Skip to main content

comScore: Bing Slowly Growing Search Share

BingAlthough the market share numbers for Microsoft’s much-hyped Bing search engine won’t really matter until the technology takes over search functions for Yahoo has part of the company’s chance 10-year bid to go up against Google, media metrics firm comScore has released new figures that find Bing managed to increase its share of the U.S. search market back half a percent during July 2009, bumping up from 8.4 percent in June to 8.9 percent in July. And while Google saw its market share dip slightly from 64.7 percent from 65 percent, Bing also ate into Yahoo’s slice of the U.S. search market: Yahoo saw its share decline from 19.6 in June to 19.3 percent in July.

According to comScore, Bing managed to wrangle in some 29 million more search requests in July than it managed in June, bringing the total number of queries it processed in the month to 1.21 billion an overall increase in queries of 2.9 percent.

However, in interpreting these numbers, it’s important to bear in mind Microsoft already had about 8 percent of the U.S. search market before launching Bing. Now that Bing is out there—and Microsoft is burning through a reported $100 million to promote the service—Microsoft’s share of the U.S. search market has reached 8.9 percent. However, it is interesting that the total number of queries handled by Bing actually increased in July; typically, summer brings a drop in U.S. search traffic, and both Yahoo and Google saw the overall number of requests they processed decline during the month.

Both Ask.com and AOL retained their portions of the U.S. search market between June and July, coming in fourth and fifth place, respectively, with shares of 3.9 and 3.1 percent.

Editors' Recommendations

Geoff Duncan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
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
Google Bard avoids the critical flaws of Bing Chat
Google Bard responses on a screen.

When I heard that the Google Bard AI chatbot had finally launched, I had one thought: "Oh no." After all, my initial conversation with Bing Chat didn't go as I planned, with the AI claiming it was perfect, it wanted to be human, and arguing with me relentlessly.

To my surprise, Google looks like it will have the last laugh on this one. Bard is already more refined and useful than Bing Chat, bypassing the critical issues Microsoft stared down during Bing's public debut. There are still some problems, but Bard is off to a promising start.
Bye, emojis

Read more
Bing Image Creator brings DALL-E AI-generated images to your browser
Bing Image Creator being used in the Edge sidebar.

Microsoft isn't slowing down its momentum in generative AI. Just a month since it launched the ChatGPT-based Bing Chat, the company is now introducing Bing Image Creator, which brings text-to-image generation right to your browser.

Bing Image Creator lets you create images from text using DALL-E, which is OpenAI's own text-to-image AI model. Microsoft says it's using "an advanced" version of DALL-E, though the company didn't provide specifics about how it was different than the current DALL-E 2 model. This isn't dissimilar, though, to how Bing Chat was announced, which had been running on GPT-4 before the new model had even been announced.

Read more