Earlier this month, a couple reports came out suggesting that Bing’s search market share took a hit in September. Hitwise reported that Bing’s share of U.S. searches was down 5 percent (in absolute terms, it was a half-point drop to 8.9 percent share). StatCounter marked an even steeper 12 percent decline (or a full 1.1 percent drop to 8.5 percent share). The headlines followed. But now comScore says all of that’s bunk.
Tonight it released its qSearch market share numbers, which are widely followed on Wall Street, and they show no decline for Bing in September. According to comScore, Bing’s U.S. search market share remained steady at 9.4 percent in September, up from 9.3 percent in August. That is not blowing the doors off of anything, but it is at least holding its own.
Meanwhile, Google’s share went up 0.3 point from August, to 64.9 percent share. The biggest loser was Yahoo, which was down 0.5 percent in absolute terms to 18.8 percent share. Since the beginning of the year, Yahoo is down 2.2 percentage points in share, while Google is up 1.9 percent and Bing/Microsoft is up 0.9 percentage point.
Bing still has its work cut out for it, but the shine isn’t gone just yet. Here are the numbers:
U.S. Core Search Share, September 2009 (Source: comScore qSearch)
| 64.9% | +0.3% m/m | +1.9% ytd | |
| Yahoo | 18.8% | -0.5% m/m | -2.2% ytd |
| Microsoft | 9.4% | +0.1% m/m | +0.9% ytd |
| Ask | 3.9% | 0.0% m/m | +0.2% ytd |
| AOL | 3.0% | 0.0% m/m | -0.9% ytd |
(Table below via JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan. Click to enlarge.)
So Walll Street follows those numbers and that makes them legit? Wall Street also followed what the Bond Rating agencies put out for mortgage-backed securities. Did that make them legit? If comscore had showed a drop and Hitwise an increase would Wall Street have been mentioned?
you can make your own judgement, but comScore’s qSearch is an estimate of actual search query volume. It’s far from perfect, but I don’t see every Google analyst issuing reports on Hitwise’s numbers. Just sayin’.
Any metrics service will have different types of bias, depending on whether they use panels, buy ISP traffic logs, or look at referrer stats. I do like that comScore provides estimates of absolute numbers. Of course, that gets tricky when comScore estimated 10B YouTube video views a month at http://comscore...Views_in_August and then Google said that it serves well over 1 billions page views each day.
I’d still rather see absolute estimates though, and I’m glad comScore provides them.
Nice Is The New Mean
There is a better site called http://www.wing.com instread of bing.
The big loser here is that vulgar chick Bartz…. time to put her back where she belongs…
This is quite interesting. I don’t recall seeing a single story on Techcrunch that mentioned the reports of Bings share decrease. There were quite a few post on the web based on the “couple reports” of the decline cited in this post. At the time, I wondered if Techcrunch was even aware of the reports of the alleged market share decline. It is nice to know that you will address the “couple reports” with your one report in the interest of debunking the previously unreported on reports.
There were some in the comments but techcrunch was deleting them.
I’m still not seeing a whole lot of traffic from Bing although I would like to. The week they launched I saw a huge spike but it has fallen off.
2 Words… and that is *** BING ROCKS ***
Ever since Bing was launched, I have never gone even once to google… I think google is loosing its luster… they have become slackers….
*** A few things to try: ***
An AMBIGUOUS Web search: “turkey” (do you want images, recipes, facts, or a map of the country? The topic guides in the left explore pane will help you narrow your search).
A TRAVEL search: “SFO to JFK”
VIDEO search: “Simpsons” (hover over the thumbnail to play the video)
IMAGE search: “Rollercoasters” (notice the infinite scroll).
A HEALTH search: “Sore throat”
SHOPPING: “Digital SLR” (sort by price or brand, get average ratings and CashBack).
MAPS: “BBQ” (automatically knows what city you are in and offers up geo-appropriate results).
and the list goes o…
I ll agree with your point .. I was looking for some resources .. and I wanted 50 of them .. I tried till 36th page of Google.. I was not able to get those resources .. I got some but still the results were nt sufficent .. then I switched to bing and even I was surprised to get the relevant sites in intial pages of searches .. well u definitely got a point ..
Best,
Daina
Bing is full of spam. I run two websites with similar content, one is a complicated relationship with a second company who likes to do a lot of fly-by-night SEO on theirs.
In Google, our site places respectably for some common queries. The other company’s site is positively nowhere to be seen on Google. All those link farms from weird parenting blogs did nothing for their ranking.
Yet on Bing, the situation is reversed. I can’t even find ours without entering the domain name. And the webmaster tools suck.
It’s anecdotal, for sure, but I’m not the only one complaining. It’s no shock to me they’d be losing share.
Meh. Bing is crap. The only time I see anything from it is when I find myself on some page with crapware installed that turns selected ‘keywords’ into auomatic hover-over’s that do bing searches. Probably half of bings numbers come from crap like that. And the other half come from people using Windows and IE who arent yet conscious of the fact that they can choose where to search, or why they would want to.
Have you ever used bing or are you merely trolling?
are you a google employee? i dont see anyone else BSing so much if you have used it even once.
One area that Bing seems to do quite well (so far) is travel searches. I’d be curious to know how much market share Bing has accumulated for the travel vertical alone.
The crawl rate of bing is very poor
What tools did you use to measure it?
The Microsoft propaganda machine will always answer any criticism forcefully, and get their #1 shills to run the answer.
Bing is actually pretty darn good these days, as compared to google. Whenever I don’t get a satisfactory result from Bing and become skeptical of Bing, I try google, and google doesn’t give me anything more useful either. I can live with either one.