As Microsoft's Bing search engine turns one year old this week, two leading Web analytics firms find that Microsoft has made some headway in establishing its place in the search market -- although not enough to seriously reshape the space.
Website operators and search and e-commerce marketers have all been watching Bing closely since Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) launched the site a year ago.
Since then, Bing, previously codenamed Kumo, has gone from zero market share at launch to 3.24 percent share of searches worldwide in May 2010, according to figures gathered and analyzed by research firm Net Applications.
During the same time, Microsoft's new partner in the search business, Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), lost almost a point of market share, falling from 7.15 percent in June last year to 6.17 percent in May.
The findings are important for SEO and e-commerce marketers looking to get the widest reach for their advertising dollars. Not surprisingly, all of the search engines have made breadth, depth and ease of accessing information a key focus for their marketing -- including showing consumers how easy they make it to find and research merchants' products.
However, Microsoft's onslaught of quirky TV ads about the randomness of information delivered by other search engines hasn't cut into searches made through Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) search engine. Last June, Google held 78.6 percent market share. In May, its tallies came in at 84.77 percent.
So where did Microsoft and Google pick up market share? It turns out that much of that gain came from a decline in usage of the most popular search engine in China, Baidu. Last June, Baidu had some 8.77 percent share of searches but, by May, it had plunged to just 3.2 percent share.
A second Web analytics firm, StatCounter, came up with similar global market share figures. The variations between researchers typically stem from different analysis criteria. The similarities in the two firms' data, however, may serve to give potential advertisers and SEO marketers a measure of confidence in their validity.
StatCounter's figures show Bing going from zero percent share last June to 3.54 percent in May of this year. Meanwhile, Yahoo slid from 5.15 percent in June to 4.25 percent. Google had 89.8 percent of global searches last year and climbed to 90.44 percent by May of this year, according to StatCounter.
Neither set of numbers reflects what Bing's and Yahoo's combined numbers will be when the two companies transition Yahoo's sites to use Microsoft's Bing's search technologies to serve them, however.
In the ten-year deal signed last December, and okayed by regulators in February, Microsoft will host Yahoo's search while getting get a percentage of advertising revenues.
The transition is tentatively scheduled to take place this fall in time for the holiday sales season, but the parties have said that if problems crop up, they will postpone the transition until early next year instead of impacting advertisers at a critical period.
If the transition were to take place immediately, depending on the analytics firm, the combined market share for Bing and Yahoo (running Bing as its infrastructure) would be 9.4 percent by Net Applications' reckoning, or 7.79 percent by StatCounter's criteria.
Either way, Google search still holds the vast majority of the share, whether it's 84.77 percent according to Net Applications or 90.44 percent according to StatCounter.
Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing writer at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
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