Bing Loses Momentum While Google Soars Above
For the first time since its release, Bing did not gain market share, and in fact, has lost a chunk of it in the US throughout the month of September. Bing remained stable in Europe, but according to StatCounter lost over 1% in the US and fell to 8.51% from 9.64% in August. StatCounter also revealed that Microsoft’s new search partner, Yahoo!, also lost US market share, declining to 9.40% from 10.50%. To dampen things further for Microsoft, it appears that the entire lost share is to Google’s gain, which grew two percentage points to 80.08% from 77.83% in August.
Globally, however, Bing only declined slightly to 3.25% from 3.58% but was mirrored by Yahoo which fell to 4.37% from 4.84%. That was also to Google’s chance as it breached the 90% mark and reached 90.54% of the global search market, which is the same place it was in a year ago.
This must be extremely worrying for the Bing team at Microsoft, which has put ample time, money, and effort into convincing people (mainly in the US), that Bing was the better way to search. Not to discredit Google though, who have clearly taken notice and stepped up innovation. Google just released and extended list of search options to accommodate real time search and attempt to stifle all of the ‘cool features’ found on Bing.
The features cannot be seen in all European countries yet but include a books, news, and blogs option alongside the existing forums and reviews options. Google has also added the option of viewing results from the past hour and the ability to choose a specific date range. To add a personal touch, Google implemented a “visited pages” option so users can see which sites they have already been on. In another move that clearly mimics Bing’s attention to e-commerce, Google has enabled users to choose whether or not they want to see more or fewer results geared towards shopping.
Could this be the end to Bing’s great start? Will Bing continue to slump and become yet another of Microsoft’s search failures? My guess is no. The determination and commitment of Microsoft to be a serious search contender that Steve Ballmer so effectively emanates tells me that Microsoft still have a few things up their sleeve and will definitely hit back sometime soon.
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