Skip to main content

Bing overtakes Yahoo for No. 2 in search

It was inevitable. As Yahoo began transitioning to using Bing to power its search engine, the No. 2 search engine had to lose market share.

According to Nielsen report of the US search market, Microsoft search service which include Bing, MSN, and Windows Live, inched past Yahoo to take 13.9 percent of all US searches, compared to Yahoo’s 13.1 percent. This report reflects only “intentional searches,” or queries typed directly into a search box. It does not include contextual searches automatically generated based on a person’s browsing behavior.

Microsoft has been aggressively growing its search offerings and adding new features over the past few months. The numbers also reflect Bing and Yahoo’s 2009 agreement to have Bing power Yahoo’s search engine. For users, the same search technology means the results on these two pages will be the same; it’s only the front-end experience that varies. And at the moment, users are using Yahoo’s services less.

Google remains the king of search, commanding 65 percent of the market.

Although Nielsen’s numbers give Microsoft the No. 2 slot for August, the more widely cited (and accepted) Comscore numbers showed Yahoo still led significantly over Microsoft in July. Comscore’s figures excludes slideshows that can artifically inflate numbers. It seems unlikely that the lead shrunk that dramatically in one month to bump Bing ahead of Yahoo.

The official switchover began in August but transition is not expected to complete until 2012.

Editors' Recommendations

Fahmida Y. Rashid
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Bing Chat just got so much better in two important ways
Bing Chat shown on a laptop.

Bing Chat is already one of the fastest and more reliable AI chat tools available, and Microsoft just made it more powerful with several significant upgrades.

Possibly the most valuable changes have to do with Bing Chat's memory, allowing longer conversations. Previously, Microsoft limited how long you could chat with Bing before a fresh start was required to prevent a frightening AI meltdown. That has been extended, but Microsoft's blog post didn't share particular details.

Read more
This Bing flaw let hackers change search results and steal your files
The new Bing preview screen appears on a Surface Laptop Studio.

A security researcher was recently able to change the top results in Microsoft’s Bing search engine and access any user’s private files, potentially putting millions of users at risk -- and all it took was logging into an unsecured web page.

The exploit was discovered by researcher Hillai Ben-Sasson at their team at Wiz, a cloud security firm. According to Ben-Sasson, it would not only allow an attacker to change Bing search results but would also grant them access to millions of users’ private files and data.

Read more
How to use Bing Image Creator to generate AI images for free
Bing Image Creator generated a realistic, yet artistic image of a hand drawing a hand.

Bing search made a giant leap forward in popularity and gained new conversational abilities when Microsoft added OpenAI's GPT-4 technology with the new ChatGPT-based Bing Chat tab. Now. another mode of operation is available with Bing Image Creator, which turns your written description into a picture.

According to Microsoft's blog post, Bing Image Creator uses a more advanced version of OpenAI's Dall-E. That means it can produce high-quality, photorealistic digital pictures, drawings, and paintings for you based on the text prompts you supply.
How to get access to Bing Image Creator
There are two ways to use Bing Image Creator. The simplest is to go to bing.com/create, which brings up Image Creator in preview right in your browser. This is available to everyone, and is a good place to try it out, even on mobile.

Read more