Bing Starts To Lose Market Share (GOOG)(MSFT)(YHOO)

Bing’s rapid ascent as a new favorite among web searchers may be over. The Microsoft (MSFT) product had picked up market share since it was launched in early June. The momentum of that progress not have just slow; it may be running in reverse.

Online audience research firm StatCounter reports that Bing lost  1% of market share, dropping to 8.51% of the search engine market in September  from 9.64% in August. That is a very big drop for a single month and shows that the novelty of the product and Microsoft’s high-budget marketing campaign for Bing may not have been effective at creating a permanent following for the product.

If Bing cannot keep over 9% of the search market and its share cannot organically grow over the months to come, the Microsoft decision to set up a joint venture with Yahoo!  (YHOO)will have been a brilliant idea. Yahoo! has about one-fifth of the search engine market in the US and its has been able to hold its own against Google (GOOG) for the last two years. Google’s two-thirds of the pie is not growing substantially if it is growing at all.

The wild card in the search business is how much Google can keep improving its service. Bing was considers a great step forward from Microsoft’s previous generation of search engine. It shows that the evolution of the technology behind search products is not over.

The biggest threat to any company in the search industry is that Google gets even better at what it does.

Douglas A. McIntyre