eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Microsoft Bing and Yahoo’s search engines combined for nearly 25 percent of U.S. search queries through their first full week of integration, according to market researcher HitWise.
Google logged 71.6 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks of August, up from 71.4 percent through July.
Yahoo and Bing grabbed 14.3 percent and 9.9 percent of searches in the country, respectively. However, the key point of interest is how Bing and Yahoo-powered search fared when combined.
Bing and Yahoo completed Yahoo’s transfer of its back-end search to Bing Aug. 4, which means Bing began powering all of Yahoo’s U.S. search queries. Users now see a “Powered by Bing” tag for searches on Yahoo.
The transfer is a significant landmark in the companies’ 10-year deal to let Bing drive Yahoo search in the hope of capturing more market share versus Google.
HitWise, which takes its data by counting the monthly upstream traffic from 10 million U.S. Internet users, displayed its charts here and noted:
“The percentage of U.S. searches for the one week ending Aug. 28, 2010, for the Bing combined powered search accounted for 24.56 percent, as Yahoo Search and Bing received 14.32 percent and 10.24 percent, respectively.”
That number should mollify Microsoft somewhat, though the company will need to continue to advance that combined growth to make a dent versus Google, which has yet to cede significant ground in the search market.
Google, meanwhile, is expected to raise the bar it set, if not fortify it, by announcing streaming search, which surfaces results instantly as users type, at a search event today.
The search engine alluded to this technology with a bouncing ball Google Doodle Sept. 7.