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Google might dominate the search engine market, but Microsoft’s Bing may be more successful in delivering users to Websites.
According to analytics firm Experian Hitwise, some 80.04 percent of searches executed on Bing resulted in the user visiting a Website. That’s in contrast to Google, which clocked a 67.56 percent success rate. Yahoo led both companies with 81.36 percent.
Overall, the firm placed Google’s July 2011 share of the U.S. search market at 66.05 percent-down from 67.12 percent in June 2011. “Bing-powered search,” combining the respective market shares of Bing and Yahoo Search, stood at 28.05 percent, up from 27.68 percent the previous month.
Microsoft’s Bing powers Yahoo’s backend search, per the terms of a previous agreement between the companies. That means Yahoo’s market share should be added to Microsoft’s, essentially doubling it. Broken out as its own category, Yahoo’s search-engine share in July stood at 15.07 percent, up from 14.49 percent in June. By itself, Bing clocked a 12.98 percent market-share, down from 13.19 percent the previous month.
Experian Hitwise’s results echo that of other firms. ComScore placed Google’s July share of the U.S. explicit search market at 65.1 percent, a slight decrease from 65.5 percent in June. Yahoo came in second with 16.1 percent, a tiny bump-up from June’s 15.9 percent. Meanwhile, Microsoft stayed steady at 14.4 percent.
According to comScore, explicit core search “excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.”
Microsoft seems willing to burn hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter in order to maintain its online presence, despite Google’s current dominance of the space. Indeed, while it may be a revenue loser, Microsoft relies on data generated by Bing to inform its approach to cloud services.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has put the squeeze on Google in other ways. Over the past several months, Microsoft has convinced several manufacturers to pay it royalties on their Android-based devices. Microsoft also led a consortium of other companies-including arch-rival Apple-in the purchase of several thousand wireless technology patents formerly owned by Nortel; Google has very publicly accused that consortium of conspiring to use the patents to litigate Android out of existence.
Despite those legal twists and turns related to Android, however, Google continues to maintain its healthy lead in the search engine market.
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