Bing Now #2 Search Engine in US

By  |  Friday, June 5, 2009 at 10:07 am

Bing LogoAccording to data from Internet statistics firm StatCounter, Bing is now the second largest search engine in the US in terms of search share. The two competitors are virtually tied worldwide however.

In the US, Google maintains a commanding lead with 71.99 percent of the market as of June 4. However, this is down over six points from the day before. During the same period, Bing rose from 8.4 to 15.64 percent. Yahoo only dropped slightly, from 11.28 to 10.32 percent.

Google seems to be the primary victim of Bing’s success. “It remains to be seen if Bing falls away after the initial novelty and promotion but at first sight it looks like Microsoft is on to a winner,” StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen said.

Worldwide, Google controls 87.66 percent, followed by Bing at 5.56 percent and Yahoo at 5.17 percent. Obviously Bing has a ways to go outside of the US to present any meaningful challenge to Google’s dominance.

Obviously, it remains to be seen whether Bing can hold on to its gains. A jump like this is not all that unusual: a lot of web users are likely giving Microsoft’s new search engine a shot, and it may have artificially gained from the IE6 bug which defaulted search to Bing (StatCounter estimates share at around 23 percent).

It will be interesting to watch over the next few weeks.

 
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3 Comments For This Post

  1. C-Urrea Says:

    Gee, there couldn’t be any possible correlation between MS making “Dink” the default search for all IE users at THE SAME TIME. Don’t get your hopes up, that was the ONLY way MS could get a share like that. Doubt it will ever happen again too!

  2. Marc Says:

    Bing seems pretty good, although it’s spell checker isn’t as good as Google’s. It also lists video previews of videos that are unavailable in the UK (from AOL Video in particular). Still, I suspect a lot of people who are suspicious of Google have been waiting for a worth-while competitor to appear.

  3. Marco Says:

    Why is there so much emotion (positive and negative) when a news story focuses on Microsoft? Let’s stick with the facts and how they might or might not impact us. In what ways is Bing better or worse than Google or Yahoo? How will (or should) Bing’s introduction affect marketers? Here are my newest thoughts on Bing, Yahoo!, and Google.

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