Some have been wondering if Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) were going to be able to keep up in the battle for US search market share with Bing. September was a bump up for Google with a gain going from 65.09% in August up to $66.12% in September. The combined Bing-powered search generated 28.07% of shares of US search, down from 28.99% in August. The drop was more on the side of Yahoo! than on Bing itself, but these metrics are not insignificant as investors are trying to size up how these internet giants did for the last quarter. Keep in mind, this data was also what Wall Street analysts will be using for calculating revenues for at least Yahoo! and Google.
Maybe this is seasonal rather than secular. Today’s research data showed that Yahoo! Search has typically seen a decline in September vs. August and has for the last 5 years, while Google has gained.
The news is bad if you own one or more of the remaining 66 search engines that Hitwise tracks. Those search engines accounted for only a combined 5.81% of all U.S. searches.
Experian Hitwise tracks some 25 million Internet users around the world and shows how they interact with more than 1 million Websites.
JON C. OGG
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