More Numbers Show Bing Chipping Away at Google

Search market analysis numbers from Comscore and Nielsen find Microsoft's Bing is gaining traction...and a small part of it is at Google's expense.

New search market analysis numbers from media tracking firms Comscore and Nielsen show that Microsoft’s search engine Bing is managing to increase its user base…and while some figures have Bing largely gaining share of the U.S. market at the expense of new partner Yahoo, other analyses show Bing starting to erode Google’s mammoth share of the search market…although it’s to early to say whether that’s a trend or just an aberration.

Media analysis firm Comscore has released figures for the U.S. search market for August 2009, and finds that Bing managed to push its share from 8.9 percent of the market in July to 9.3 percent in August. The numbers are somewhat lower than recent figures for the U.S. search market recently released by Nielsen—which serves to highlight how soft the numbers in the media metrics market can be—but shows the same general trend for the month. However, unlike Nielsen (which showed Bing’s gains coming at Yahoo’s expense in August) Comscore finds that Google’s share of the U.S. search market declined by 0.1 percent in August to 64.6 percent , while Yahoo’s share remained unchanged at 19.3 percent. Overall, Comscore found that the volume of queries in the U.S. search market was up 15.5 percent from July, and 19.2 percent higher than August of 2008.

In the United Kingdom, Nieslen found Bing managed to increase its share of the UK market by 5 percent during August 2009—and a portion of that gain came at the expense of Google, which found its share of the UK search market decline by 1.7 percent during the month.