Redmond, Washington — Microsoft’s new Internet search engine Bing continues to post modest gains in the US search market share in December, and is now growing faster than ever before any of its rivals, according to figures released by online tracking firm comScore.
However, Google remained the undisputed leader of the most profitable US search and advertising market last month, capturing majority of searches, with a 65.7 percent market share, up 0.1 percentage points from November, according to comScore figures released Friday.
In December, Microsoft Bing’s share of searches in the U.S. gained 0.4 percent to capture 10.7 percent of all search queries, according to the latest comScore qSearch statistics.
The front page of the new Microsoft search web engine Bing
Microsoft’s growth came at the expense of its partner Yahoo, which witnessed its share of the search market swooped down to 17.3 percent in December from 17.5 percent the previous month, comScore said.
Moreover, Ask.com’s share dropped to 3.7 percent from 3.8 percent while AOL’s slipped to 2.6 percent from 2.8 percent.
That makes seven straight months in a row of modest gains in search share for Bing since it was launched in June along with a 100-million-dollar advertising campaign in a bid to challenge search juggernaut Google.
The two tech heavyweights have been consistently upgrading their online search service features in what has thus far been a lopsided duel favoring the Mountain View, California-based Internet king over the software giant.
In mid-November, Bing results began banking on computational information from Wolfram Alpha, allowing people to type complicated math equations or ask Bing to display a graph plotting an equation.
Interestingly, the most captivating thing is that if you examine the year-over-year query growth rates for each search engine, Bing’s growth is actually speeding up faster than ever. Its growth rate in query volume was 49.4 percent in December, compared to 20.6 percent growth for Google (which was also above the average), and a 1.9 percent decline for Yahoo.
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer last week unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that Bing would be the default search engine on Hewlett-Packard computers in 42 countries.
Also, Yahoo and Microsoft announced a 10-year Web search and advertising partnership in July that set the stage for a joint offensive against Google. Under the agreement, Yahoo! will employ Microsoft’s search engine on its own sites while providing the exclusive global sales force for premium advertisers.
What is more, both the competitors have been engaged in improving their respective mobile search offerings and incorporating real-time content from popular online communities such as Twitter and Facebook into search results.
Note: The above statistics is based on comScore’s qSearch, which estimates the actual number of search queries for each search engine. Data from Nielsen and Hitwise show different tendencies, with Bing actually falling in December, but they measure market share differently.