Microsoft’s release of the Bing search engine last year shook up a market dominated by Google. While Google is still the clear leader, Microsoft’s big marketing budget and Bing’s innovative features pushed Microsoft’s search share up a notch and brought more competition to the game.
But as ecommerce-guide reports, a controversy is brewing around just how search share is calculated.
Bing began its second year of operation at the end of May but it didn
’
t get any birthday presents, except for maybe not losing any ground to Google.
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Bing’s share of the global search market remained nearly flat in May compared with April, according to numbers released Friday by Web analytics firm comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR).
However, a controversy has come up over how to define a “search.”
Recently, both Bing and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) have introduced “slide show” features that are counted as searches as users scroll through them, causing the numbers to be a little off from previous measurements, post on the company’s blog.