Washington — Despite the huge marketing and advertising thrust Microsoft has given Bing, the new search engine failed to gain much ground among users in September, while Google Inc. continued to lead the U.S. core Web search rankings in September, whereas rival Yahoo! Inc. claimed a distant second, according to data released by Internet data tracking firm comScore Inc. Wednesday.
Google sites handled 9 billion core searches in September, essentially unchanged from August. Google’s share accumulated 64.9% search market share in September, up from 64.6% in August, Reston, Virginia-based comScore said yesterday. Microsoft rose to 9.4% from 9.3%, while Yahoo dropped to 18.8% from 19.3%, comScore said.
(Credit: comScore)
Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, the world’s biggest software maker, saw its search sites remaining in the number three spot during September. Microsoft’s latest attempt to change that picture with the launch of Bing has not set the world on fire but is making some progress, according to the latest results. Bing’s share of U.S. search queries rose slightly from 9.3% in August to 9.4% last month, comScore reported.
Microsoft, which has multiplied its share for four straight months, announced an agreement with Yahoo in July to team up against market leader Google. Under the 10-year accord, Microsoft will gain more users for its Bing search engine, unveiled in June, and the two companies will share revenue for ads that appear next to query results. The companies expect to close the deal early next year.
“Bing continues to nibble away at Yahoo,” Youssef Squali, an analyst with Jefferies & Co. in New York, said in a research note today. “After losing market share in July and August following the much-heralded Bing’s launch, Google has climbed back up to the pre-Bing levels.”
Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo took a small tumble, as its share of queries in the overall U.S. core search ranking during September, with its sites combining to represent 18.8% of all searches, down from 19.3% in the previous month, leaving it in a distant second place.
Overall, U.S. Internet users conducted a 13.8 billion searches in September, 1% less than in August. Yahoo saw a 3% decline in the number of core searches performed on its sites during September to 2.6 billion, according to the comScore figures.
Dana Lengkeek, a spokeswoman for Yahoo, said the focus should be on long-term trends and not month-to-month swings.
“We continue to invest in our search experience to drive innovation and user engagement,” Lengkeek said in an e-mail.
Google, based in Mountain View, California, rose $9.21 to $535.32 at 4 p.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, added 7 cents to $16.95. Microsoft, in Redmond, Washington, climbed 15 cents to $25.96.