Nielsen has released its U.S. search market figures for February 2010: Bing is up, and (surprisingly) Google is down.

Although Microsoft’s Bing search engine was greeted with a healthy dose of skepticism when it was first unveiled almost a year ago, but Microsoft must be doing something right—like setting up Bing as the default search engine for Internet Explorer and Motorola Android phones—because the service is continuing to gain share in the U.S. search market. According to media metrics firm Nielsen, during February 2010 Bing was the number three search engine with a 12.5 percent share of the U.S. search market. What’s interesting about that numbers is not that Bing was third, but that Bing was at 10.9 percent in January 2010…and Google dropped over a point from a 66.3 percent share in January to 65.2 percent. Proportionately, that’s a 14.7 percent increase for Bing.

In the past, Bing’s market share gains have seemed to come mainly at the expense of Yahoo. Although Yahoo and Microsoft have entered into a long-term agreement that will see Bing handling the back end of Yahoo search queries, Yahoo says it is keeping its hand in the search game, and according to Nielsen the company still accounted for 14.1 percent of U.S. Internet searches in February. Although Yahoo lost ground between January and February, this time it amounted to 0.4 percent—less than half the share of the overall market Google seemingly lost to Bing during the month. Of course, in proportional terms, Yahoo’s loss is more substantial: month to month, Yahoo saw 2.7 percent of its search traffic go away, where Google saw only a 1.7 percent drop over the same period.

Overall, in raw numbers Nielsen found that U.S. searches dropped by over 1 billion in February, dropping from 10.27 billion searches in January to 9.18 billion in February.

Showing 10 comments

  1. Prince at 7:50am 29th May 2010 good for u, but nobody cares
  2. juju at 7:49am 29th May 2010 aha, didn't get nothing but redirected to news and to google charta and quotes. Bing sucks. Type anything on bing and first results will redirect to google or to some microsoft crap they are advertizing.
  3. Mike at 7:09pm 6th April 2010 Users know exactly who own the best search, me too: Google :)
  4. ciciliu at 10:10pm 17th March 2010 i nostri prodotti sono belli ,buone qualita' ,bassi prezzi ,con gran sconti~
  5. User at 6:21pm 17th March 2010 Well there is no finance or stats button for Bing but there is “Bing Stocks and Funds”… it’s complicated. On Bing search write the quote you’re looking for and type “stocks” after it… i.e. (Dow Jones stocks). You will get a chart and the heading on the top in the results page… Don’t click the chart, CLICK the HEADING. Once you click the heading you will get the most beautiful and useful User Interface for stocks in the Internet and it’s from Bing.
    The information in “Bing Stocks and Funds” is from MSN which has the most specific set of data on stocks and as a result the most complicated user interface. Well Bing simplifies it but it doesn’t have an stocks and funds button in its main page because I suppose some legality issues within their own company? So I recommend you use Bing and BOOKMARK your stocks from the “stocks and funds” results. That is unless you want to use the ugly interfaces from Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
  6. quinceanera at 1:35pm 17th March 2010 I wanted to use bing the other time but I forgot the name, where can i find some stats for international markets?
  7. Ian Bell at 12:50pm 17th March 2010 I will have to try Bing for directions, Google maps is a nightmare to use most of the time for me.
  8. User at 11:47am 17th March 2010 Actually theres more but I have to go to work...bye
  9. User at 11:36am 17th March 2010 I use Bing and Google for searches 50/50
    For directions Bing is the leader by a mile....trust me.
    Bing has awesome fresh video content with a system that works better than youtube...yes i said it
    I use Google for image searching because its provides that options tab on the left...you know
    I use Google to read News articles. I use Bing for News videos when im too lazy to read articles.
    I use Google to compare prices in shopping because im too lazy to go to amazon.
    Sometimes I use Google for Finance, Scholar, and Books...but not to often
    I use Yahoo answers...because its more reliable than wikipedia.
    I use Yahoo movies...to see what other reviewers said about the movie im watching on Saturday
    I use Yahoo mail... dont ask why............and thats pretty much it :)
  10. Ian Bell at 10:53am 17th March 2010 Odd, I still do not know anyone that uses Bing either.
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