Microsoft’s (relatively) new search engine Bing has continued to eek away the lead of its more established counterparts, most notably Google. The latest figures from the US show that Bing now commands 8.9% of the search market there, up half a percent from 8.4%. Conversely, Google has since slumped by 0.3 of a percent down to 64.7% for the month of July.
This trend has continued in the search figures, with Bing attracting 29million additional searches; representing a 2.4% increase from June’s figure of 1.21billion. Once again, Google was impacted with a 4% loss of 352million; although with over seven times the total search volume of Bing, they won’t be overly worried.
So what does this all mean for the proposed Yahoo and Bing merger? Well, not a lot really. Yahoo unfortunately dipped 0.3% down to 19.3% of the market share, negating much of Bing’s progress. That said, Google’s previously impervious crown has slipped slightly (well, a minute fraction anyway) once again. So perhaps the idea of YaBing closing the gap – eventually – isn’t quite as mad as some might expect.
Clearly Bing as a search engine is garnering some strong support, far beyond its initial surge. It’s too early to suggest that this could lead to any meaningful assault on Google, but it will certainly be interesting to monitor over the coming months.
What do you think?