Bing's market share ripple

By Stephen Withers
Friday, 12 June 2009 07:47

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft's Bing search engine arrived with a splash, but despite the early interest you'd hardly notice the ripples when you look at market share.

Microsoft launched Bing with much fanfare and it was met with significant media attention.

But it made little difference to people's searching habits.

According to figures collected by StatCounter, search engine shares fluctuated by only a fraction of a percentage point.

Comparing the two weeks following Bing's debut with the two weeks before, StatCounter saw Google's share drop by -0.12 percentage points to 89.69 percent, Yahoo's by -0.24 to 5.1 percent, while Microsoft's rose 0.42 points to 3.5 percent.

The Microsoft numbers combine Bing, MSN Search and Live Search.

I'm sure Microsoft is pleased with any gain, and coming off such a small base that is a creditable effort.

Similarly, that's a proportionately large chunk taken out of Yahoo's share.

But Google's share remains within the range it has seen over the last 12 months. And while the inhabitants of the Googleplex are likely bothered about any loss of share (or more accurately the loss of advertising revenue that follows), they're probably not losing any sleep.

I'm left wondering which other search engines lost share to Bing - who uses anything other than Google, Yahoo and Bing (and its forebears)?

Bing has a long way to go before it takes the number two spot, let alone becoming a credible challenger for Google. But Microsoft seems determined to keep plugging away.

To my mind, the biggest barrier to broader Bing adoption is the way the site insists on sending an 80K (or thereabouts) photo when visitors want to do is search?