Bing bounces

Stephen Withers
Monday, 13 July 2009 08:20

Your IT - Home IT

The use of Bing sagged once initial interest in Microsoft's new search engine waned, but there are now clear signs of an upward trend, at least in the US.

The latest figures from StatCounter (for July 9) show Bing on 12.9 percent of the US search market, putting it ahead of Yahoo! for only the second time since Microsoft launched its new search engine.

StatCounter has its suspicions about the cause of the latest rise.

"The jump in Bing's share may reflect a positive review of the search engine compared to Google which appeared online in the New York Times on the 8th and in the print version on the 9th July," said CEO Aodhan Cullen.

"While its lead over Yahoo! may not last into next week our data suggests that it is slowly but surely closing the gap," he added.

Most of last week's gain came at Google's expense. Google's share slid from 80.16 percent at the beginning of the month to 74.99 percent on July 9.

Globally, Bing is still lagging Yahoo! on StatCounter's figures. Last Thursday's surge only took it to 4.69 percent, behind Yahoo!'s 5.06 percent. However, this was the highest share achieved by Microsoft since the launch spike on June 6.

Comparing the latest figures with those from 28 days earlier, Google is down 1.24 percentage points from 89.51 to 88.27 percent (a 1.39 percent fall), Yahoo! is down 0.23 percentage points from 5.29 to 5.06 percent (a 4.35 percent fall), and Microsoft is up 1.17 percentage points from 3.52 to 4.69 percent (a 33.24 percent rise).

StatCounter's analysis is based on 1.3 billion clicks (336 million from the US) from search engines to sites monitored by the company.