Has Bing's growth peaked?

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 02 September 2009 08:10

Your IT - Home IT

Figures from web analytics companies are mixed, but it looks like Bing's growth may have stalled. Perhaps surprisingly, Google's position has improved.

According to StatCounter, Bing's share of the US search market grew slightly from 9.41% in July to 9.64% in August, but StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen noted that "when you analyse the weekly data, Bing peaked for the week 10th - 16th August at 10.98% and has declined since then."

In the light of the recent search alliance between Microsoft and Yahoo, it's worth noting that their combined share fell from 20.36% to 20.14% in August.

Globally, Bing's share slipped just 0.01 points to 3.58%, but the combined share dropped from 8.77% to 8.42%.

Not only does the alliance have a smaller global share than in the US, it's also falling faster.

Another source of search share figures is Net Applications' Market Share report. Since the two companies measure a different pool of sites, you can't read too much into direct comparisons, but the trends are interesting.

Net Applications' report for August is clouded by a decision to adjust downwards the numbers for Chinese search engine Baidu "due to detection of automated traffic."

That adjustment was to the tune of 5% of total search usage. Consequently, the remaining search engines all saw an increase in global share.

Google's rose from 78.45% to 83.33%, Bing's from 3.17% to 3.52%, and Yahoo's from 7.16% to 7.28%.

That gives Bing/Yahoo a combined share of 10.8% - appreciably more than StatCounter's 8.42%.

But if we turn back to the US market where Baidu has no share at all (at least according to Net Applications), it's a different story. Google still takes the lion's share at 75.87%, Yahoo holds 11.75%, and Bing has a useful 8.42% (up from 7.8%).

While Microsoft/Yahoo is unlikely to be satisfied with approximately 20% of the US market (as reported by both StatCounter and Net Applications), it could be a lot worse.

We'll see next month whether StatCounter's report of Bing's dip was a blip, or if it was really the BING! announcing the arrival of its elevator at the top floor.