New York — Barely a week after search engine behemoth Google’s hissy fit about Bing “copying” its search results by collecting Google results, Microsoft-powered search engine saw a jump in market share over the last month, increasing its U.S. market share by 21 percent, according to Experian Hitwise. Maybe this is why Google has been publicly trashing Bing.
In essence, it seems that the people behind Bing happened to make gaining market share a New Year’s resolution, then they got off to a great start. In fact, the Bing search engine gained sixth position at Wikipedia Compete’s list of the top 50 websites.
According to Hitwise’s new stats this morning displays that there might be something to this strategy, and the firm discovered that Bing’s market share increased by a significant amount between December and January; as January 2011 boasted high success rates for searches on Bing and Yahoo.
Bing’s market share rose from 10.60 percent in December to 12.81 percent in January, according to Experian Hitwise. That makes for a month-over-month gain of 20.85 percent, which is quite remarkable. Whereas industry leader Google, which tends to either hold steady or increase its dominance, witnessed its market share drop from 69.67 percent in December to 67.95 percent of all U.S. searches in January on a month-over-month basis.
Bing-driven search made up 27.44 percent of all searches, up from 25.77 percent. Searches on Yahoo declined to 14.62 percent, down from 15.17 percent. The remaining 4.61 percent of U.S. searches were conducted on 70 other search engines Hitwise tracks. The popularity of the Bing-Yahoo combo as a whole increased a fair amount (6.48 percent), then, which is good news for a lot of people. Carol Bartz, in particular, could arguably use a win.
According to Hitwise, Microsoft-catered search engines — Bing and Yahoo combined — had a higher “success rate” in January than Google by a significant margin. The noteworthy thing will be whether Bing continues to make this sort of progress following the whole “stolen results” brouhaha. It might have hurt the search engine’s image, or, just maybe, it might cause more people to give Bing a try.
Interestingly, another newsworthy achievement by Bing is that on Compete’s list of the top 50 websites for December 2010, Bing climbed Wikipedia to take the sixth spot with 79.8 million unique visitors. Compete accounted that Bing closed the year with a 105.36 percent increase in unique visitors — the largest yearly growth among the top 50 sites.
With 149.9 million unique visitors, Google topped the list, followed by Yahoo (136.9 million uniques), Facebook (134 million uniques) in third, and YouTube (117.2 million uniques) in fourth.