San Francisco — Although Microsoft’s Bing search engine was welcomed with a healthy dose of skepticism when it was first unveiled almost a year ago, but while tracking web-search habits, research groups are indicating that market shares for Bing search engine share has moved up to 12.5 percent from 10.9 percent in January in the U.S. in February, according to research groups.
According to media metrics firm Nielsen, Bing witnessed approximately 15% growth in its share of US searches in February 2010. This makes Bing stand in third place overall. Google Search led all search providers with a 65.2% search share, or about 5.98 billion searches, writes MarketingCharts.
Ever since introducing its refined search engine last June, Microsoft took on a huge marketing campaign to make Bing a better search site than Google or Yahoo! for shopping, travel and medical information.
What is interesting about that Bing claimed 3 position in search engine, but it is steadily climbing in market shares. It climbed from 10.9 percent in January 2010, while Yahoo’s search slipped to rank second position with a 14.1% search share, or about 1.29 billion searches, and Google decreased from 66.3% to 65.2%, according to tracking firm Nielsen Co.
This is really good news for Microsoft, which has pulled strings for years to improve its search technology and narrow the gap with Google Inc., which by the way used to own more than 90% of the search engine market share, in this post-Google world.
Danny Sheppard, president of search engine optimization firm Titan SEO, said in a Microsoft press release, “SEO companies still need to pay attention to Bing because their 12.5% market share will become 25% or more once the two search engines merge and Yahoo! uses Bing technology to power the Yahoo! search engine.”
Now there is a definite sign — albeit a small one — that Bing may also be tempting some Googlers.
In the past, Bing’s market share gains have derived mainly at the expense of Yahoo. Although Yahoo and Microsoft have entered into a long-term agreement that will see Bing handling the back end of Yahoo search queries, Yahoo says it is keeping its hand in the search game.
Last week, comScore Inc. released its own February search rankings, which indicated Google benefiting a tenth of a percent to 65.5 percent. Microsoft’s share crept up to 11.5 percent from 11.3 percent by comScore’s count, while Yahoo’s slice of U.S. Web searches slipped to 16.8 percent from 17 percent.
Overall, in raw figures Nielsen discovered that U.S. searches declined by over 1 billion in February, dropping from 10.27 billion searches in January to 9.18 billion in February.