Bing Search Market Share 1 Year Later

This past weekend marked the 1 year anniversary of Bing which was officially announced May 28th, 2009.  Over the past year, Microsoft sites search market share went from 8% in May 2009 to 11.8% in April 2010 (I’m using April’s numbers because May 2010 isn’t released to later this month) according to comScore.  Google on the other hand hasn’t changed nearly as much, going from 65% in May 2009 to 64.4% in April 2010.  Granted Google’s market share did increase in March 2010 to 65.1% but as noted did drop down in April.  Yahoo also took a hit in market share going from 20.1% in May 2009 to 17.7% in April 2010.  So what does this all mean?  Obviously, the two biggest changes that occurred were Bing (positive change) and Yahoo (negative change), while Google has stayed mostly stagnant.

It’s clear that Google is still the dominant force in this industry, but should they be worried?  Once Yahoo completes the transition to Bing powering their search, Microsoft will potentially have approximately 30% of the search market.  It’s an interesting position for Google to be in.  They actually have some serious competition now in the search industry.  Over the past decade or so, there really wasn’t anyone who could be taken seriously when going up against Google.  But now, Microsoft is David and Google is Goliath.

Microsoft has much more leeway with Bing, they are able to test new things, tweak things, and add new features directly within search without having to worry (too much) about upsetting people.  And this has worked out well for Bing.  A lot of their integration with 3rd party services such as Twitter were before Google’s.  In addition to 3rd party services, Microsoft has been integrating Bing into all of their products and services such as Microsoft’s own website, MSN, and Hotmail.  I would fully expect to see Bing integration with XBOX Live as well as other future and current products/services.  Bing is also the default search engine for Facebook’s web search, something I’m sure Google would kill to be.

Microsoft has built a solid product along with a number of smart moves and that $100 million dollar advertising campaign Bing is becoming quite successful.  Oh, yeah, and that possible iPhone search deal could prove very useful as well, but we will most likely hear more about that (if it’s true) at the upcoming WWDC conference.