Bing Losing Steam Already?
While August was a good month for Bing, Microsoft’s new pride and joy, early data seems to point to a downhill September for the search engine.
According to Nielsen, Bing (along with MSN and Windows Live) finished August with 10.7 percent of the U.S. search market, which was a 22.1 percent boost from its share in July.
In September, however, Bing’s share of the search market fell to 8.51 percent from 9.64 percent in August, according to StatCounter. The company also found that Yahoo!’s share dropped to 9.40 percent from 10.50 percent in August.
Net Applications, another online statistics firm, had numbers that corroborated with StatCoutner’s findings. According to Net Applications, Bing’s search market share dropped to 3.39 percent in September from 3.52 percent in August. The company’s data also showed that Google’s share dropped to 83.13 percent in September from 83.33 percent in the previous month.
“The trend has been downwards for Bing since mid August,” said Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter.
“The wheels haven’t fallen off but the underlying trend must be a little worrying for Microsoft,” he added.
Google seemed to reap the rewards of the declining shares of its two main rivals as its slice of the pie grew to 80.08 percent in September from 77.83 percent in August, according to StatCounter.
On the global perspective, Bing also lost ground in September as its worldwide share shrunk to 3.25 percent from 3.58 percent in the previous month. Yahoo! fell similarly to 4.37 percent from 4.84 percent.
Google, on the other hand, broke the 90 percent mark with a 90.54 percent share of the global search market, according to StatCounter.
The company’s data was based on 4.6 billion search engine referring clicks from StatCounter’s network of more than 3 million sites in September, 1.1 billion of which were from the U.S.
Sources:</strong
http://gs.statcounter.com/press/bing-records-first-monthly-decline-since-launch
http://www.btobonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091005/FREE/910059985/1078
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/19744.cfm
