February search results show that Bing continues to grow as Yahoo sags.
Comscore reported that usage of Bing went up from 11.3% in January to 11.5% in February, while Yahoo’s stats during the same period dropped to 16.8% from 17%. Google’s stats remained essentially unchanged.
The most impressive figures for Bing, however, come from a report written by Morgan Stanley analyst Imran Khan. Khan stated that Microsoft’s year on year search growth for the month of February was 55.4%, up from January’s similarly impressive 49% year on year search growth. In the same period, Yahoo’s seen year on year search volume shrink 9.8% in February and 8.9% in January.
So what does this mean for the search market? It means that Bing has continued to grow, and more importantly, that Bing’s growth appears to be accelerating.
This appears to be due to a combination of factors. First, Bing is apparently luring considerable numbers of users away from Yahoo. This suggests that Bing’s extensive marketing efforts have succeeded to some extent.
Second, Google’s growth appears to be slowing down a little bit. Year on Year total searches for January and February increased by 12.4% and 10.4% respectively. Google’s Year on Year search growth for these months barely outpaced total search growth, coming in at 16.7% and 14.3% respectively.
It appears that the search market is consolidating somewhat. Bing’s market share is inching upwards, at the expense of everyone else except Google. When Yahoo essentially concedes their search engine to Bing, it will be interesting to see if Bing is able to take a bite out of Google
Another interesting point would be that how many people are using a particular search engine on their own.. I mean many use IE cause it's there and they don't even know what a browser is… and IE's default is Bing (but you install yahoo messenger and becomes Yahoo! and many don't know what's wrong…). Unfortunately this can't be counted, but I believe Google did not lose percents there. ANYONE CHANGED HIS MIND AND USE BING INSTEAD OF GOOGLE LATELY?
I agree with WD Kent, as long as Google keeps there market share, nothing has really changed.
SERPS from Bing and Yahoo are going to be the same anyway (Both companies stated that last week on SMX West), since they made a deal and joined forces on search engine advertising to gang up against Google.
When Google actually loses market share to Bing, I'll be impressed..
I agree, with you both… it seems that Bing has really caught the attention of Yahoo users, perhaps due all of the media around how Bing will power up Yahoo's search… it seems it's not been too good on Yahoo… although bing helps with some user interface improvements the truth is that at the end of the day they still deliver links that are lagging Google's better results in terms of relevance, accuracy and freshness. Excited to see how this unfolds…
I think Bing has the potential to keep growing. But it may take a few years to reach its aims.
Search engine is very fast changing business and Google, Yahoo & Bing remain number big player in the business, Google has advantage against it rivals Yahoo and Bing, as Google provides great results and quick, German market more uses Google.de as its very reliable.