Microsoft’s Bing overtook Yahoo! as the number two search engine in the United States and worldwide on Thursday (4th June) according to our StatCounter Global Stats data. Bing grabbed market share from Google.
“It remains to be seen if Bing falls away after the initial novelty and promotion but at first sight it looks like Microsoft is on to a winner,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo! at a cost of $40bn it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated.”
Our analysis finds that in the US Bing leapfrogged Yahoo to take second place on 16.28%. Yahoo! has 10.22%. Google still commands the US search engine market with 71.47%.
Globally Bing at 5.62% has taken a narrow lead over Yahoo! (5.13%). Google worldwide retains 87.62% of the market.
StatCounter Global Stats, a free online service which captures market share battles of search engines, browsers and operating systems including mobile, was launched in March this year.
The StatCounter Global Stats research data is based on four billion pageloads per month. Other regional and country breakdowns can be viewed at: http://gs.statcounter.com
Full press release available here.
UPDATE 11 June 2009:
While Bing has fallen back to third place behind Google and Yahoo! it is winning market share for Microsoft against its two main rivals in the US and worldwide according to our latest analysis.
We analyzed search engine market share two weeks before and after the formal launch of Bing on May 28th (14th May to the 27th May and the 28th May to 10th June). For the US market it found:
Google decreased from 78.68% to 77.94% (-0.74%)
Yahoo decreased from 11.46% to 10.76% (-0.7%)
Microsoft (Bing, MSN Search and Live Search) increased from 7.4% to 9% (+1.6%)
(See here and here)
“It is too early to say what the long term result will be but this is a creditable performance by Bing,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO StatCounter. “It remains to be seen what happens to Bing after user curiosity and the reported $100m advertising budget runs out.”
Worldwide, comparing the two weeks before and after the Bing launch, StatCounter reports a similar trend with Microsoft taking market share.
Google decreased from 89.81% to 89.69% (-0.12%)
Yahoo decreased from 5.34% to 5.1% (-0.24%)
Microsoft (Bing, MSN Search and Live Search) increased from 3.08% to 3.5% (+0.42%)
(See here and here)
Full press release available here.
Nice looking site you have – are you having fun with it? It’s interesting and well worth the time to visit.
It’s not weird since IE 7/8 has ‘Live’ as the default search engine so when anyone search within IE, it’ll redirect to ‘Bingo’ unless he/she is using ‘Google/Yahoo Toolbars.
I wasnt impressed with the search results i got from Bing for content in fact I couldnt really even tell a difference from live to bing in that regard. The results really did and continue to suck.
However, I was impressed with the image search. In my opinion they OWN that area.
In regard to yahoo. Man those guys are hanging on by a thread. When was the last time we saw anything truly innovative from Yahoo? Innovate or die in this market baby. A lesson their new CEO will learn the hard way i guess.
Bling? Sounds like a new moon is appearing. Let’s see what yahoo will do about it.
Interesting. Quite honestly though, I believe Yahoo Search isn’t really “much” of a contender, as such the Hype surrounding the (Bada) Bing was good enough to outpace them. Google on the other hand is a completely different “ball game”. They’d surely have to work on those results if they are to stand any chance against the big Ol’ G.
Really Good Info. Thanks
“According to ComScore, Bing.com market share is up to 11.1% from 9.1% (for Microsoft Live Search).”
Wow, all that money and they gained 2% which I really doubt will last after the buzz is over and the novelty has worn off. Their results are OK, but still need some improvement IMHO. Their commercials are kind of funny, but at least in the case of Google really don’t make sense to me. Google may have more spam, but their results are darn good and better than Yahoo & Bing according to http://blindsearch.fejus.com – although that is subject to gaming, which I now see has happened.
MSN or Live or now Bing has always been my favourite, however the results are not good compared to Google.
I think this is because bing is very new and there’s no way it can beat yahoo in the long run.
Haven’t seen much Bing traffic yet, but the availability of the Global Stats data is fantastic!
Bing is catching yahoo and Google in the search world and I found the background very much interesting and cool. This Decision search engine will provide a unique way to search information and the details given by STATCOUNTER is very much interesting.Looking forward for more news coming from Search Engine Arena.
Re: the “beautiful background image” that Home mentions in a comment above —
That image is no favor to people who have slow internet connections. I don’t care how well it is optimized. A simple page like Google is always going to load a lot faster over dialup.
I’m not at all impressed with Bing. I tested it on some blog posts I’ve written about an extinct post office in rural Nebraska — an obscure topic. I have posted more information about this little community than is available at any other site on the internet.
Google finds these posts as indexed on Blogcatalog within 4 results and finds these posts on my blog as the 14th result. Of course I would like to see it higher, but that’s acceptable. Many of the other top Google results are valid returns for the search terms.
Bing locates my blog feed as the 20th result — please note: it does not find the relevant posts, but it locates my blog feed. That is a fairly useless result for someone who is researching a specific topic.
Most of Bing’s results that ranked higher than my blog feed are “Find a date in …”, “Rent an apartment in …” “Gay Men in …” More useless garbage.
Google remains the top search engine bringing visitors to my blog by a *huge* majority. Next is Yahoo, followed by AOL, and Bing is currently in 4th place.
Amazing, and so quickly, I noticed so many of my visitors coming from bing lately, it was bound to happen sooner or later.
Just try adding a local listing for UK, posts suggest there is no facility yet for UK but I can see some of my competitors so where has the info come from?! The more things change….
Oops. Correction. I must say that I am stunned to see Bing pass Yahoo in such a short amount of time.