Experian Hitwise, an analytics firm has been coming up with a few effective stats and its recent update which came last week noted that Bing-powered search had gained significant growth in the share in all searches made in the U.S. The percentage for Bing-powered search had jumped up to almost 30 percent in U.S. in August. The report stated that the share of Bing-powered search as compared to others in U.S. had an increase, bettering its 28.05 % in July to 28.99 % in August. Bing-powered search includes not just Bing, but even searches made on Yahoo.
As per the stats, it seems like the increase for Bing-powered search had come at the expense of Google whose share dropped from 66.05 % in July to 65.09 % in August. To look at the stats individually, its actually Yahoo, which has had an increase in the market share as it moved to 15.89 % in August from 15.07 % in July, while Microsoft’s Bing moved from 12.98 % in July to 13.10 % in August.
Google might not be facing real problems from its competitors individuals, but the combination of Bing with Yahoo, which together accounts for Bing-powered search. Even though, Google is still a by far winner here, Bing-powered search is still a concern as its slowly eating up Google’s share. The partnership was entered into in 2009 which was for online search and advertising. This even led to Yahoo making use of Bing technology to power searches made through their portal.
In regards to advertising technology which is owned by Microsoft, the same is powering advertisements even on Yahoo, but Yahoo is in complete command of search-advertising sales, albeit powered by Microsoft technology. Talking about Bing individually, since its launch a year back, Bing had gained more than 4% market share in the U.S. Again at that time the growth of Bing had resulted in a direct fall for Google. Last year in August, Google had a share of 71.59 % which means that in a year’s time, Google has lost out on 6.5% of its search market share in U.S.
Microsoft-Yahoo may be enjoying their partnership to boo Google, a hugely dominant competitor, but the said partnership is still quite shaky. To add to the problems of Microsoft, there is a contingent of Microsoft shareholders that want the company to jettison Bing as it is not performing as well as expected finally. But there were views such as made by Mark Ballard, the senior analyst at the Rimm-Kaufman Group, who has said that the partnership was backfiring, with Yahoo struggling more than Microsoft. To support his comment, he stated that earlier Yahoo had brought in 60% of broad matched traffic, which went down to around 40% of broad matched traffic as it is now powered by Bing.
There was yet another comment on the partnership by Rimm-Kaufman who noted that the revenue per click has had an improvement when the results are combined as Bing took over ad serving, but the pace of CPCs have not improved.
However, the report by Hitwise even had noted that there was an increase in the longer search queries, which were of 5 to 8 words or more. The increase was for 3% month over month.