With the official figures released, showing Yahoo is down once again while partner Bing has struck “an all time high” according to one analyst. Apart from this, the search market share figures vary in reports from different companies, Bing’s success in comScore’s statistics shows some of the organization’s latest innovations could be driving more site traffic.
The largest changes from Bing in 2012 (thus far) include:
Launch of a social sidebar to aggregate social data relevant to a query. Integration of Yelp data for local search. Altering the number of results that appear on SERPs.
Accordingly, Bing gained their search engine market share for the third month running, at the expense of both Google and Yahoo. Google lost some share (0.4 percent) in August, while Bing gained and Yahoo declined by an equivalent amount (0.2 percent). Strangely, AOL also gained (0.2 percent). Bing’s share of the search market was 14.7 percent in August 2011.
However, Google tumbled only slightly from its record high of 66.8 percent to 66.4 percent. In August 2011, Google’s search market share was at 64.8 percent.
In fact, the share percentage for the Search Alliance between Bing and Yahoo is somewhat different than the total combined number of Bing and Yahoo search share. The comScore report breaks out “powered by” search numbers for both Bing and Google, with the most recent Search Alliance share at 25.3%. The reason for this slight difference is that Bing does not entirely power all aspects of Yahoo search.
Meanwhile, for marketers, Bing has also introduced an inbound link disavowal tool to eliminate unwanted links that could hurt SEO strategies. Moving further, Bing could receive an even greater boost from its new app, as well as Amazon’s decision to partner with Bing in making it the default search engine on its newest Kindle tablets.
Besides, comScore’s figured depicts searches from Home & work locations only, not mobile. This month, they incorporated two changes in reporting, as follows:
“The first enhancement is the incorporation of updated demographic universe estimates based on data from the 2010 U.S. census, which provides an improved accounting of the percentage of the population falling into each demographic segment. The second enhancement was an improvement in comScore’s enumeration survey methodology to better represent persons in cell-phone only households.”
Regardless of many good news for Bing, Google remains the clear leader, accounting for 66.4 percent of search queries. Meanwhile, Yahoo, Bing’s partner in search, dropped to 12.8 percent of the market, comScore found.
Nevertheless, in the final few months of 2012, it would be worth watching Bing’s growth given the inevitable increase in queries related to holiday shopping and the impact of BingItOn.com.