The use of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Bing search engine may have peaked. Several studies over the last week showed that the surge of Bing use that came after it was launched may have slowed. It now appears that Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is taking back share from Bing along with traffic to Yahoo!’s (NASDAQ:YHOO) search engine.
New data from Hitwise shows Bing market share dropping from 9.48% in August to 8.96% in September. Google’s share moved up slightly from 70.24% to 71.08%. Yahoo!’s share dropped to 16.38% from 16.96%.
The news will not be welcome at Yahoo! or Microsoft which have crafted a relationship to combine their search properties so that both are powered by the Bing technology. The deal will give Microsoft the scale that it would like to compete with arch rival Google in the search industry. It will allow Yahoo! to cut R&D costs and improve its margins.
The Microsoft dream gets broken if Google continues to gain market share against the alliance of the No.2 and No.3 products in the market. It looks more and more like that may happen.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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