Bing's Market Share at All-Time High

ESCONDIDO, Calif., March 18 /PRNewswire/ -- According to Nielsen, Bing's market share was at an all-time high in February, when it reached 12.5% of search engine providers worldwide.  What is so remarkable is that this number was a 15% increase from Bing's market share in January of this year.  This increase coincides nicely with the February 18th announcement that Yahoo! and Microsoft were granted regulatory approval to make their Search Alliance a reality (see Titan SEO's Search Alliance article). Although Microsoft has seen consistent growth since April 2009, when its market share was 9.9% (well before the launch of Bing), this jump from 10.9% in January to 12.5% in February is its biggest yet.

Yahoo!, on the other hand, has seen a slow but steady decline in market share since last year, when Nielsen claimed the search engine had control of 16.3%; as of February 2010, Yahoo! only controlled 14.1%.  The obvious conclusion we draw here is Yahoo! and Bing combined have not gained much ground over the past several months, and have not presented much of a threat to Google as a unified front.  This is evident in Google's statistics, as their market share has hovered around the range of 64%-67% during the past year; it currently holds 65.2% as of February.

According to Danny Shepherd, President of Titan SEO, "We expect to see Bing's market share continue to grow, but it is very unlikely it will maintain the same rate of growth every month.  People are interested in checking out Bing and new Search Alliance, but most people who 'Google' will continue to search that way."

Bing knows this, and is working to capitalize on its strengths: providing real-time updates to airfare schedules, ticket prices, shopping items, reference materials, health updates, and more.  These are areas where Bing tends to outperform Google's algorithm, and searchers are beginning to find instances where hunting for information on Bing just makes more sense.  In addition, people are beginning to take note of Bing Maps, which provides a similar experience to Google Maps, but with a bit of a more immersive and interactive, albeit complicated, feel that some searchers will find more appealing.  Although it must be downloaded, Bing Maps is also fully-customizable and provides real users' photographs of different places, which can be of great use to local businesses.

At the end of the day, Bing has no earth-shattering statistics to claim.  However, Bing's innovative enhancements, combined with the upcoming Search Alliance and its multi-million dollar advertising campaign, are slowly but steadily taking effect.  Furthermore, as Shepherd goes on to say, "SEO companies still need to pay attention to Bing because their 12.5% market share will become 25% or more once the two search engines merge and Yahoo! uses Bing technology to power the Yahoo! search engine."

Contributed by Amanda Finch, VP Operations, Titan SEO, Inc.

SOURCE Titan SEO, Inc.