San Francisco — Interestingly, current statistics from ad network Chitika revealed that Bing overtook Yahoo to claim second spot in the US search engine market as long ago as January this year, and merchants may want to plan paid search campaigns accordingly.
While many U.S. tracking services claim that Yahoo is America’s second leading search engine, but Chitika’s July search stats suggest that Bing has beaten out Yahoo for the No. 2 position in search market share.
Chitika states that Bing accounted for 11% of the search market last month, while Yahoo indicates just 6% of last month’s traffic. Microsoft may be celebrating and Yahoo could also be pleased – the company has started transitioning some of its searches to Bing in preparation for the upcoming alliance between the two.
“July is over, and we have stats: by examining at the full month’s traffic, Google remains unassailable in its #1 spot, and Bing beats out Yahoo! by a few percentage points for the #2 spot,” the firm claims. “AOL and [Ask] continue to jockey for 4th place.”
Yahoo and Bing recently announced that Yahoo’s organic results will be fully powered by Bing (in the U.S.) by late August.
The chart below shows the share of traffic that each of the three major search engines drive to Chitika’s North American web sites stretching back to January 2009:
However, before the celebrations begin, and before merchants consider repositioning their paid search ad spend, it may be worthwhile to examine how Bing’s success was measured. Chitika ranks search engines according to “the percentage of all search traffic coming into the Chitika advertising network in a given month.” It could be that Yahoo actually accounts for more searches than Bing, but fewer of these queries direct users to third-party sites in Chitika’s network. Hitwise and comScore’s latest search engine rankings each place Yahoo second in terms of search market share.
Another attribute worth considering in the search market is the browser. Earlier this month, Chitika suggested that Google Firefox-based searches were more than total Bing or Yahoo searches. This could make things pretty fascinating when Google’s pact with Mozilla as the browser’s default search option expires.
According to Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan spotted the improvement which suggests that the gap between the Bing and Yahoo has expanded ever since Bing first overtook eight months ago. If true this would be a major achievement for Microsoft, who only launched Bing in fourteen months ago.
He observed that “One key differences is that the ratings services named generally measure activity at the search engines themselves, the number of searches happening at each of them. In contrast, Chitika is measuring how many visitors leave a search site and come to web sites in its network.”
Also, worth noting is that Bing delivers web search on Facebook, which presently have more than 500 million users. Bing will also make its existence felt more in the mobile space as Windows Phone 7 phones make their way to the market.
Regardless of which search portal picks the silver prize, all rating services put Google in the lead. The Chitika report shows that Google accounted for 80% of search traffic last month. As it keeps a tight hold on to the keys to the search kingdom, the search giant is making it easier for small businesses to benefit from advertising on Google. From the release of new features that let SMB owners respond to reviews on Google Places to the recent launch of Google’s Small Business Blog, it seems the site is becoming more SMB friendly, and it is proving as powerful as ever in catching consumers’ queries.