The research firm Hitwise reports that Microsoft Corporation’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Bing search engine market share rose 7% in June, from 9.23% to 9.85%. The number is probably within a the margin of error of the study. That is certainly the case for the tiny changes in the percentages of the market that Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Google Inc (NASDAQ: GOOG) had. Yahoo! moved up down from 14.43% to 14.37%. Google dropped from 72.17% to 71.65%.All of this shows how little month-by-month research on search engine market share is. The figure supplied for the same three company’s by Comscore, another internet research company, are radically different.
The most important issue that the numbers raise is obvious. Together Yahoo! and Bing will have 24% of the market. It is not clear that it is a level which drives better revenue per user than they have today. If not. the marriage between the two will have been worse than a waste of time. Yahoo! could have spent more time competing with Google and less time helping Microsoft.
| Percentage ofU.S. searches among leading search engine providers | |||
| Domain | May 2010 | June 2010 | Month-over-month percentage change |
| www.google.com | 72.17% | 71.65% | -1% |
| search.yahoo.com | 14.43% | 14.37% | -0% |
| www.bing.com* | 9.23% | 9.85% | 7% |
| www.ask.com | 2.14% | 2.19% | 2% |
| Note: Data is based on four-week rolling periods (ending May 29, 2010 and June 26, 2010) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. Figures are for Web searches only. | |||
| *This includes executed searches on Bing.com but does not include searches on Club.Live.com. | |||
| Source: Experian Hitwise | |||
Douglas A. McIntyre
Thank you for reading! Have some feedback for us?
Contact the 24/7 Wall St. editorial team.
Latest from 24/7
