The latest report by media analysis firm StatCounter reveals that Bing took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June. This is up from 7.21 percent in April.
"At first sight, a one percent increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing, but the underlying trend appears positive," said Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter. "Steady if not spectacular might be the best way to describe performance to date."
Market trends after Bing’s launch
Google still dominates the U.S. search market, although Bing has impacted the search giant. Microsoft is spending $80 million to $100 million to market Bing.
In April, before Bing was launched, Google had 79.07 percent of the search market. In June, that slipped slightly to 78.48 percent.
Analyzing the weekly search-market trends for June, Cullen noted that Microsoft sites, which include Bing, Live Search, and MSN Search, saw a rise after the Bing launch at 9.21 percent. Bing then saw a dip during the following two weeks, but bounced back in the final week of June to 8.45 percent.
According to NetApplications, an online metrics firm, Google remains the leader in global search market share by a huge margin at 81.22 percent, followed by Yahoo at 9.21 percent, Bing at 5.31percent, AOL at 1.74 percent, and Ask at 0.84 percent.
Hitwise, another online metrics company paints Bing in a less impressive light. For the four weeks ending on June 27, 2009, it measured Google's share of searches at 74.04 percent, Yahoo's at 16.19 percent, Bing's at 4.99 percent, and Ask's at 3.15 percent.
ComScore, yet another Web metrics company, reported last month that Microsoft's share of search results in the U.S. was 12.1 percent between June 8 and June 12, a 3 percent rise from the week of May 25-29 when Bing was introduced.
Google dominates market
The figures reveal that Bing is a strong contender, but perhaps not strong enough. A recent survey by the Catalyst Group, a New York-based design firm, found that despite users trying Bing they were not abandoning their standard search engines and respondents still preferred Google to Bing 2 to 1 and that they planned to continue using Google rather than switch to Bing.
In the end, it was safe to say that the changes may be small but Bing is still very much in the reckoning in the search market.
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