On an aggregate basis, Bing and Yahoo search controlled 28.5% of the U.S. market, according to new figures released by comScore. At the same time, Microsoft’s Bing leapt to 16.3% market share for the month of December, and only saw a small increase from November. Google, which remains on top, dropped from 67% to 66.7%. The remaining 0.1% that Google shed in the month went to marginal players in the space.
Yahoo meanwhile came in third place with a 12.2% (up 0.1 percentage points) of the market, with the rest being made up of smaller services.
Despite losing market-share, Google still amplified its growth, with both Google and Microsoft increasing their user search queries by 4%. So whilst Google is by no means on the decline, Microsoft showed stronger growth in December.
According to comScore figures, more than 17.6-billion definite core searches were carried out in December (up four percent), with Google Sites ranking first with 11.8-billion (up four percent). Microsoft Sites came second with 2.9-billion searches (up five percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.2-billion (up five percent), Ask Network with 534-million (up five percent) and AOL, Inc. with 310-million (up four percent).
Amongst all those statistics is a simple fact: Microsoft grew faster than Google. It is extremely interesting, as interpreting the change could suggest that the introduction of Windows 8 and native Bing search baked in has helped increase Microsoft’s numbers. Or could it simply be because people are searching using Bing now?
In fact, it is interesting to note that both Bing and Yahoo grew in the period. Especially, Bing is growing as a search engine, there is no denying that, but it is surprising to see the growth being stolen from Google – the biggest player in the search engine market – and not the smaller search providers. The latter’s growth meanwhile may well be the complements of the Marissa Mayer effect, especially as it rolls out a number of redesigns.