Microsoft has been working hard to raise its share of the Internet search market, aggressively promoting its Bing search engine and striking a ten-year deal with Yahoo to have Bing power Yahoo searches. And the latest search engine share numbers from media analysis firm Comscore suggest some of that effort is paying off, with Microsoft sites showing the greatest month-to-month increase in the industry. However, the growth doesn’t seem to be slowing Google; in fact, it seems to mostly be coming at the expense of new-partner Yahoo.
Comscore’s latest rankings cover U.S. Internet users for November 2009; according to the figures, Microsoft sites (including Bing) saw a 0.4 percent increase compared to October 2009, jumping to a 10.3 percent share of the U.S. search market. However, Yahoo sites saw a 0.5 decline during the same period, dropping from an even 18 percent of the market in October to 17.5 percent in November.
Google, in the meantime, continued to expand its U.S. marketshare, going from 65.4 percent in October to 65.6 percent in November. Most measurements put Google’s share of most overseas markets substantially higher than its share of the U.S. market.
Comscore’s figures also have Ask.com and AOL losing 0.1 percent of their market share between October and November, dropping to 3.8 percent and 2.8 percent of the search market respectively.
Bing’s growth is good news for Microsoft: increasing search share makes it easier for Microsoft to sell advertising via Bing, and that in turn gives Microsoft the means and motivation to continue developing and innovating the service. But at a certain point, Microsoft is going to have to find ways to cut into Google’s dominance of the Internet search market, rather than merely siphoning away search share from Yahoo.
