Search query traffic to Microsoft Bing increased 18 percent in August, giving the nascent search service 9.48 percent of the U.S. search market, HitWise said. Google commanded 70.24 percent of U.S. search in August, down 2 percent from 71.4 percent in July. Yahoo was No. 2 with 16.96 percent, declining 1 percent from 17.2 in July. Bing faces an uphill climb, but hopes to help itself by partnering to power Yahoo search, which would give Bing nearly 30 percent of the search market should the deal clear regulatory hurdles in 2010.
Search query traffic to Microsoft Bing increased 18
percent in August, giving the nascent search service 9.48 percent of the U.S.
search market, according to a sample survey of 10 million users by HitWise.
Bing's growth, up from an 8 percent share in July, seems
to have come at the expense of Google and Yahoo. Google commanded 70.24 percent
of U.S. search in August, down 2 percent from 71.4 percent in July. Yahoo was No.
2 with 16.96 percent, declining 1 percent from 17.2 in July, HitWise said. Here
is the
full data sheet.
HitWise is the third researcher to release stats for U.S.
search in August, following Nielsen and comScore.
Nielsen
said Bing grabbed 10.7 percent of the U.S. search engine market in August, a 22
percent growth, which the researcher said came largely at the expense of Yahoo.
One week later, comScore said Bing
notched
9.3 percent of
the U.S. search engine market share in August, up from 8.9 percent in
July. However, comScore tracked Yahoo as holding steady and its numbers
indicated Google and
AOL lost share slightly to Bing.
While the three researchers highlighted that Bing has
made impressive gains since its launch in June, financial analysts are taking a
more cautious view of Bing's traction. Many observers attribute Bing's rapid
success to curiosity from searchers going to Bing to see how it
compares to Google.
Bing is getting high marks from most users who test it,
but there is no evidence to suggest users are leaving market leader Google in
droves for Bing.
Bing faces an uphill climb, but hopes to help itself by
partnering to power Yahoo search, which would give Bing nearly 30 percent of the
search market should the deal clear regulatory hurdles in 2010.
Bing has also been offering some unique innovations,
including
Bing Visual Search and
Bing and Ping shared search. Bing has also beaten Google to
indexing Twitter tweets in real time. However, it is too early to tell whether these
features will make Bing successful enough to help it gain sustained market share versus Google.
HitWise also tracks search query length, noting that longer
search queries were down slightly in August. Longer search queries, or those
with five to more than eight words in length, decreased 2 percent between July
and August 2009. Searches of eight or more words decreased 2 percent.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt regularly says on conference
calls that users are
conducting longer, more sophisticated searches on Google.
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