The good news, if you’re Microsoft of Yahoo, is that you didn’t lose any more ground to Google in the search engine space in July. In fact, both picked up a bit of share at Google’s expense.
But as eCommerce Guide reports, the sequential improvement is hardly enough to keep Google execs up at night considering the vast amount of share Yahoo has lost this year as Microsoft’s Bing desperately tries to establish itself.
Microsoft and Yahoo announced earlier this week that Bing’s search technology is now in place and is providing search results to Yahoo’s sites, demonstrated by the “Powered by Bing” logo appearing at the bottom of Yahoo search results pages. Had that transition already been accomplished for the month of July, the search figures would have given the two companies a combined share of U.S. searches of 27.9 percent.
But since the integration was only completed in the latter part of this month, their combined results will not show up until Web analytics firms report rankings for September.
Microsoft and Yahoo just finished transitioning the smaller company’s websites to run the Bing search engine backend platform earlier this week, making it too early to assess whether the combination will pick up any market share vis-à-vis Google in a gambit that could tilt search marketers’ spending priorities.
But according to market tracker Nielsen Company, the latest numbers for July show that Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Bing search engine handled 13.6 percent of all U.S. searches while Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) served 14.3 percent. Meanwhile, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) served up 64.2 percent of U.S. searches.
Those figures translated into a 1 percent decline in market share for Google from June, while Yahoo gained 4 percent, and Bing picked up 2 percent.