While the picture varies around the globe, the reality is that Google reigns supreme in almost every market. In fact, for those who have forgotten, Google is the main search engine in all but five countries that regularly access the internet. However, despite themonolithic size of Google, Bing and its partner Yahoo are making gains. Bing hit a record high in June, while Google remained stable.
That record high for Bing is 14.4 percent of market share – fairly impressive when you consider how young Bing is overall and that they only breached the 10 percent mark over the last year. This 14.4 percent market share combines with Yahoo’s 15.9 percent (about the same as Yahoo has held historically over the last couple years) to hit over 30 percent of the total market – up from about 20 percent last year and 25 percent at the end of 2010.
Still, despite the impressive gains, Google isn’t suffering. In fact, Google has remained stable or improved in each of its given search markets. Google holds at 65.5 percent of search share currently, and saw a rise in core search from 63.3 percent last month to 64.5 percent; “core search” includes all contextually-driven searches (which don’t indicate any actual intent to interact with search results) as well as standard searches.
So where is the Bing growth coming from? It seems that, rather than penetrating the fortress being held by Google, Bing is killing off the remaining competitors: Ask and AOL both remain strong in their core search site, but search sites networked to these companies saw an approximate 5 percent drop. Meanwhile, search activity on the whole has increased by about 8 percent over the last year.
[Sources include: comScore]
