Still several months away from its big integration of Yahoo’s search business and a year after launching Bing, Microsoft can be both pleased and extremely concerned by the latest Internet search statistics from a pair of industry researchers.
As eCommerce Guide reports, while Bing has certainly established itself as a viable search alternative to goliath Google, much of its traffic appears to have come at the expense of its future partner, Yahoo.
Picking up between 3.25 and 3.5 percent of such an enormous market is considerable but the fact that in May Yahoo’s search engine lost a full percentage of its traffic and now holds a meager 6.1 percent (according to Net Applications) or 4.3 percent (according to StatCounter) of total search traffic should have execs at both companies perplexed.
Turns out Google—with either 85 percent of 90 percent of the search biz depending on the source—Microsoft and Yahoo all benefited from a precipitous drop in search traffic on Baidu, the dominant search engine in China.
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.
