It is usually questionable if Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) and its new Bing.com search engine is stealing from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) or from Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) when it comes to gains in the share of internet search. Or maybe it was IAC/InteractiveCorp. (NASDAQ: IACI) and its Ask.com distant #4 search product. Hitwise is only one source which measures U.S. searches, but a reading of searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 31, 2009 showed a gain for Bing. Hitwise showed that Bing is clearly taking more from Google and some from Yahoo!. Even Ask.com got a little lift this time. Hitwise gave the following data:
Gooogle was 71.08% of search in September, but that shrank by a factor 0.01 to 70.6% in October. Yahoo! was 16.38% in September, but that also shrank by a factor of 0.01 to 16.14%.
Microsoft’s Bing.com is taking back some share of the search market as the September reading of 8.96% share of the search market grew by a factor of 0.07 to 9.57% of the share of search.
IAC/InterActiveCorp’s distant #4 search product, Ask.com, had September search share of 2.56%. That rose by a factor of 0.02 to 2.62% for October. That figure used to be higher, so maybe Diller and the IAC team are trying to garner more glue that holds all the IAC sites together.
At this rate, Bing and Yahoo! combined are just over 25%. It won’t be easy to force this change, but if the two companies can get back to above a combined 30% share between the two then they will be able to show that they have a real and true answer to the Google search universe.
JON C. OGG
NOVEMBER 11, 2009