Bing Chips Away at Google’s Market Share in April
Bing’s piece of the United States search market share pie grew bigger than ever before in April, all at the expense of Google, according to a new report from comScore. The company already set a personal record for search market share in March, when it climbed to 16.9%.
It appears as though Bing’s recent advertising efforts may finally be paying off, although this data is exclusive to April, before the relaunch of the Bing It On Challenge. If Bing achieves positive results from their relaunch of the Challenge, we could see this trend continue when comScore releases its search market share figures for May.
Bing Up Big, Yahoo Too; Google and AOL, Not So Much
Google dropped a significant 0.6 percentage points from March to April, sliding from 67.1% to 66.5%. This means that, at least for last month, we can officially say that Google no longer holds a full two-thirds of the search market.
Bing was obviously the biggest winner of the month, climbing 0.4% from 16.9% to land at a healthy 17.3%. It’s important to note that when we refer to Bing in the context of search market share, we’re actually referring to all searches powered by Microsoft, whether they’re performed on Bing.com or some other Microsoft site like MSN.com.
Bing’s search partner, Yahoo, also managed to gain a modest 0.2% to land at 12%. Both Bing and Yahoo have managed to make gains for the past two months of comScore reporting, which is unusual; typically, Bing’s gains come at Yahoo’s expense and vice versa.
Meanwhile, Ask.com held steady from March to April with 2.7% of search market share, while AOL dropped a relatively significant 0.2% from 1.6% to 1.4%.
Trends to Continue?
At this point, it’s anyone’s guess as to how search market share numbers will shift over the next few months. As mentioned, the effects of Microsoft’s Bing It On Challenge relaunch won’t be reflected until May, June and beyond. At the same time, Google will be pushing back with a series of SEO changes over the summer, expected to improve the quality of their search results.
This raises an interesting question: what do you think is most responsible for shifts in search market share? Advertising and marketing, or the actual quality of search results? Let us know in the comments below.
