Bing gains ground on Google

BOSTON: Bing, Microsoft's search engine, experienced growth for both search queries and unique visitors in November 2010, taking market share from Google.

New figures from research firm Compete suggested Bing's share of US searches rose from 10.2% to 14.4% year-on-year, while Google's dropped from 73.4% to 66.4%.

Microsoft's "decision engine" has also almost caught up with Yahoo, which retained a 14.6% market share in November, the Kantar Media-owned firm said.

Yahoo's results have been provided by Bing since August 2010.

This means that the total proportion of "Bing-powered" searches hit 29% for November.

comScore's US search market analysis for the same month suggests that Google had 66.2% of the "explicit core search" market, beating Yahoo's 16.4% and Bing's 11.8%.

For "total core searches" - a metric including partner searches, cross-channel searches and contextual searches - these totals were 64.3%, 19.3% and 11.3% respectively for the three providers.

Bing has been heavily-promoted to US audiences over recent months.

It launched in 2009 with an integrated "Bing & Decide" campaign, which positioned the product as a "decision engine" and played on users' concerns about "overload" when using searches.

TV spots also encouraged users to "break the Google habit".

Data sourced from Compete/comScore/Warc; additional content by Warc staff, 31 January 2011

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