New York — The Redmond, Wash.-based software major Microsoft’s Bing slowly but surely starting to chew into Google’s dominant position in U.S. search market. According to the latest Hitwise data, which indicates that Bing gained the most search growth for the month of June, growing 7 percent month-over-month to capture 9.85 percent of the U.S. search market, which means marketers may increasingly do well with paid searches on Bing. Overall, according to Hitwise figures, the market has been pretty static in June in the US.
“Google accounted for 71.65 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending June 26, 2010, but witnessed a one percent drop in growth month-over-month. Yahoo’s search growth was even, garnering 14.37 percent of the market and Ask captured 2.19 percent of the search market, with 2 percent growth month-over-month, respectively. The remaining 70 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.94 percent of U.S. searches,” Hitwise announced.
While the software maker’s progress are coming mostly at the expense of partner Yahoo, whose search operations it will soon incorporate, new figure shows that Bing is also chipping away at Google’s dominant position.
Bing is prospering especially well in the health vertical, where it accounted for 4.22 percent of searches — closing the gap on Yahoo, which accounted for 4.85 percent of searches in this category last month. Bing also witnessed a 197 percent increase in automotive searches, a 199 percent increase in shopping searches and a 162 percent increase in travel searches over June 2009.
The shift demonstrates a 94 percent increase in health searches for Bing over June of 2009, while Google’s minute drop is well within limits and is very likely not an indication of any trend in the search market.
Bing, according to Microsoft, is configured to deliver a more functional experience than existing search engines, including Google’s.
Bing’s short-term climb is impressive, but a longer view shows Microsoft’s upstart search engine making even bigger inroads against its main rival. On the recently released the iPhone 4, which sold more than 1.7 million units in its first three days on the market, Bing is prompting users who visit Bing.com to make it their default search engine.
Microsoft rolled out Bing in June of 2009, when it captured 5.25% of the U.S. market. With its share currently at 9.85%, Bing has grown 88% in just 12 months. Yahoo’s share has declined 11.24% over the same period, while Google is down 3.2% over that span.
These fluctuations are natural from month to month. Likewise, those figures might not instigate fear into Google, the trend should evoke at least some concern from the search leader.