Bing search share starts sliding

Stephen Withers
Friday, 02 October 2009 03:32

Your IT - Home IT

And the search giant fared even better internationally. While MicroHoo lost 0.8 of a percentage point, Google added 0.97 of a point as Baidu, AOL and the 'other' category all lost share.

There's no real comfort for Microsoft in Net Applications' latest market share report either. That shows a drop in Bing's global share from 3.52% to 3.39%, and in Yahoo!'s from 7.28% to 6.84%.

The only consolation is that these figures also show Google losing a little share, going from 83.33% in August to 83.13% in September.

So if Google, Bing and Yahoo! all lost share, the only remaining search engine of any size is China-focused Baidu, That one's back on the growth curve after Net Applications adjusted its numbers beginning in to allow for a significant amount of automated traffic.

(How significant? Baidu when from a reported 8.87% in July to 3.46% in September when the adjustment started.)

Baidu rose 0.92 percentage points to 4.38%.

StatCounter's figures are based on 4.6 billion search engine referring clicks to more than 3 million web sites. Net Applications' come from data associated with some 160 million visitors to an unspecified number of web sites.