stated that Google continues to maintain a sound 74% of U.S. However, this figure is somewhat higher than the one posted in May and marks a salient increase from the 69% posted in June, 2008.
In contrast, Internet search during the four weeks ending on May 27, Microsoft’s Bing registered relatively high search-engine growth, gaining from 3.4% in the first week of the month to 6.63% by the month’s end.
Bing constitutes a big bet for Microsoft, which according to reports is pouring in between $80 million and $100 million as part of an intensive marketing effort.
While a proportion for U.S. searches among the leading search engines dropped for all, except Google, Bing still continues to see growth, Hitwise says. Bing has managed to gain small but significant market share, according to most research companies monitoring its progress; StatCounter, for example, found that the site gained 8.23% in June, as compared with when Microsoft’s search engine was named Live Search and hovered around 7% market share.
Adding in Live.com and MSN Search along with Bing, the unified search engines have grown at an average of 16% during June 2009. Hitwise estimates that Bing grew faster than the three other prominent search engines for the month.
“These early statistics reflect a continued positive market reaction to Bing in the initial stages of its launch,” explained comScore senior vice president Mike Hurt.
Whitney Burk, director at Microsoft Bing, declined to comment on the Hitwise findings, but says Microsoft believes people are not overly loyal to their search engines, and many are more than willing to switch to something new.
Microsoft research shows that 55% of people use more than one engine per week, and 60% of people are open to making the switch to another engine.
“Customers are noticing a problem with the current search experience, and while they are generally satisfied with search today, they expect to be dissatisfied more than 50% of the time with their query result,” Burk says. “We think we can do better. This is why we designed Bing–to serve as a decision engine aimed at helping people get the result they want to ultimately help them make better decisions more quickly.”
Nevertheless, mounting praise on Microsoft and Bing for the ability to challenge Google in the search-engine arena might be a little premature. Despite claiming big gains for Bing, which combines traditional “page of hyperlinks” search with tabs that allow access to specific categories such as Shopping and Video, Microsoft may have an uphill battle if it wants to take more of Google and Yahoo’s market sahre.
Indeed, Microsoft’s biggest challenge will be to separate itself from Google with the introduction of unique features — such as the interactive video thumbnails currently offered on Bing.